Video recording and materials from KM4Dev Knowledge Café 16: Decolonization of knowledge, an Action Plan

KM4Dev Knowledge Café 16 and KM4Dev’s fifth knowledge cafe of 2021 looked into the topic of decolonisation of knowledge and an action plan for KM4Dev in a specific session for Asia, Australia, and the Middle East. It was expertly organised and facilitated by Svrividya Harish, Pier Andrea Pirani, Gladys Kemboi, Ginetta Gueli, and Sarah Cummings, and featured Navid Nezafati and me as presenters.

As the following video shows, the Knowledge Café was very interesting and insightful. Collectively, the participants came up with a range of good ideas about what we can do as individuals and as KM4Dev to decolonise knowledge.

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Navid Nezafati spoke about the journey in Iran to localize knowledge management. He advised that setting up geography-specific models and approaches is critical to the decolonisation agenda.

Responding to Navid, Lata Nararyanaswamy talked about the need to look at both knowledge and knowledge management (as a practice) through a slightly different lens, and understand and challenge how power and intersectionality are mediated and expressed in development knowledge systems. Importantly, Lata brought the “gender lens” to the conversation.

I then shared my ideas in regard to what KM4Dev and RealKM can do to further the agenda of decolonising knowledge. These ideas are discussed and listed in an article.

Further decolonisation resources

Videos of previous KM4Dev Knowledge Cafés

• Knowledge Café 15: Decolonization of knowledge: an Action Plan for KM4Dev
• Knowledge Café 10: Uncomfortable truths in development
• Knowledge Café 7: Decolonization of knowledge (see also the related RealKM Magazine article)

Articles and blogs

• Towards a Feminist Knowledge Management by Srividya Harish, 22 April 2021
• Energizing pathways for decolonizing knowledge in the Global South by Charles Dhewa, 19 April 2021
• We can do better by Stacey Young, 1 February 2021
• Committed development workers: you are not alone by Ann Hendrix-Jenkins, 2 December 2020
• Sham of dignity and equality in development by Kishor Pradhan, 21 November 2020
• Coloniality and wilful hermeneutic ignorance by Sarah Cummings, 20 November 2020
• New initiatives begin decolonising research, libraries, and knowledge systems. But what about decolonising KM? by Bruce Boyes, 13 December 2019
• How do we fix the world’s very unequal knowledge — and knowledge management — map? by Bruce Boyes, 9 August 2018
• Decolonising KM (ongoing overall RealKM Magazine series of articles on the topic of decolonising knowledge and KM, with new articles regularly added)

Originally published at RealKM.