Resistant Knowledges: unmasking coloniality through the re-search of local to global communities
The Invitation
The Critical Race Theory collective (CRTc) calls for contributions to a special issue of the international peer-reviewed journal Education for Information (IOS Press Interdisciplinary Journal of Information Studies). Responding authors are being called to respond to the theme of engaging with and generating resistant knowledges with a fully articulated intention of unmasking coloniality. This call welcomes works with discipline specific, interdisciplinary and/or transdisciplinary approaches within (or focused on) “communities” related to library, information and/or education praxes.
The Prevailing Context
In these divisive times of social, cultural, political, informational, and economic retrenchment and crises, those who understand, seek, and participate in racial justice and decolonial work can draw inspiration from a question posed by bell hooks: “What are the actions I will concretely do today in order to bring myself into greater community? With that which is not here?” (2003, p. 163) Being in community (or building community) in both intimate and collective settings offers the opportunity to create space for a local to global range of resistant knowledges.
We define resistant knowledges as processes of thinking and acting against the grain of coloniality in order to build collective consciousness and calls to action for racial justice and social change.
Resistant knowledges often occur within community formations and can emerge as “knowing as collective rhythm” (Gago, 2020, p. 164) and modes of epistemic disobedience for the global majority research (narrative) ecosystem (Fuh 2022). These collective rhythms reverberate knowledge along a continuum of communities from those who intimately syncopate their rhythms at the (micro) local level to those communities that aspire to or are already vigorously beating their (praxes) drums to amplify their resistant knowledges with global intentions. Authors are encouraged to explore and ultimately explain their framing of community in their submissions.
“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community. bell hooks –
from: Teaching community: a pedagogy of hope (197)
