Identities

Global Studies in Culture and Power

ISSN: 1070-289X (Print) 1547-3384 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gide20

Rehumanising the university for an alternative

future: decolonisation, alternative epistemologies
and cognitive justice

Marcelle C. Dawson

To cite this article: Marcelle C. Dawson (2019): Rehumanising the university for an alternative
future: decolonisation, alternative epistemologies and cognitive justice, Identities, DOI:
10.1080/1070289X.2019.1611072

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Published online: 01 May 2019.

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IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER
https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2019.1611072

Rehumanising the university for an alternative

future: decolonisation, alternative epistemologies
and cognitive justice
Marcelle C. Dawsona,b
a
Sociology, Gender Studies and Criminology, School of Social Sciences, University of Otago,
Dunedin, New Zealand; bCentre for Social Change, University of Johannesburg,
Johannesburg, South Africa

ABSTRACT
Reflecting on the shifting landscape of higher education, this discussion high-
lights how inequality is entrenched within the university, largely as a result of
Western-inspired, commodified knowledge production processes. The article
grapples with scholarship on cognitive justice and builds a case for transfor-
mative resistance that is simultaneously anti-colonial and anti-neoliberal,
within, against and beyond the Westernised university. The discussion con-
centrates specifically on epistemic hegemonies and internationalisation, and
argues that substantive decolonisation as a counterhegemonic project must
entail an intellectual element that is aimed at transforming the knowledge
structures that facilitate dehumanisation. The pursuit of more equitable, anti-
racist futures must thus involve the identification and obliteration of deeply
embedded epistemic hegemonies, which have been created through the
dehumanising processes of capital expansion and colonisation. This article
offers a hopeful approach that encourages the collaborative creation of
a counter-university that actively pursues epistemic diversity as a pathway to
alternative futures.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 27 January 2018; Accepted 22 April 2019

KEYWORDS Decolonisation; cognitive justice; alternative epistemologies; global neo-colonialism;

internationalisation of higher education; alternative futures

Introduction
Universities remain one of the most significant sites of intellectual life. They
provide an arena for shaping debate and fostering critical enquiry. Yet, some
of the core logics in accordance with which most universities have histori-
cally operated, and continue to operate today, constrict critical debate. This
is due, in part, because they are founded on, and endorse, Western

CONTACT Marcelle C. Dawson marcelle.dawson@otago.ac.nz Sociology, Gender Studies and

Criminology, School of Social Sciences, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand; Centre for
Social Change, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 M. C. DAWSON

epistemologies, often at the expense of non-western and indigenous ways

of knowing and understanding the world. Consequently, much of what gets
recognised as ‘knowledge’ is derived from one particular way of coming to
know reality. A critical enquiry into the university – one of the main arenas
where knowledge production takes place – is thus an integral part of
interrogating the intellectual traditions and histories of anti-racist thinking
and the role of intellectual life in struggles against racism.
The nature of the contemporary Westernised university is the subject
matter of a burgeoning body of literature. For instance, Zeleza’s (2016) epic
volume on the transformation of global higher education offers a detailed
analysis of changes to the higher education landscape in the seven decades
following the Second World War. Like others, he points to five key trends
that have significantly altered the terrain of higher education and continue
to influence the politics of knowledge production. These include: the massi-
fication of post-secondary education; privatisation of higher education insti-
tutions; knowledge hierarchies and changes to processes of knowledge
production; internationalisation; and the introduction of quality assurance
measures. In addressing the topic of this special issue on the role of
intellectual life in contestation and social transformation, this piece focuses
on two of these shifts. It begins with a discussion that highlights the
profoundly dehumanising outcomes of the establishment of knowledge
hierarchies and the entrenchment of epistemic hegemonies. It then con-
siders the ways in which internationalisation, as currently practised at many
universities, can be regarded as an aspect of global neo-colonialism that
subverts attempts to address inequalities at a national level. This discussion
is counterbalanced with arguments about the potential of internationalisa-
tion to foster global solidarity through learning about and incorporating
alternative epistemologies into the daily operation of universities. As such,
this article adds a more hopeful voice to existing literature on the contem-
porary university, highlighting its critical role in shaping more optimistic,
anti-racist futures.
Written as a conceptual essay, the discussion engages with scholarship
on epistemologies of the south and cognitive justice, largely from the
perspective of Portuguese sociologist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, but
I also draw on the work of others who have written on global coloniality
and decolonisation within the context of higher education. The central
argument is that substantive decolonisation as a counterhegemonic project
must entail an intellectual element that is aimed at transforming the knowl-
edge structures that facilitate dehumanisation. The Westernised university is
a prime site for such a project and, accordingly, the discussion raises some
preliminary thoughts on how university staff and students can play a role in
co-creating ‘the counter-university inside the university, seizing any oppor-
tunity to innovate on the margins’ (Santos in Guilherme and Dietz 2017, 23).
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 3

I draw on selective examples from South Africa and New Zealand and share
some secondary insights from the United Kingdom, these being locations
where I have spent time as a student and/or university academic. While the
insights presented here do not claim to represent a generalised realty, my
reading of the extensive literature on this topic reveals that many of the
examples mentioned here resonate elsewhere in the world. Moreover, the
selected geographical coordinates highlight the reach and extent of 'empire'
in settler colonial nations.

