Decolonizing Science: Where Have We Gotten To? - I

Abstract

The global trajectory of scientific innovations seems to be both interrupted and regenerated by the rise of the Rest. The ascent of China and India as serious contenders for global scientific leadership, thriving pockets of excellence in South America, and an emerging attentiveness to promoting pan-African research excellence, call into question the validity, authority and even relevance of a Western-dominated epistemic vision of what ‘good science’ is. A heightened and widened awareness to decolonise science among both the Global South and the Global North has led to genuine attempts at reshaping the production and delivery of knowledge. Yet such efforts and their impacts cannot be taken for granted. Some have argued that while the world is not flat, there is an observable trend of the ‘cosmopolitanization of science’, where stakeholders in the Global South capitalise on the concepts of risk and give rise to new ways of science governance. Others have cautioned against an intrinsic irony underlying ‘subaltern ethicality’, whose path to international recognition may re-enact existing hegemonic logic and reinforce scientific hegemony rather than decolonize it.

More importantly, we need to look not only outwards at the struggle of the previous marginalised Global South, but also inwards at how initiatives to break new grounds within the Global North meet resistance. We invoke Spivak’s classic question: To what extent can the Subaltern speak (and be heard) within existing scientific hegemony? What are the incentives and hinderances to decolonizing science in practice? How does this inform us about the organisation and governance of science for the public good?

Chair

• Michael Barr, Newcastle University

Individual Presentations

• The Construction of a Peripheral Scientific Agenda: Human and Medical Genetics in Brazil - Mariana Toledo Ferreira, Instituto Federal de Educação Ciência e Tecnologia de Goiás

• The View from Pusa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Indian Agricultural Science - Swati Sureka, National Science Foundation

• Spoken But Not Heard? Indian and Chinese Stem Cell Governance and Challenges of Decolonising Science - Joy Zhang, University of Kent

• Decolonizing Natural Hazards and Disaster Risk Research: The Case of Chile - Magdalena Gil-Ureta, P. Universidad Católica de Chile / Engineering School

Session Organizer

• Joy Zhang, University of Kent