Black Feminist Interventions to Decolonize the Westernized University

Epistemology, Research Methodology, and Pedagogy

Assata Zerai

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781978782617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Teaching Social Science
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Decoloniality is a perspective that challenges the colonial foundation and neoliberal operations of the westernized university today. In Black Feminist Interventions to Decolonize the Westernized University: Epistemology, Research Methodology, and Pedagogy Assata Zerai highlights feminist decoloniality as a tool to promote institutional transformation, indirectly through changes in research and teaching in the social sciences, directly by centering social justice within higher education. Reflecting on three decades of scholarship, Zerai adapts principles of decolonial theory to scholarship, pedagogy, and praxis transnationally, focusing on higher education in the USA and South Africa. She intentionally centers students who have been racially and culturally excluded in these contexts and provides evidence of university students experiencing intersectional microaggressions, including gendered, ableist, and queerphobic anti-Blackness. Zerai argues that faculty must appreciate such realities in order to affirm students and create learning environments in which all may thrive. Further, this book argues that ethical commitments to minoritized students and their communities must be reflected in humanizing research practices. Finally, Zerai reviews ways in which scholars have begun to move their disciplines from a focus on traditional canons of the modernist era to embrace decolonial sensibilities in their academic work. This book highlights these new approaches within the social sciences, to promote justice, equity, accessibility, diversity, and inclusion (JEADI) within higher education.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Acronyms
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Locating This Feminist Decolonial Project and Acting on Calls to Decolonize the Westernized University
• Chapter 2: A Special Period: Persisting in Higher Education during Retrenchment in the United States
• Chapter 3: Intersectional Microaggressions in Transnational Contexts: Black Students Experiencing Gendered, Ableist, and Queerphobic Anti-Blackness in the United States and South Africa
• Chapter 4: Everyday Practices of Decolonizing Research in the Social Sciences: Epistemology, Methodology, Citational Justice, and Praxis
• Chapter 5: Beyond Acknowledgment: Does Moving from Recognizing Legacies of Harm in Higher Education Institutions to Dismantling Racism Give Us Actual Hope for Decolonizing the Westernized University?
• Chapter 6: Truth and Reconciliation and Other Investigative Commissions: Addressing Racism in South African Higher Education Institutions
• Conclusion
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author