Decolonizing and Delinking North–South Higher Education Partnerships: Imagining Possibilities for Global Social Justice

Abstract

Social justice continues to be an ideal pursued by researchers and educators, particularly in the context of growing global inequality. In higher education, the formation of North–South (N–S) partnerships are considered here as a site for the possibility of social injustice. My concern in this chapter is with the notion of N–S partnership as a site for the production of social (in)justice through the reproduction of knowledge through Western, Eurocentric theories, methodologies and interpretations. Yet, unequal power relations, access to resources and participation in knowledge production processes, such as publication and patenting, continue to favour northern institutions. Socially just research partnerships continue to be stymied by questions such as: Who counts as a partner in the production of N–S research? What are the possibilities, expectations and limitations of partnerships with respect to publication and profit?

This chapter engages with Walter Mignolo’s (2007) concept of delinking and liberation to imagine the new possibilities for N–S partnerships outside Western-centric models. Drawing on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ (2014) concept of cognitive social justice, it challenges the formation of N–S partnerships in higher education as a persistent form of epistemic imperialism. Including an excerpt from case study research on a N–S education and research partnership, the chapter reveals the frustrations of one local research partner’s exclusion from recognition on academic publications written on jointly produced research. It explores how the vast apparatus of academic publishing and patent production continues to expand exponentially, granting legitimacy and authority to a modern colonial system of knowledge production (Biesta 2012).