Reclaiming Our Labor: Contesting Epistemological and Productivity Narratives

• In Event: A Dialogue on the Status of Junior Women of Color in the Discipline

Abstract

An urgent question emerging from the retreat was: What does it mean and look like to decolonize political science? From its inception, American higher education was limited to property-owning white males. Meaning that access to education was dictated by the systems of power that privileged wealth, whiteness, and masculinity. Entire disciplines and their methodologies are founded on colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. Western academia continues as an active hegemonic force today. As increasing numbers of non-whites, poor, and historically marginalized populations gain access to higher education, they are confronted by rigid academic standards based on these underlying oppressive ideologies and their gatekeepers. Many emerging scholars from the barrios, hoods, fields, reservations, and other places of oppression struggle to gain access to higher education as a means to end inequality and spur social change. Yet, access to academe also means forced assimilation into these Western epistemologies that limit the impact of our work. This paper seeks to address these issues, specifically asking: why is it important and necessary to work towards decolonizing the discipline, our research praxis, and our pedagogies? What does it mean to produce scholarly research that is accessible, relatable, relevant, and uplifts the communities we choose to write about working within a neoliberal mode of intellectual production? We draw from existing scholarship on decolonization to provide our own collective definition of the term in relation to political science research. We also discuss what it means to reimagine our relationship to academic labor, and productivity; and to imagine a future for the discipline where our academic worth is not directly tied to our productive capacities.

Authors

• Kimberly Fields, University of Virginia

• Melina Juarez, Western Washington University

• Diane Wong, Rutgers University-Newark

• Jenn M. Jackson, Syracuse University