Re-Storying African (Studies) Pedagogies: Decolonizing Knowledge and Centering Black Agency?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The quest to decolonize this or that has become quite popular these days. In some instances, it is even being applied to general institutional strategies on equity, diversity, and inclusion. But what really is at stake in this endeavor? With specific reference to what we teach and how we engage our pedagogy toward the subject at hand, we ask: What does epistemic decolonization look like? How do we center the voices and perspectives of Black theorists, peoples, and communities in the way we teach and study ‘Africa’? In responding to such questions, this introductory chapter to the volume highlights an argument that accentuates the need to rethink entrenched narratives about Africa and the place of African agency in knowledge production as a way of tackling the enduring legacies of epistemic imperialism. It provides a thematic review of research that has been done on this topic while also suggesting alternative ways of understanding the current context. Overall, the contribution seeks to provide some justification for why the notion of ‘re-storying’ is a useful concept to imagining the possibilities of centering Black agency in our pedagogical choices and our field of study at large, including an account of the hard work that ‘true’ epistemic decolonization will require.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".