Decolonial Reflexivity and Climate Change Scholarship in Botswana
摘要
The discourse of decolonisation and decoloniality has generally focused on examining the hegemony of the Western knowledge systems, unmasking the Western epistemological tradition and reframing the quest for knowledge production in the context of a pluriversality of epistemic traditions and cultures. In doing so, the decolonial turn in the global entanglements of knowledge has successfully diagnosed the embedded epistemic violence in the Western epistemic tradition, which leads to what has been characterised as ‘epistemicide’. However, the decolonial enterprise seems to rely on the basic assumption that a new knowledge system can easily be developed in place of a dominant system of knowledge production. In this chapter, I open a new path within the decolonial turn by adopting the idea of decolonial reflexivity that banks on a conversational and dialogic approach to the co-production of knowledge. To illustrate the propositions of decolonial reflexivity empirically in the context of knowledge co-production, I turn to climate change research and representation in Botswana to demonstrate the ways in which decolonial reflexivity could be applied in climate change scholarship and discourse.