Sankofa: towards African-centred research methodological framework
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
This article presents critical duo-ethnographic reflections on our experiences as Western-trained researchers conducting research in Ghana. We propose Sankofa as a methodological framework to envision possibilities for decolonizing and indigenizing research. As a methodological framework, Sankofa provides a critical paradigm for both African and non-African researchers to learn, unlearn, and relearn authentic and culturally sensitive modes of researching and mobilizing knowledge. Sankofa offers critical decolonial reflexivity in the research process by guiding researchers and participants to reflect on and learn from the histories of the past to reimagine a decolonial future. Our duo-ethnographic reflections reveal challenges, including navigating institutional ethics, respecting communal practices, and confronting power imbalances embedded in traditional research paradigms. The application of Sankofa shows promising outcomes in addressing these challenges and enabling a research process that honors African Indigenous knowledge, fosters authentic and ethical accountability and communal empowerment.
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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 | 0.047 | 0.128 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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