zerai

Decoloniality has been the outgrowth of theorists and philosophers largely writing within the humanities. Reflecting on three decades of scholarship, Assata Zerai’s Black Feminist Interventions to Decolonize the Westernized University: Epistemology, Research Methodology, and Pedagogy provides methods for adapting principles of decolonial theory to research, teaching, and praxis in the social sciences transnationally. She argues for intentionally centering students who have been racially and culturally excluded to affirm them and create learning environments in which they thrive. She also suggests that ethical commitments to minoritized students must mirror commitments to their communities, reflected in humanizing research practices. This book discusses intersectional microaggressions in transnational contexts, providing evidence of Black students experiencing gendered, ableist, disablist, and queerphobic anti-Blackness within the United States and South Africa. Zerai reviews ways in which scholars and professors have begun to move their disciplines from a focus on traditional canons of the modernist era to embrace decolonial sensibilities in research, teaching, and institutional transformation. This examination highlights these new approaches within the social sciences, to promote justice, equity, accessibility, diversity, and inclusion, and to bring about change within higher education.

Assata Zerai is visiting professor in the School of Human and Community Development at the University of the Witwatersrand.