No University Is Neutral: The Possibilities and Challenges Decolonial Research in Social Sciences

Although universities are portrayed as institutions of merit and equal opportunities, critical scholars have identified academia as an “inequality regime” (Smith, Tuck and Yang, 2018), where the ‘knowledge producers within academic institutions are still disproportionately white’ (Johnson, 2020:91). According to Motta (2019:25), universities are institutions that continue to exhume ‘the logics and rationalities of coloniality’ and silence the ‘knowing-be-in’ of other races. The silences and absences within the theory and its production can be called ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak, 1988:280–281). For too long, questions of racism have not been part of historical sociology's understanding of modernity. The issue of coloniality has been largely overlooked in sociology (Go, 2020). Yet, within the academy, a new generation of scholars has begun to address this, foregrounding decolonial approaches in their research. This new generation considers previously marginalized voices central frameworks for their doctoral studies. In line with this shift, this paper analyses qualitative interview data from racialized PhD researchers and investigates what the possibilities are for decolonial critiques of knowledge within universities. In particular, we consider what it means to conduct decolonial research as a racialized academic in the context of the Belgian university. Drawing on 17 semi-structured interviews with racialized PhD researchers, this paper finds that the university remains a site where epistemic exclusionary practices are reproduced. We argue that the epistemic frameworks of social sciences are intrinsically racialized, fostering exclusionary modes of thought and practice that align with racial and socio-geographical lines. Our findings underscore that decolonial academic contributions encounter devaluation on the grounds of perceived subjectivity, lack of neutrality, and political activism. However, the individual interactions between colleagues and supervisors influence how researchers can embrace their academic identity.