Knowledge hierarchies, epistemic hegemonies and

dehumanisation
Once a respected agent of socialisation, universities in the twenty-first-
century are increasingly being revealed as sites of profound dehumanisa-
tion. While this claim is intentionally provocative, it is not unnecessarily so.
What follows is a discussion that seeks to address aspects of the contem-
porary university that have made it a target of keen anger and vitriol. From
the vantage point of being within the university, the discussion reflects on
what we are against, and how we might go beyond. As such, the work
presented here contributes to Harney and Moten’s (2013) project of ‘under-
commoning’ (see also Cowden and Singh 2013; Dear 2017), which seeks to
create global solidarities among those in its immediate orbit, namely aca-
demic staff, students and, increasingly, administrative or support staff, who
continue to bear the brunt of downsizing and centralising in the name of
efficiency. Undercommoning is a project of rupture in that it seeks to ‘take
apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to
find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie
outside its walls’ (Halberstam in Harney and Moten 2013, 6). Ultimately,
undercommoning is a project that seeks to create alternatives to the hege-
monic Westernised university, which operates in locales well beyond the
geopolitical ‘West’. Taking a cue from Venugopal (2015), I explore the ways
in which many of today’s universities reflect and perpetuate three variants of
neoliberalism, namely neoliberalism as an economic policy agenda, as an
extension of authoritarian capital and as a form of neo-colonial domination.
In particular, I discuss the dehumanising nature of two specific features of
the contemporary university, namely knowledge hierarchies and epistemic
hegemonies.
Scholarly accounts of today’s neoliberal’ universities are proliferating at
a rapid rate. This is, in part, an ironic response to neoliberal performance
measurement systems that now drive universities. Many of these accounts
ooze with nostalgia for the university of a bygone era that supposedly
operated as a ‘storehouse of ideas’ (Bowen and Schwartz 2005, p. 11–17)
where human progress depended upon the variety of, and contestation
4 M. C. DAWSON

between, different ways of thinking about things. The tendency to romanti-

cise the past is unsurprising when present circumstances and future hor-
izons look bleak. In numerous scholarly accounts, the university has
variously been described as a ‘neoliberal’ (Giroux 2002, 2009, 2014; Murray
et al. 2018; Peters 2011, 2013; and many others), ‘corporate’ (Brownlee
2015), ‘toxic’ (Smyth 2017) and ‘infantilising’ space (Furedi 2016). In this
environment, entrepreneurialism, commodification, competition and rank-
ing have become the new normal. Moreover, those who stand to gain the
least from this new modus operandi (notably students and academics) are
often (unwittingly) complicit in its reproduction (Shore and Davidson 2014).
Amidst this context, it is not hard to understand why there is a yearning for
universities that allow room for ‘blue skies’ research, where all manner of
ideas can be proposed, hotly debated, rubbished and renewed, without fear
of reprisal. However, before getting too wistful, it may be worth thinking
about whose ideas get to be contested and why other ideas might be
marginalised or entirely excluded from debates. To this end, it is useful to
consider the purpose of universities, with particular emphasis on the rela-
tionship between knowledge production and the socio-economic and poli-
tical milieu in which universities operate. It is also necessary to address how
patterns of epistemic privilege have become entrenched over time and how
this might foreclose alternative futures.
In the thirty years following the Second World War, Keynesianism and
Sovietism were especially dominant as two distinct modes of economic
thought. With regard to higher education, Keynesian economics and its
principles of social democracy ensured that state funding was directed
towards supporting the activities of universities and subsidising the cost of
higher education. Informed by this socio-economic context, the purpose of
the university was predominantly to uplift society to a level where members
were able to contribute effectively to the economy. Under the Soviet model,
high levels of state control ensured total access to education, but access to
information and the nature of ideas produced in the soviet context was
similarly controlled, allowing little room for intellectual freedom or contesta-
tion of ideas. Although there were stark differences in how these economic
models were operationalised, the common thread in the context of higher
education was that a more educated population had indirect benefits for
economic growth. In the 1970s, amidst unprecedented prosperity in the
Western world, a new economic model began to emerge in the wake of
Keynesianism. Neoliberalism, as it was called, scoffed at state-led economic
planning and structural safety nets. Instead, the new world order embraced
the free market and sought to limit state involvement in the economy to
stimulating markets where none existed previously (Harvey 2005; Venugopal
2015). Taking their cue from this new ethos, universities in the Western
world began to incorporate principles of competition (and, in some
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 5

