Event | Workshop and Lecture on Decolonial Scholarly Self-Critique with professor Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

Event | Workshop and Lecture on Decolonial Scholarly Self-Critique with professor Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Date: 24 October 2024
Time: 10:00-13:-00 (Worshop) & 17:00 (Lecture)
Location: CREA (Nieuwe Achtergracht) – Room 3.12 (Workshop) & SPUI25 (Lecture)
Organizers: Grâce Ndjako & Yolande Jansen  (in cooperation with Amandla Awethu!/University of Colour & Africadelic; and Mano Silva/Africadelic)
Contact: gracendjako@gmail.com
Registration: here.
Credits: 1 ECTS
Read more about the public lecture here.

On 24 October, we organise a workshop and a lecture/meeting (i.e. 2 events) given by professor Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. The workshop and lecture form part of a larger cultural programme concentrated on Africana philosophy co-organised by Africadelic, The University of Colour, the UvA departments of Literary and Cultural Analysis, Department of Philosophy, ASCA and (hopefully) NICA. 24 October is Feladay, and October is Black Achievement Month.

The workshop will address how students and scholars grapple with issues surrounding (colonial) research methods and the position of scholars in themes concerning the global South. These are issues that are of great importance to all scholars, and in particular to scholars of color, trained in Western and Westernized institutions. We will address questions regarding positionality, invisibilised hierarchies (in academic research and discourses), erased epistemologies (erased through academic practice) and academic freedom. These themes are relevant for philosophers and literary and cultural analysists in general, not only for scholars of color. There is increasing awareness of the histories of coloniality and whiteness in scholarship and academic attitudes, and we expect a large group of especially young scholars to want to reflect on these themes together.

Professor Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí is Full Professor of Sociology of Gender, Knowledge and Culture at Stony Brook University. She is of Nigerian background and her fields of study include (Post) Colonial Studies and Modernities, and African studies. Her first book, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (1997), has been groundbreaking and highly influential for various scholarly movements, such as Sociology, (Cultural) Anthropology, the Decolonial School of Thought, African-, Cultural-and Gender Studies. Her work is read in many courses across the Humanities and Social Sciences, including in the Netherlands. In 2021, she won the distinguished Africanist Award of the African Studies Association.