decolonising methodologies linda tuhiwai smith

The second part of the book meets the urgent need for people who are carrying out their own research projects, for literature which validates their frustrations in dealing with various western paradigms, academic traditions and methodologies, which continue to position the indigenous as 'Other'. Providing a history of knowledge from the Enlightenment to Postcoloniality, she also discusses the fate of concepts such as 'discovery, 'claiming' and 'naming' through which the west has incorporated and continues to incorporate the indigenous world within its own web.

Extending the work of Foucault, she explores the intersections of imperialism, knowledge and research, and the different ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and methodologies as 'regimes of truth'. In the first, the author critically examines the historical and philosophical base of Western research. Here, an indigenous researcher issues a clarion call for the decolonization of research methods. From the vantage point of the colonized, the term 'research' is inextricably linked with European colonialism the ways in which scientific research has been implicated in the worst excesses of imperialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples.

Decolonising methodologies linda tuhiwai smith