instances, privatisation) into their modus operandi. Accordingly, education

and knowledge came to be seen as commodities in the form of degrees,
research outputs and graduates. In today’s neoliberal universities, a much
more explicit and direct link exists between higher education and the
economy. Tasked with increasing their ‘outputs’, university academics are
now pitted against one another and ranked largely according to their rate of
productivity, the amount of money that they can attract through external
research funding, the outlet where they disseminate their ideas (as mea-
sured by the prestige/reputation of publishers and a range of journal
metrics), and the level of satisfaction of their ‘customers’ (as measured by
student evaluations of teaching). Moreover, in this context, ‘knowledge
hierarchies’ (Zeleza 2016) have come to be accepted as self-evident or
normal, with social science and humanities disciplines occupying a lower
status in relation to their ‘natural’ and bioscience counterparts (commonly
referred to as STEM i.e. science, technology, maths and engineering). This
ordering of knowledge is not restricted to Westernised universities. As
Zeleza (2016) notes, despite Asia’s rise as a major knowledge producing
region and the relative decline in the status of Europe and the United States
as intellectual powerhouses, knowledge hierarchies remain intact and com-
mercially viable knowledge outputs (notably in the fields of science and
technology) are more highly prized than those which are not.
Zeleza (2016, 200) attributes the entrenchment of knowledge hierarchies
to ‘various forms of epistemic hegemonies’ that have resulted in some ways
of seeing and understanding the world being almost entirely obliterated
from intellectual debate. Centuries-old ways of seeing, understanding and
explaining social reality have been silenced by the epistemological tradi-
tions of the West, and this has constrained intellectual life, starved scholar-
ship of richness and complexity, and made it more difficult to conceive of
and embrace alternatives that lie beyond the canon of Western epistemol-
ogies. The pursuit of more equitable, anti-racist futures must, therefore,
involve the identification and obliteration of deeply embedded epistemic
hegemonies, which have been created through the twin processes of capital
expansion and colonisation. Before addressing how the logic of these
processes continues to be replicated inside universities, it is worth pointing
to Fanon’s account of violence in the colonies, which he described as not
only oppressive and divisive, but also profoundly dehumanising in that it
aimed to eradicate the languages and cultures of indigenous people (Fanon
1963). In later writing, Fanon (1967) used the terms, ‘zone of being’ and
‘zone of non-being’, to describe the social locations occupied respectively by
the coloniser and the colonised. For him, non-being derived from constant
exposure to the multiple manifestations of various forms of violence: phy-
sical, structural, emotional, psychological and indeed epistemic.
6 M. C. DAWSON

Kenyan author, Ngũgĩ Wa Thiong’o (1986, p. xiv), echoed this theme of

dehumanisation in his book, Decolonising the Mind, which he described as
'my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings.' The book bears
the subtitle, ‘the politics of language in African Literature’, and in it Ngũgĩ
asks whether African writers are not merely ‘continuing that neocolonial
slavish and cringing spirit’ when they write in European languages and get
rewarded for enriching Anglo-European culture (Ngũgĩ 1986, p. 26). The pain
and loss that Fanon detailed in Black Skin/White Masks (1967), is captured
succinctly in Ngũgĩ’s term ‘colonial alienation’, which, for him, involved:

an active (or passive) distancing of oneself from the reality around; and an
active (or passive) identification with that which is most external to one’s
environment. It starts with a deliberate disassociation of the language of
conceptualisation, of thinking, of formal education, of mental development,
from the language of daily interaction in the home and in the community. It is
like separating the mind from the body so that they are occupying two
unrelated linguistic spheres in the same person. (Ngũgĩ 1986, p. 28)

Universities in the colonies played a particularly important role in ensuring the

adoption of the language and modes of formal education of the colonisers.
Institutions of higher learning were modelled on and, in some cases, affiliated to
universities in the colonising countries. Universities in New Zealand and South
Africa bear the hallmarks universities in the United Kingdom, and indeed some of
South Africa’s universities still offer tuition in Afrikaans, a legacy of Dutch colo-
nisation, but also of apartheid, which has been recognised as colonialism of
a special type. The languages of indigenous populations did not feature in the
countries’ officially recognised universities. In his work on language imperialism,
Phillipson (1992, 47) referred to the promotion of the English language as a form
of ‘linguicism’, which he defined as ‘ideologies, structures and practices which are
used to legitimate, effectuate, and reproduce an unequal division of power and
resources (both material and immaterial) between groups which are defined on
the basis of language’. At New Zealand’s oldest university, the University of
Otago, the first three professors were sourced from the United Kingdom
(Clarke 2018). Beyond the context of settler societies like New Zealand and
South Africa, Western influence in higher education and the use of English as
the medium of instruction and knowledge dissemination remains prevalent even
in the wake of independence struggles in postcolonial contexts (Arrighi 2010;
Cox, Nilsen, and Pleyers 2017). Still today, knowledge production within the
academy relies largely on methodological tools, theoretical premises and styles
of writing and argumentation developed and entrenched by European and
American scholars. In the Westernised university, career success is measured
partly by outputs in international (usually English language) journals. If we accept
the Sapir-Whorf thesis that language influences how we think about and experi-
ence the world, then it follows that limited opportunities to produce scholarship
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 7

