Session 7 | 14 Dec 2023 | Critical Research Ethics as Decolonial Praxis

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In this panel, Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo, Antony Pattathu, and June Rubis discuss and
emphasise the importance of critical research ethics in decolonial praxis within academia,
highlighting the harmful effects of irresponsible and extractive scholarship that perpetuates
epistemic violence and injustice by disregarding Southern epistemologies, knowledge-
makers, agency, and history. They argue that confronting the embeddedness of knowledge
production in imperial, colonial, and patriarchal ideologies, practices, and histories,
addressing colonial continuities and complicities and working towards preventing their
perpetuation in research are crucial for engaging in a rehumanising and redistributive
academic praxis. This includes challenging the limitations of superficial attempts to
decolonise academic institutions and the role of whiteness in decoloniality, as well as the
exclusion of Indigenous voices and failure to confront ongoing colonial violence. Thus, they
suggest that a more meaningful decolonial project requires remaking relationships towards
liberatory justice, including ethical collaboration and accountability with the communities
researchers work with.

Prof. Dr. Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo is a sociocultural anthropologist, curator, and publicly engaged
scholar. She is currently a substitute professor of public anthropology at the University of
Bremen and formerly an interim professor and postdoc at Humboldt-Universität zu
Berlin’s Institute for Asian and African Studies and curator at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Her interdisciplinary research and initiatives on social justice issues, resistance and solidarity,
imagination and memory, and affect and healing are guided by critical, decolonial,
indigenous, and feminist epistemologies and praxes. She also specializes in critical research
ethics, alternative pedagogies, and community-engaged scholarship, as well as reaching
broader publics through reflexive, multi-sensorial, multi-format, and research-based modes of
learning.

Relevant publications

Dr. Antony Pattathu is a social and cultural anthropologist and scholar of religion. He holds a
PhD from the University of Heidelberg and studied in Berkeley and Heidelberg and is a
Habilitation Candidate at the department for social and cultural Anthropology and founding
member of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global South Studies at the University of
Tübingen. His research focuses on, care migration, gender and religion in/ and between India
(Kerala) and Germany. His other research focus is decolonization, postcolonialism, and
racism. Through workshops and conferences at universities, in the field of education and in
collaboration with different communities, cities and museums, he addresses the question of
how the debate on decolonization makes new formats and dialogues on cultures of
remembrance and the reappraisal of colonial history possible in order to shape academic
fields and society in a way that is critical of racism and sensitive to questions of diversity and
a pluralistic culture of remembrance.

Relevant publications

Dr. June Rubis has about twelve years in hands-on primate conservation fieldwork and
community work in Borneo before embarking on her graduate studies. Her PhD (DPhil) in
environmental geography from the University of Oxford, UK explored decolonising orang
utan conservation in Sarawak. She held a three-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Sydney
Environment Institute, University of Sydney and was recently offered a lectureship at a
Russell Group university in the UK. She turned it down to explore more applied work
bridging decolonial perspectives, political ecology and Indigenous and local communities
governance to reimagine new pathways in conservation.

Since 2020, June has been the Co-Chair of Documenting Territories theme, for the ICCA
(Indigenous and community conserved areas) global consortium, and a member of the
International Indigenous Forum of Biodiversity (IIFB). She is the co-founder and co-director
of (BiiH) Building Initiatives in Indigenous Heritage to support community conservation and
cultural heritage in her Bidayuh homelands of Bau, Sarawak, West Kalimantan and
elsewhere.

Relevant publications