Module Two

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.

Reimagining Where and How Knowledge is Produced

Research is not merely the pursuit of answers—it’s the shaping of worldviews. It reflects a set of assumptions, values, and priorities encoded in the spaces we study, the methods we employ, and the questions we ask. This module invites you to examine how physical, institutional, and conceptual research spaces are entangled with colonial legacies and power.

Why “Otherwise”?

The term “research otherwise” signals a shift in both practice and imagination. It asks:

What forms of knowledge have been systemically excluded from the academy?
What kinds of spaces enable knowledge to emerge collectively, relationally, and ethically?
What would it mean to design research around care, accountability, and pluralism rather than objectivity, control, and hierarchy?

Research as Colonial Space

Universities are not neutral spaces. As sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos notes, academic disciplines were shaped within and in service of colonial expansion. Research was—and often remains—a mechanism for naming, categorizing, extracting, and managing the “Other.” European institutions and their epistemologies have long been positioned as the universal standard, rendering all other forms of knowing “local,” “traditional,” or “non-scientific.”

This legacy persists:

Through funding structures that prioritize extractive agendas.
Through publication practices that reward conformity to Euro-American citation standards.
Through curricula where authors from the Global North dominate reading lists.
Through institutional review boards (IRBs) that enforce ethical standards rooted in Western notions of harm, consent, and objectivity.

To decolonize research, we must therefore examine not just what we study but where, how, and with whom.

What Is a Research Space?

A research space is any environment where knowledge is generated, shaped, or contested. It can be:

A university classroom or laboratory.
A community garden or library.
An online archive or open-source coding forum.
A circle of elders passing down oral histories.

But more than geography, a research space is also shaped by values:

Is it open or gated?
Is knowledge co-produced or extracted?
Is it built on trust, or surveillance?
Who is named as expert, and who is “studied”?

Research spaces should be designed with communities, not simply imposed upon them.

The Practice of Re-searching

The hyphen in re-search is instructive. As decolonial scholar Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni argues, “re-search” is not a neutral activity. It is a repetition—a digging through people’s lives, sacred practices, or social realities under a lens constructed by others.

Hyphenating “research” into “re-search” is very useful because it reveals what is involved, what it really means, and goes beyond the naive view of “research” as an innocent pursuit of knowledge.

It underscores the fact that “re-searching” involves the activity of undressing other people so as to see them naked. It is also a process of reducing some people to the level of micro-organism: putting them under a magnifying glass to peep into their private lives, secrets, taboos, thinking, and their sacred worlds.

This metaphor challenges the image of the “objective researcher” as a benign observer. Instead, it demands that scholars:

Unpack the epistemic violence embedded in inquiry.
Reflect on how their tools, frameworks, and categories may distort what they seek to understand.
Reimagine research as dialogue, stewardship, and shared authority.

Rethinking the Research Process

To conduct research otherwise is to ask hard questions at each stage:

1. Framing Research Questions

Are your questions generated in collaboration with communities?
What assumptions underlie the framing of your inquiry?
Have you considered what other questions might matter more?

2. Knowledge Practices

How do you define what counts as knowledge?
Are oral traditions, performance, ritual, or lived experience valued?
Are non-Western or Indigenous epistemologies part of your methodology?

3. Data Collection and Participation

Who is involved in the data collection process? How?
Are participants considered collaborators, advisors, and co-authors, or simply as “subjects”?
What forms of consent, care, and reciprocity are in place?

4. Citation and Representation

Who is being cited? Who is invisible?
Are you citing across languages, regions, and media formats?
What paradigms are reinforced through your sources?

5. Funding and Impact

Who funds your research? What are their priorities?
Who benefits from the knowledge produced, and who might be harmed?
How are results returned to the community in meaningful ways?

Decoloniality in Practice

As Walter Mignolo (2017) asserts, decoloniality is not just a critique; it’s an active project of unlearning and reworlding. It means:

Challenging the dominance of English-language, peer-reviewed journals.
Making space for community-led publishing, zines, oral archives, or creative media.
Collaborating across boundaries of discipline, institution, and worldview.

Case Examples:

A research collective that creates ethnographies with community members, not about them.
An Indigenous research circle that blends traditional knowledge with environmental science.
A youth-led study that uses street murals and podcasts to share findings outside academic journals.

Questions for Ongoing Reflexivity

Ask yourself:

Am I listening to the people I’m writing about or with?
Have I created space for co-authorship, shared leadership, and community review?
Am I open to methodologies that unsettle my academic training?
Am I using my platform to uplift or to extract?

Final Reflection

A decolonized research space is not a checklist but a commitment. It’s a posture of humility, accountability, and transformation. To research otherwise is to embrace the hard work of breaking with tradition, not to discard rigor, but to reimagine it.

Let this be a living invitation: cultivating research spaces rooted in care, plurality, and justice.

The Open Knowledge Lab