in languages other than English deprive us all of multiple windows on the world.
This is fundamentally dehumanising.
Perhaps more insidious than the blatant replication of Western education
is the enduring popular narrative that institutionalised higher education is
a product (or even a gift) of the West. This misrepresentation of history
denies the existence of the University of Al-Quaraouiyine (Morocco) and Al-
Azhar University (Egypt) as two of the world’s oldest universities, having
being established in the ninth and tenth centuries respectively, more than
a hundred years before the University of Bologna (recognised as the first
university in the Western world) came into existence. What gave Western
universities their distinctive character was the concomitant extension of
imperial control and the desire to use Western ways of knowing as
a means to ‘civilise’ native populations (Dear 2018; Grosfoguel 2013;
Wilder 2013). In Grosfoguel’s (2013, 72) words,

the epistemic privilege of Western Man in Westernized Universities’ structures

of knowledge, is the result of four genocides/epistemicides in the long 16th
century (against Jewish and Muslim [populations] in the conquest of Al-
Andalus, against indigenous people in the conquest of the Americas, against
Africans kidnapped and enslaved in the Americas and against women burned
alive, accused of being witches in Europe).

This large-scale killing off of people and their ways of knowing can thus not be
separated from global capital accumulation, which serves to protect the socio-
economic interests of elites (Grosfoguel 2013; Venugopal 2015; Zeleza 2016;
Santos in Guilherme and Dietz 2017; Dear 2018). The Westernised university,
which Dear (2018) likens to a branch plant industry, acts to ensure that all those
who operate within its sphere of influence, regardless of where its branches are
located, conform to the expectations set by the parent company. While margin-
alised ‘others’ (notably women and racial minorities), whom Puwar (2004)
provocatively calls ‘space invaders’, are actively encouraged to enter the site
in the name of diversity and representation, they too are compelled to behave
in accordance with the rules set by the dominant group, thereby reproducing
privilege rather than challenging it. Being allowed into the space comes at the
cost of suppressing those aspects of their identity that are considered incon-
gruent to the context. These observations led Shilliam (2015, 32) to claim that
while ‘the doors to higher education have been opened . . . the architecture of
the building has hardly changed’.
The dehumanisation and epistemic violence that is perpetuated by many
contemporary universities maintain the privilege and dominance of the West by
ensuring that branch plants keep using it as a reference point; as a master to be
obeyed. This state of affairs is arguably a form of global neo-colonialism
(Venugopal 2015), which has a clear epistemic dimension as well as socio-
political and economic implications. It is unsurprising, then, that recent struggles
8 M. C. DAWSON

within and against the contemporary university are framed by the rhetoric of
decolonisation. I return to this point later in the discussion with specific reference
to the recent student-led struggles in South Africa, but first, it is worth consider-
ing how global neo-colonialism is experienced in universities in New Zealand.
Although Venugopal (2015) associated global neo-colonialism with devel-
oping nations that have been forced into a relationship of dependency with
countries in the global North, there is evidence to suggest that this variant of
neoliberalism is enacted through epistemic hegemonies that operate in uni-
versities in developed settler colonies. In the New Zealand context, Smith
(2012) and Lee-Penehira (2016) used the terms ‘colonising knowledges’ and
‘colonising research’ to refer to the dominant form of knowledge production
that occurs at universities in and beyond settler colonial nations. For Smith
(2012, 118), ‘Western knowledge and science are the “beneficiaries” of the
colonization of indigenous peoples’ in the sense that the bulk of Western
knowledge is derived from research ‘on’ (as opposed to ‘with’ or ‘by’) indigen-
ous people. Lee-Penehira (2016, kindle version) defines colonising research as
‘that which privileges academic literature and empirical evidence over and
above oral accounts’. It bears repeating that colonising research also privileges
the English language. Smith’s own experience of ‘colonial alienation’ is appar-
ent in her claim that she finds herself having to traverse two different worlds;
one being Māoridom and the other being the world of university-based
research, where native English speakers (who are often, but not always, white
and male) are presented with the fewest obstacles to success.
These experiences are not limited to universities in settler and former
colonies. Reflecting on universities in the United Kingdom, Shilliam (2015,
32) noted: ‘British academia remains administratively, normatively, habitually
and intellectually “White”, and Black academics and students suffer the most
from the institutional racism and implicit biases that accompany this mono-
culturalism’. The whiteness that pervades the university creates an alienating
environment for BME staff and students. Shilliam goes beyond Puwar’s
space invader metaphor to suggest that it is not merely a case of BME
bodies feeling out of place, but rather that what they have to offer to make
it a more familiar and welcoming space is seldom, if ever, sought out or
validated as useful or relevant in that context. In other words, epistemic
diversity is not encouraged. Instead, many universities have responded to
the challenge to ‘diversify’ by pursuing an internationalisation agenda.

