• Humanities and Social Sciences, Cornwall
• Research
• Power, Violence, and (De)Colonialism

Power, Violence, and (De)Colonialism

HaSS Cornwall is sensitive to the inequities of power produced through violence and imperialism across time and space and seek to explore their origins and legacies, and how they are experienced and understood.

As a research cluster, we are interested in understanding the root causes, present dynamics, and future consequences of power, violence, and (de)colonialism. We are committed to exploring the socio-political implications of these processes in an effort to provide research-based means of responding to and resisting violence and imbalances of power, as well as positively supporting social justice and decolonial politics. 

Since September 2022, this research theme has been led by the Decolonising Knowledges Collective. They seek to nurture a space of care and collegiality among colleagues to facilitate research on the politics of knowledge production, researcher reflexivity and decolonisation. Collective activities include regular seminar series, works-in-progress sessions, and a Decolonising Knowledges Collective blog.

In order to dismantle academic gatekeeping and the institutional hierarchy of knowledge production, students have been engaged in the collective’s activities. ECRs are supported by building a mutually caring intellectual community thereby co-constructing a distinctive identity as an interdisciplinary space for decolonial politics.

The collective remain attentive to the appropriation of decoloniality by conservative politics across the world and pay particular attention to practices of coloniality and decolonial movements within the global South.

Collective events aims to listen to and learn from the experiences of the positions of the indigenous, colonised and besieged subjects. Euro-centric knowledge is provincialised by amplifying their research and epistemic standpoints. With an enhanced departmental culture on decolonisation and knowledge politics, a safer and more inclusive institutional space is built for minoritised staff and students to share, teach, and centre their knowledges.