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.
Publishing is not just a method of distributing ideas—it is a central mechanism through which power circulates in the academy. The structures that govern what is considered “valid knowledge” often reflect colonial, white, and patriarchal values, rendering non-Western, Indigenous, and community-rooted knowledge invisible or peripheral. This module critically examines scholarly publishing as a site of epistemic control and invites learners to explore how decolonial publishing practices can transform knowledge production.
Publishing as a Colonial Inheritance
Publishing as an academic practice is deeply embedded in the Enlightenment project and the rise of Western universities—institutions that have long functioned as tools of imperial knowledge consolidation. From peer review processes to impact factor metrics, many of the mechanisms that define credibility in academic publishing are biased toward white, Eurocentric, and male epistemologies. These systems reward proximity to dominant norms and often marginalize voices that challenge them.
In Knowledge and Decolonial Politics: A Critical Reader (Dei & Jajj, 2018), contributors critique the dominance of Eurocentric epistemologies and advocate for the recognition of Indigenous, community-based, and embodied knowledges. Their call is not merely to “include” other ways of knowing but to reimagine the entire knowledge infrastructure. The book promotes:
- Decolonizing Knowledge Systems: Dismantling the epistemological authority of the West by affirming other traditions as equally rigorous and valid.
- Educational Transformation: Restructuring pedagogical environments to allow multiple epistemologies to coexist, rather than forcing marginalized knowledge to assimilate.
- Embodied and Contextual Epistemologies: Highlighting the importance of place, identity, history, and the body in shaping how knowledge is created and validated.
These themes demand that we look beyond text as the sole form of scholarly output and engage other modalities—oral storytelling, digital platforms, community zines, visual media—that have long been sidelined in academic discourse.
Citation Politics and Structural Erasure
Citation is one of the most visible expressions of academic recognition—and one of the most insidious sites of epistemic exclusion. As Rachel Borchardt argues in White Supremacy in Scholarly Communications, citation practices disproportionately elevate white male voices and systematically undercite BIPOC scholars, especially Black women and Indigenous thinkers. This pattern is reinforced through:
- Self-citation dynamics: Research shows that male academics cite themselves more frequently than their female counterparts, inflating their scholarly visibility (King et al.).
- Editorial and peer networks: Citation networks often reflect homophily—people citing within familiar or institutional circles, which tend to be white and male-dominated.
- Indexing and search bias: Digital platforms often algorithmically favor dominant names and publications, hiding less mainstream sources from view.
The implications are far-reaching. Citation metrics are used for hiring, promotion, funding, and tenure. To undercite marginalized scholars is to systemically deny them access to academic capital and career advancement.
Who do you cite—and who gets left out? How might your bibliography reproduce or resist colonial power?
Disrupting the All-White Panel and the Colonial Journal
Beyond citations, scholarly publishing is governed by institutional gatekeepers: editorial boards, peer reviewers, conference organizers, and journal rankings—all of which disproportionately represent white academics. All-white and all-male panels are not outliers; they are symptoms of structural exclusion. The blog Congrats, you have an all white panel! highlights just how normalized these exclusions are across disciplines.
Recognizing that publishing is a site of power means:
- Questioning who sets the standards for “quality” or “rigor.”
- Challenging journals that center Euro-American thought as universal.
- Decentering prestige metrics as the sole measure of value.
Crucially, we must reimagine publishing not as a ladder to climb, but as a space to co-create. BIPOC-led journals, community-based archives, open access initiatives, and Indigenous knowledge repositories are reshaping what publishing can be.
Practice Prompt: Research an independent or non-traditional scholarly journal that centers decolonial, Indigenous, or BIPOC voices. What values guide their editorial decisions? What might it look like to publish there?
Practicing Decolonial Publishing
To decenter white epistemologies in publishing, we must:
- Actively cite BIPOC and Global South scholars. Use resources like Cite Black Women, People of Color Also Know Stuff, or The Indigenous Authors Database.
- Reject neutrality. As Ibram X. Kendi notes, not being racist is not enough; we must be actively anti-racist in our knowledge practices.
- Support open access platforms. Many traditional journals are behind paywalls that limit access to knowledge for scholars in the Global South.
- Experiment with form. Publish outside the limits of standard formats—consider poetry, multimedia, podcasts, zines, and community-based outputs.
- Build coalitions. Publishing doesn’t have to be solitary. Co-authoring, collective writing, and collaborative editing redistribute authority and expand access.
Discussion Prompts
- In what ways does your current field of study reinforce Eurocentric or colonial publishing norms?
- Have you experienced or observed citation bias? How did it manifest?
- What might a decolonial publishing model look like in your discipline or context?
- Who are the thinkers you rarely see cited but who have shaped your thinking?
Activity: Publish Like You Mean It
- Who needs this knowledge most urgently?
→ How will they access it? - Where would your research be read, felt, or used?
(Hospital waiting room? Protest banner? School assembly? Telegram thread?) - Who did you learn from?
→ Have you cited them — materially, relationally, and in print? - What publishing format feels most true to your intent?
→ Make a prototype or describe it.
The Open Knowledge Lab 