Internationalisation as a neo-colonial pursuit

International education is concomitant with (but not tantamount to) globalisa-
tion and actively driven by the ‘knowledge economy’ and its potential to gen-
erate export earnings (Altbach and Knight 2007; Jiang 2010; Kehm and Teichler
2007; Khoo 2011; Maringe and Foskett 2012). For instance, the 2017 figures for
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 9

New Zealand reveal that export earnings of international education are valued at
NZ$ 5.1 billion (about £2.7 billion), making it the country’s fourth largest export
industry behind tourism, dairy and meat (New Zealand Education 2018a).
Internationalisation in higher education has to do with the measures put
in place by institutions to keep pace with the global context of education,
including policies on ‘the cross-border movement of students and of higher
education programs and institutions, . . . the growing international market
for academic and scientific personnel, curricular internationalization, and the
commercialization of international higher education’ (Altbach and Knight
2007, 291). Indicators of internationalisation that are used in global bench-
marking include numbers of foreign staff and students, international
research partnerships and academic curricula, inter-institutional agreements,
international accreditation and numbers of satellite or branch campuses.
Critics of internationalisation argue that these measures are used as indica-
tors of global standing simply because they can be easily quantified.
Commonly used ranking systems (such as Academic Ranking of World
Universities (or Shanghai ranking), Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) and Times
Higher Education) use these key performance indicators to compare uni-
versities around the world. In turn, universities use a high ranking as part of
their ‘global brand’ in order to attract more foreign business (Altbach 2011;
Brandenburg and de Wit 2011; Knight 2011). For instance, ‘Think New’ (New
Zealand Education’s brand) lists the opportunity to acquire a world class,
English-medium education among the top ten reasons to consider pursing
education in the country (New Zealand Education 2018b). Through this
brand, the footprint (or epistemic imprint, perhaps) of the Westernised
university is expanded.
With its emphasis on that which can be quantified, international benchmark-
ing falls short in its ability to measure the quality and impact of teaching. These
intangible aspects are often left out of the ranking criteria or are measured by
some or other proxy, for example, staff to student ratio or PhD completions per
staff member. Internationalisation is arguably an inevitable and intractable out-
come of massification and the extension of the neoliberal agenda in higher
education. Nonetheless, key contributors to this debate caution against despair
and point to the potential of internationalisation’s attendant processes to be
transformed in ways that challenge the dominant narrative of competition and
commodification (Altbach 2011; Altbach and Knight 2007; Jiang 2010; Khoo
2011; Stein et al. 2016). Some of these transformation efforts are located at the
moderate end of the spectrum and include policies to democratise access to
higher education and improve the experience of international students (Jiang
2010; Marginson 2007). A key criticism of these two measures is that they tend to
be regarded as distinct sets of objectives, often with separate administrative units
set up to deal with ‘equality and diversity’ (E&D) on one hand and ‘international
experience‘ on the other (Carauna and Ploner 2010). Such an institutional
10 M. C. DAWSON

arrangement misses the point that feeling out of place may be an experience
shared by both domestic minorities and some international staff and students,
notably those who are not first-language English speakers. Commenting on the
limited success with regard to increasing access to higher education among
disadvantaged communities internal to the nation, research in the United
Kingdom, New Zealand and South Africa reveals a flawed policy environment.
Researchers in all three countries have argued that, in spite of a raft of measures
being put in place to increase inclusion and access among those who were
historically excluded, policy initiatives have fallen short of their objectives
(Alexander and Arday 2015; Ahmed 2015; Leach 2013, 2016; Leibowitz and
Bozalek 2014; Pilkington 2015). In all three countries, the enduring lack of
inclusion of minority and/or indigenous students has, in recent times, been
expressed in terms of a struggle for decolonisation, rather than a struggle for
access. This suggests that the issue is not so much about being excluded from
the university, but rather that, once there, marginalised students feel profoundly
unwelcome.
While moderate policy tweaks result in an increase of domestic minorities
and other ‘bodies out of place’, internationalisation as currently practised in
universities tends to be more aligned with developing global perspectives
than altering and diversifying epistemologies. In other words, the inclusion
of more ‘diverse’ bodies in the university does not actually address the
exclusions that come from monocultural epistemologies that favour those
who already feel at home in the institution. Indeed, the focus on internatio-
nalisation shifts the focus away from access, equity and equality within
nations and becomes a metaphor through which universities can tick the
‘diversity’ box without actually challenging or altering Western dominance.
From the university’s perspective, the experiences of international students
can be surveyed and used by universities as a key performance indicator of
how well they are doing in comparison with others (see Ahmed 2012). From
the vantage point of the international student – and here I am referring
specifically to those for whom English is a foreign language – internationa-
lisation practices are designed to help them to assimilate more easily into
a flawed system that propagates dehumanisation through colonial aliena-
tion. Moreover, the additional layers of support put in place to help ‘out-
siders’ succeed in spite of the alienating space imply that it is the individual
who must adapt (Burke 2015). Failure to thrive in the space is regarded as an
individual rather than a structural shortcoming. If the goal is to create an
environment in which everyone can succeed regardless of their social loca-
tion, there must be a concerted effort to incorporate alternative ways of
coming to know the world that better reflect the backgrounds, experiences
and languages of the diverse bodies within the university. By implication, all
the extra support aimed specially at ‘space invaders’ in the name of profes-
sional or student development should, in time, be phased out. In other
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 11

