The Reimagine Research Toolkit invites researchers, students, artists, librarians, and community members to reclaim research as a collective, creative, and decolonial practice. It’s for dismantling the barriers between knowledge and life.
The concept of the commons has historically evoked images of shared lands, resources, or data spaces outside private ownership and oriented toward collective use. In contemporary digital, academic, and infrastructural settings, the “knowledge commons” is framed as open access to scholarly information or collaborative platforms that aim to democratize knowledge. However, when viewed through a decolonial lens, this framing is inadequate. A decolonial commons must go beyond inclusion or access. It must address the epistemic violence of colonialism and actively engage in the redistribution of power in knowledge production, ownership, and circulation.
Decoloniality as the Ethical Ground of the Commons
Drawing on Sarah Trembath’s interpretation, decoloniality is not simply an academic concept or a synonym for decolonization. It is an ongoing process and praxis that resists, dismantles, and rebuilds systems that have long privileged Western epistemologies, values, and institutional structures. Rooted in the work of Aníbal Quijano and expanded by scholars like Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, decoloniality is a radical stance that seeks to “disobey and delink” from the colonial matrix of power.
In this view, the commons becomes a relational and transformative space, not merely a shared resource. It is an infrastructure of care, memory, resistance, and repair. The commons is where knowledge is re-worlded—created not just about communities, but with and within them. This involves restoring epistemologies that were systemically erased, denied, or subordinated by colonialism: Indigenous oral traditions, land-based philosophies, African spiritual systems, ancestral wisdom, and other ways of knowing rooted in community, ecology, and non-human life.
Against Epistemic Monoculture: Knowledge as Pluriversal
The colonial project relied not only on territorial but also on epistemic conquest, imposing a singular, universalized worldview and marginalizing all others as primitive, irrational, or superstitious. In education, publishing, libraries, and archives, this epistemic monoculture continues to shape what is considered “real” knowledge. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith and others have powerfully argued, colonized peoples were disconnected from their own histories, languages, and cosmologies, and trained instead to internalize and reproduce colonial systems.
Decolonial commons work to undo this legacy. They embody what Mignolo calls a pluriverse: a world in which many worlds and knowledges coexist, not in hierarchies of power but in mutual respect. Rather than integrating non-Western knowledges into Eurocentric paradigms, pluriversal commons center the logics, aesthetics, and ontologies of colonized peoples on their own terms. These commons are not additive but restructural. They require rethinking not only content, but form, method, and governance.
Knowledge Management and the Global North-South Divide
Bruce Boyes’ analysis of the global knowledge landscape reveals the ongoing coloniality of knowledge infrastructures. Most formal research still originates from the Global North—particularly elite institutions in the U.S. and Europe—while knowledge from Africa, Latin America, and much of Asia is severely underrepresented or pathologized. Boyes argues that fields like Knowledge Management (KM) have failed to engage with this disparity, instead replicating colonial hierarchies under the guise of efficiency or best practices.
This imbalance has real consequences: policies, pedagogies, and technologies developed in WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies are exported globally as universal solutions, often with little regard for cultural specificity, historical context, or community priorities. In response, the decolonial commons must be a site of resistance to this knowledge imperialism. It must uplift community-driven research, ancestral technologies, local archives, and intergenerational modes of learning and sharing.
Decolonial Praxis in Libraries, Archives, and Publishing
In practical terms, the decolonial commons means transforming how knowledge is curated, cited, shared, and remembered. It demands a shift from extractive knowledge practices—where communities are studied and written about without consent or return—to reciprocal and reparative ones. This includes:
- Community Archives: Localized, participatory archives that document histories and memories often erased by state or institutional repositories.
- Oral Citation Systems: Valuing oral traditions, storytelling, and ceremonial knowledge transmission as legitimate and rigorous forms of citation.
- Decolonial Metadata: Challenging colonial taxonomies and classification systems in library science by including Indigenous vocabularies, non-Western knowledge categories, and relational metadata practices.
- Liberated Publishing: Supporting open access, collective authorship, and alternative publishing platforms that foreground BIPOC, queer, disabled, and diasporic knowledge producers.
These efforts are not just aesthetic or ethical—they are material. They redistribute funding, authority, and visibility. They contest the metrics of “impact” and “productivity” that govern academic and digital knowledge spaces.
Against Diversity-as-Decor and Toward Systemic Change
It is crucial to distinguish decolonial commons from well-intentioned but insufficient diversity initiatives. As Aneeth Kaur Hundle notes, such initiatives often merely diversify representation within unjust systems, leaving underlying power structures untouched. In contrast, decoloniality is about changing those structures altogether. It is about refusal as much as inclusion. It requires dismantling the very assumptions of knowledge objectivity, neutrality, and universality that uphold whiteness and settler colonial norms in education, research, and policy.
Envisioning Commons Otherwise
In the spirit of the commons, this module invites participants to build knowledge with others, not about others. It asks us to reimagine pedagogy, librarianship, publishing, and research as processes of relation, reciprocity, and accountability. It calls for commons that are radically plural, locally rooted, and collectively held—where knowledge is not a product to be owned, but a practice to be shared and sustained.
Engaging in this work is not simply critiquing colonial systems, but cultivating otherwises: futures in which many ways of knowing, remembering, and imagining thrive in relationship, not hierarchy. A commons otherwise is already being built—in zines, in community libraries, in Indigenous language schools, in citation refusals, in networked activism, in anti-colonial publishing collectives. Our task is to join it with humility, courage, and care.
The Open Knowledge Lab 