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Professor Farid Alatas on ‘The captive mind and anti-colonial thought’

by Ibrar Bhatt

On Monday 2 December 2024, during the online segment of the 2024 SRHE annual conference, Professor Farid Alatas delivered a thought-provoking keynote address in which he emphasised an urgent need for the decolonisation of knowledge within higher education. His lecture was titled ‘The captive mind and anti-colonial thought’ and drew from the themes of his numerous works including Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon (Alatas, 2017).

Alatas called for a broader, more inclusive framework for teaching sociological theory and the importance of doing so for contemporary higher education. For Alatas, this framework should move beyond a Eurocentric and androcentric focus of traditional curricula, and integrate framings and concepts from non-Western thinkers (including women) to establish a genuinely international perspective.

In particular, he discussed his detailed engagement with the neglected social theories of Ibn Khaldun, his efforts to develop a ‘neo-Khaldunian theory of sociology’. He also highlighted another exemplar of non-Western thought, the Filipino theorist José Rizal (see Alatas, 2009, 2017). Alatas discussed how such modes sort of non-Western social theory should be incorporated into social science textbooks and teaching curricula.

Professor Alatas further argued that continuing to rely on theories and concepts from a limited group of countries—primarily Western European and North American—imposes intellectual constraints that are both limiting and potentially harmful for higher education. Using historical examples, such as the divergent interpretations of the Crusades (viewed as religious wars from a European perspective but as colonial invasions from a Middle Eastern perspective), he illustrated how perspectives confined to the European experience often fail to account for the nuanced framing of such events in other regions. Such epistemic blind spots stress the need for higher education to embrace diverse ways of knowing that have long existed across global traditions.

Beyond critiquing Eurocentrism, Professor Alatas acknowledged the systemic challenges within institutions in the Global South, which also inhibit knowledge production. He urged for inward critical reflection within these contexts, addressing issues like resource constraints, institutional biases, racism, ethnocentrism, and the undervaluing of indigenous epistemologies through the internalisation of a ‘captive mindset’. Only by addressing these intertwined challenges, he concluded, can universities foster a more equitable and inclusive intellectual environment, and one that is more practically relevant and applicable to higher education in former colonised settings.

This keynote was a call to action for educators, researchers, and institutions to rethink and restructure the ways in which sociological and other academic canons are constructed and taught. But first, there is an important reflection that must be undertaken, and an acknowledgement, grounded in epistemic humility, that there is more to social theory than Eurocentrism.

There was not enough time to deeply engage with some of the concepts in his keynote; therefore, I hope to invite Professor Farid Alatas for an in-person conversation on these topics during his visit to the UK in 2025. Please look out for this event advertisement.

The recording of this keynote address is now available from https://youtu.be/4Cf6C9wP6Ac?list=PLZN6b5AbqH3BnyGcdvF5wLCmbQn37cFgr

Ibrar Bhatt is Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences, Education & Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland). His research interests encompass applied linguistics, higher education, and digital humanities. He is also an Executive Editor for the journal ‘Teaching in Higher Education: Critical Perspective’s, and on the Editorial Board for the journal ‘Postdigital Science & Education’.

His recent books include ‘Critical Perspectives on Teaching in the Multilingual University’ (Routledge), ‘A Semiotics of Muslimness in China’ (with Cambridge University Press), and he is currently writing his next book ‘Heritage Literacy in the Lives of Chinese Muslim’, which will be published next year with Bloomsbury.

He was a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research into Higher Education between 2018-2024, convened its Digital University Network between 2015-2022, and is currently the founding convener of the Society’s Multilingual University Network.

References

Alatas SF (2009) ‘Religion and reform: Two exemplars for autonomous sociology in the non-Western context’ In: Sujata P (ed) The International Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions London: Sage pp 29–39

Alatas SF (2017) ‘Jose Rizal (1861–1896)’ in Alatas SF and Sinha V (eds) Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon London: Palgrave Macmillan pp 143–170


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Ethicality in academic knowledge production

by Dina Zoe Belluigi

‘Research cultures’, and their problematics, have received sufficient attention to have been delineated various definitions by authoritative groups within the university/ research ecology in the United Kingdom, and amongst scholars in our field of enquiry. Raising questions about ethicality within research cultures, in a recent paper I explored dys/consciousness and its effects on research production and the formation of academic researchers. The focus of the empirical component was on one part which falls within the United Kingdom – Northern Ireland (NI).