words, if the Westernised university remains dependent on, and indeed

keeps expanding, support services that mitigate the deleterious effects of
neo-colonialism, it ceases to be a seedbed for crafting alternative futures.
There are, however, more novel, possibly even radical, ways to rethink the
internationalisation agenda. These are explored below.

Alternative futures through global cognitive justice

Moving beyond the moderate options of broadening access and improving
international experience requires the dismantling of epistemic hegemonies.
This is an ambitious project; one that has for a long time captured the
imagination of Boaventura de Sousa Santos. In a series of edited volumes
under the rubric, Reinventing Social Emancipation: Towards New Manifestos,
Santos and his colleagues explored counterhegemonic understandings of
the Western- and Euro-centric concepts of democracy (Santos 2005), capi-
talist production (Santos 2006) and knowledge (Santos 2007a), and engaged
with other ways of knowing and seeing that derive not only from the
context-specific experiences of those located in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America, but that are also shaped relationally by struggles against ‘the
oppressor’ (Santos 2010a). Reminiscent of Fanon’s (1967) distinction
between the ‘zone of being’ and ‘zone of non-being’, Santos (2007b, 2014)
spoke of the ‘abyssal line’, above which the coloniser inhabits a world
marked by respect for human rights, the rule of law and dignity, where
the values of liberty and equality are upheld and where violence is excep-
tional. Those below the abyssal line are subjected to inhumane treatment
and ‘overt appropriation/dispossession, [where] perpetual violence is the
‘norm’ (Grosfoguel, Oso, and Christou 2015, 639). For Santos, challenging
and indeed obliterating the abyssal line is inextricably tied to a project of
‘cognitive justice’, which begins with a recognition that Western thought
constrains efforts to create a more just world and is, on its own, ill-equipped
to do so. Santos (2007a, p. xv) conceived of cognitive justice as the recogni-
tion of ‘the coexistence of many knowledges in the world and the relation
between the abstract hierarchies which constitute them and the unequal
economic and political power relations which produce and reproduce
increasingly more severe social injustice’.
A key aspect of cognitive justice is the promotion of an ‘ecology of
knowledges combined with intercultural translation’ (CES 2017). Here,
Santos is driving at the idea that different ways of knowing the world as
well as the knowledge produced through these diverse epistemologies are
symbiotic or ‘incomplete in different ways’ (Santos 2014, 212) and he urges
us to move beyond explanations that claim to be comprehensive or uni-
versal. Similar ideas are taken up by Grosfoguel (2007, 212), who argues that
alternative knowledge-scapes ‘would have to be the result of the critical
12 M. C. DAWSON

dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects towards

a pluriversal as oppose[d] to a universal world’. Several others have taken up
these ideas in their suggestion of (or desire for) a shift from universal to
‘pluriversal’ thinking’ (Andreotti, Ahenakew, and Cooper 2011; Boidin,
Cohen, and Grosfoguel 2012; Connell 2016; Cox, Nilsen, and Pleyers 2017;
Mignolo 2009; Santos 2010b). Such an approach to knowing and under-
standing the world does not necessarily reject universal thinking, but
instead insists that a ‘collective resurgence of humanity [requires]
a thinking in circulation, a thinking of crossings, a world-thinking (Mbembe
2017, p. 179, original emphasis).
Mignolo (2011) shares the view that thinking within Western paradigms is
self-reproducing. However, he goes a bit further than Santos and Grosfoguel
with his notion of ‘epistemic delinking’, which entails epistemic disobe-
dience (Mignolo 2011, 45). One aspect of this disobedience is perhaps
apparent in renewed calls to decolonise higher education. The most visible
examples of this were manifested in the student-led struggles ‘within,
against and beyond’ universities in South Africa in 2015 and 2016, which
occurred initially under the rubric #RhodesMustFall. While the rhetoric of
decolonisation was strident – and indeed had an impact on similar struggles
elsewhere, including the United Kingdom – the demands were quite limited
in their reach. Students clamoured for the removal of colonial relics (because
they were regarded as symbols of oppression); the excision of the work of
European scholars from the curriculum (because Eurocentric theories do not
capture the realities of indigenous experience); and the diversification of
staff (because the existing staff complement did not accurately reflect the
country’s demographics). These objectives required neither a dismantling of
the structural conditions that produce and entrench knowledge hierarchies,
nor a rejection of the neoliberal framework that embraces the logic of the
market and breeds individualism, inequality and dehumanisation (Dawson
2017). I suggest that such efforts could be referred to as ‘decolonisation lite’.
Shilliam (2017) echoes this critique in his assessment of the debates around
decolonising higher education in the United Kingdom. Although he does
not explicitly refer to Santos or Mignolo, he invokes the ideas of cognitive
justice and epistemic disobedience in his claim that decolonisation projects
that seek to redress ‘white abolitionism or colonial development’ with
symbolic or tokenistic gestures are inherently flawed (Shilliam 2017, 17).
Arguably the #FeesMustFall and #OutsourcingMustFall campaigns – as
extensions of the fallist movement in South Africa – were more cognisant of
the neo-colonialism variant of neoliberalism within the academy. However,
the strong materialist underpinnings of these struggles were not adequately
harnessed to a project of cognitive justice. Consequently, proposals to scrap
university fees for students whose household income is below a certain
threshold are reactive rather than proactive, and are disconnected from
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 13

