decolonising methodologies linda tuhiwai smith

This marks the emergence of the Cartesian philosophy of being and the Cartesian knowing subject: a human defined by her rationality. This idea is best captured in Rene Descartes’ famous dictumĬogito Ergo Sum (I Think, Therefore, I am). God was no longer the only one who could understand the world. When Europeans shifted from a God-centred society to secular thinking during the Enlightenment period, they inaugurated the science of “knowability”. The process of its decolonisation is an ethical, ontological and political exercise rather than simply one of approach and ways of producing knowledge. That is why methodology needs to be decolonised. I define re-search methodology as a process of seeking to know the “Other” who becomes the object, rather than subject of re-search and what is means to be known by others. The “re-searched” appear as “specimens” rather than people. Re-searching continues to give the “re-searcher” the power to define.

In particular, it concerns the relationship between methodology with power, the imperial/colonial project as well as the implications for those who happened to be the re-searched.īroadly speaking, what is at issue is re-search as a terrain of pitting the interests of the “re-searcher” against those of the “re-searched.” The core concern is about how re-search is still steeped in the Euro-North America-centric worldview. Building on Smith’s work, my concern here is the context in which re-search methodology is designed and deployed.

Decolonising methodologies linda tuhiwai smith