How to conceptualise thinking and seeing for the study of UK universities?

The paper begins with a mapping of conceptualisations of consciousness. It does so through their application, by those who have studied dynamics of racism in universities and educational institutions in the United Kingdom and the USA. The mapping includes scholars’ arguments about the persistence of not unconscious but dysconscious racism, the limits of critical consciousness, the necessity for anti-racism, and the constraints to realising decolonisation, when faced with janiform approaches to structural, institutional and scientific racism in academia.

Methodological approach

The conceptual mapping served as a sensitisation device through which to explore academic research cultures, about enquiry on social groups who were and are marginalised due to perceptions of their ‘otherness’ to dominantly-placed Northern Irish groups. Difference is indexed through constructions of ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘migration’, underpinned by whiteness.

A Critical Discourse Analysis, undergirded by Critical Race Theory, was undertaken of 200 published research items that related to this area of enquiry, which were found to extend from 1994 to 2022, and were spread across disciplines. These were sourced from the repositories of the research-intensive universities in Northern Ireland. Qualitative reflections enriched the analysis. These included the participation of the related academic-authors, and report-and-respond insights from institutional research officers, and non-academic partners of such studies (n=37). Combining these sources was to probe more deeply the ways in which such outlier practices of knowledge production reinforced, evaded or resisted dominant frames and norms of conduct.

Signs of dysconsciousness

The paper’s analysis unpacks 5 signs of what was interpreted as dysconscious racism and xenophobia-ism in the context. The first sign was the under-study and under-funding of local research enquiry on/ about/ and by so-called ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘migrants’. Secondly, were the skewed dynamics within the politics of participation and of authorship, wherein those studied were rarely positioned as authorities of knowledge produced. Thirdly, the ethicality of authors’ interests and motivations in undertaking such research were found to be complicated and undermined by strategic, and often self-serving, goals imposed by the academic research ecology. Problematics in the data collected and held by public authorities, was the fourth sign. The article culminates in the fifth sign: that the threats of risk, social sanction and double-speak related to such research, were not only exogenous to universities, but endogenous too.

Insights for further explorations

In the current neoliberal milieu, the enablers of research – such as funding, social validation or career rewards – were of such a techno-rational nature that the depth of theorisation, complexity and intellectual debate necessary to challenge the existing dysconscious racism and xenophobia-ism remained under-supported. Moreover, the article confirms observations that – rather than enrich or catalyse criticality and plurality within the dominant formations of academic knowledge and of scholars – risk-avoidance of (perceived) controversial issues is compounded when institutions are situated within complicated local socio-political conditions. This places limits on, and indeed de-idealises, promotional social responsibility imaging of ‘anchor’ universities.

Participants’ counter-narratives provided insights about the production of enquiry despite, and in some cases because of, such dominant dynamics. Of interest is that many of the authors were women (in far higher proportions than the staff composition of those institutions); and many of the authors self-identified as migrant academics. In addition to external migrants to the British Isles, this included those from the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, providing a sense of how alienated ‘outsiders’ were often made to feel within that academic ‘community’. Avoiding hero narratives, the article points to the politics of authorial agency within academic practices when individuals negotiate insider-outsider, minority-majority dynamics of academic research cultures hostile to such enquiry.

The article concludes by raising questions about the mantle of ethical responsibility to justice, truth, and dissent within such constraining, homogenising conditions. While it is tempting to read this as an exceptional or peculiar case, references to related studies are included throughout the article to demonstrate that similar problematic dynamics within research cultures have been observed across university spaces in the Global North, and warrant further enquiry.

Professor Belluigi is a Council member of SRHE; Professor of Authorship, Representation and Transformation at Queen’s University Belfast; and a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University.