a discussion about the inherent flaws in the knowledge structures that give
rise to a situation where some students need to be subjected to means
testing to determine whether or not they ‘deserve’ to be educated for free.
In other words, suspending fees for those who can prove that they are poor
enough may have the unintended consequence of dehumanising even
further an already alienated group. Based on these observations, I support
Shilliam’s (2017, 17) suggestion – albeit in a slightly modified form – that
substantive decolonisation must ‘confidently and critically orient “[indigen-
ous] self-consciousness” towards the pressing problems of our age’. Such an
agenda entails being open to the idea that our current conceptions of
reality could potentially be radically disrupted and reframed by other ways
of knowing. This is incredibly daunting as it is likely to entail a loss of
privilege for those – including myself and most others who currently work
in academia – who know no other reality than that shaped by Western
understandings of the world. This terrifies me! However, such a project also
harbours great potential for imagining alternative futures that are likely to
arise out of an ‘ecology of knowledges’. This excites me and fills me with
a sense of hope. It conjures up a childhood memory of playing with
a kaleidoscope and being utterly thrilled at the endless possibilities of
colourful patterns that came into view with a slight adjustment of the lens.
Linking these ideas on cognitive justice to the discussion on the internatio-
nalisation of higher education, it would seem that there is room to shift the
emphasis away from international competition towards global symbiosis and
solidarity. If, as Grosfoguel suggests we are going ‘take seriously the epistemic
perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South think-
ing from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies’ (2007,
p. 212, emphasis in original), then internationalisation needs to be transformed in
more radical ways than setting up administrative units to deal with equality and
diversity and the international experience. Stein et al. (2016)have advanced
thinking in this regard in two ways. First, they call for ‘anti-oppressive’ interna-
tionalisation’, which requires an explicitly articulated commitment to feminist,
anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-imperial, and anti-racist praxis. Systemic change
is actively pursued by reaffirming the university’s role as the critic and conscience
of society, by showing solidarity with marginalised people and designing curri-
cula in such a way that learning objectives are centred on ‘[t]ransform[ing]
oppressive structures and politics of knowledge’ (Stein et al. 2016, 13), as
opposed to merely developing an appreciation of global cultures and
perspectives. Second, they call for ‘relational translocalism’, which requires think-
ing beyond the current reality of neoliberal capitalism. This is akin to Santos’
claim that ‘alternatives are not lacking in the world’, but that what we need
instead is ‘an alternative thinking of alternatives’ (Centro do Estudos Sociais (CES)
2017). In other words, relational translocalism requires revisiting and (re)valuing
already existing alternatives. With regard to internationalisation of higher
14 M. C. DAWSON

