Romanticizing decolonization and Asian epistemology: reflections on identity and space
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Recent calls for the decolonization of the academy demand recognition for diverse canons of knowledge . Asia’s economic ascent also imparts rising confidence among Asian scholars and institutions to promote indigenous knowledge. While these global calls for emancipation are invigorating, decolonial scholarship is prone to sterile theorization, historical fixity, and an overt romanticization of the Global South. Drawing on my lived experiences as an Asian academic, I reflect on decolonization and Asian epistemology from five different spaces in my life: (1) Northern Europe, (2) Toronto, (3) Southeast Asia, (4) Kazakhstan and (5) the United Kingdom. I analyze these spaces by using the concepts of intellectual captivity and decolonization from Syed Hussein Alatas and Kuan-Hsing Chen. Specifically, the tendency for decolonization movements to descend into nationalism, nativism, and civilizationalism provides provocative insights on epistemic justice (Chen, 2010). I demonstrate how epistemology as practice can reveal a colonial mindset even among academics who engage in social justice discourse and international work. I also highlight examples of indigenous knowledge that reinforce inequality based on race, gender, sexual orientation and religion. As more individuals with hybrid identities (race, culture, and nationality) enter academe and pursue careers that require international mobility, it is imperative that decolonization moves beyond reductive categories of identity that reproduce stereotypes. I conclude with reflections on the role of comparative and international education research in decolonization movements.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it