education, which is driven currently by the institution’s desire to develop

a globally competitive brand, the institutional driver of relational translocalism
would need to take the form of: ‘[p]rotect[ing] spaces of dissent; revitaliz[ing]
marginalized knowledge; experiment[ing] with alternatives; [and] trac[ing] exist-
ing patterns of violence’ (Stein et al. 2016, 13).
The idea of relational translocalism may, at first glance, seem too radical, and
possibly even idealistic or even unrealistic but if the goal is global social justice,
then we need to change the structures that produce inequity and dehumanisa-
tion. Most of New Zealand’s universities are arguably one step ahead in this
regard with their incorporation of strategic frameworks that spell out their
commitments to honouring the terms of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of
Waitangi), New Zealand’s founding document. It is beyond the scope of this
piece to go into detail about every aspect of the various strategic frameworks,
suffice it to say that they place particular emphasis on achieving equitable
participation and success rates among Māori in tertiary (higher) education and
embedding mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge) into the universities’ modus
operandi. To this end, most of New Zealand’s universities offer courses in te reo
(the Māori language) and tikanga Māori (Māori customs). Study assistance is often
provided for staff wishing to enrol for such courses. While it is too soon to tell
whether these measures are an effective conduit for cognitive justice, and while
I am aware that questions have been raised (largely behind the scenes) about the
practicality of implementing these frameworks, they represent a starting point
for intellectual debate on the crafting of alternative futures. Many of the strategic
frameworks refer to a commitment to ensuring that Māori staff and students
succeed ‘as Māori’. This points to a recognition that regardless of how ‘book
smart’ Māori staff and students may be, success in terms of the current criteria for
advancement at neo-colonial universities means distancing oneself from the
language and customs through which one comes to know and experience the
world. In other words, invoking C. Wright Mills, public victory is accompanied by
the personal tragedy of colonial alienation. In no way am I suggesting that this is
the experience of all Māori or that all Māori are able, or desire the opportunity to,
write, teach and be taught in te reo Māori. It is merely a provocation to signal
what might become possible if we begin to dismantle the epistemic hegemonies
that are embedded in most contemporary universities. The experiences of
students who wrote their PhD theses in te reo Māori is the subject of a future
research project that explicitly addresses the relationship between language,
epistemology and knowledge.
Other initiatives that are not unique to New Zealand, but that could play
a role in advancing cognitive justice include indigenous exchange pro-
grammes, where indigenous students at other universities enrol for
a semester at a New Zealand university. Another response to Santos’ call
to build a counter-university entails conferring university status on tertiary
education institutions (known as wānanga) that provide instruction in te
 IDENTITIES: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER 15

reo Māori in accordance with Māori customs. This is not a new proposal, but
it is a highly controversial one, given that New Zealand – with its population
of about five million people – already has eight universities and several
degree-offering polytechnics that are in fierce competition for a small num-
ber of students. A 2017 bill to have New Zealand’s three wānanga recog-
nised as universities was vehemently shot down by all eight universities, but
not necessarily because of concerns about increased competition. For
Victoria University of Wellington’s Vice-Chancellor, rejecting the bill had to
do with the issue that ‘current wānanga do not have characteristics of
a university’. Of course what he really meant was that wānanga do not
have the features of a Westernised university. He continued by saying that
‘all eight New Zealand universities were ranked in the top three percent of
the world’s 18,000 universities’ and that ‘bringing in wānanga Māori would
diminish what it meant to be an institution with international recognition’.
In other words, the fear of damage to the brand outweighed the courage of
being at the forefront of creating more epistemologically just futures.

Concluding remarks
Written as a conceptual piece, this article has discussed two shifts that have
occurred within higher education globally since World War Two that are most
closely linked with global neo-colonialism, namely the establishment of knowl-
edge hierarchies and entrenchment of epistemic hegemonies and internationa-
lisation. The discussion has brought debates on the neoliberal onslaught on
universities and the decolonisation of education into a closer dialogue. Viewed
through one set of lenses, the shifts in higher education paint a bleak picture for
the future of the university. The tomes of scholarly invective against the neolib-
eral onslaught on universities make for some pretty disheartening reading. Even
more distressing is the realisation that by conforming to the prescriptions of
knowledge production in today’s universities – regardless of who is producing
the knowledge (however oppressed they may be) or what they produce in the
end (however radical or transformative the content) – we are potentially con-
tributing to the expansion of global neo-colonialism. However, another set of
lenses offers a more positive outlook. Given that so many academics have chosen
the medium of scholarly publication to analyse and critique the changed land-
scape of higher education, surely indicates that – despite the flaws and frustra-
tions – universities remain ‘spaces of hope’, to borrow David Harvey’s (2000)
term. We can use this space to take on Santos’ Marx-inspired challenge to make
our own history by developing an ‘alternative thinking of alternatives’. Such an
undertaking can contribute to the project of undercommoning in exciting ways.
Substantive decolonisation must have as one of its pillars the transforma-
tion of universities into spaces that actively foster and acknowledge episte-
mological diversity. Such a project requires confronting the source of the
16 M. C. DAWSON

problem rather than its effects and, given that it aims to disrupt privilege, it
is a matter of political will rather than a bureaucratic exercise. This may be
a bitter pill for many to swallow, but in the absence of such a project, efforts
aimed at redressing past inequalities will continue to be a ‘tick box exercise’
completed by universities in an attempt to increase access to higher educa-
tion and creep further up the league tables.
Many of the ‘solutions’ adopted by Westernised universities ignore the
deep-rooted impetuses of inequality and dehumanisation, one of which is
a continued emphasis on and acceptance of Western ways of knowing as
a superior way of producing universal knowledge. By broadening the means
of producing knowledge to include multiple, symbiotic epistemologies, we
can begin to turn an ‘ecology of knowledges’ into the new normal, thereby
fostering a new culture within the academy that embraces cognitive justice
as a necessary means to achieve social justice.

Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the guest editors for the opportunity to submit this piece to the
special issue. The conference from which this submission emerged was an enor-
mously valuable experience, and I am grateful to the organisers for their generous
invitation to attend.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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