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 Decolonizing Globalization
Studies
Patricia Richards

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I argue that scholarship on globalization needs to be

decolonized in three ways. First, Northern theory on globalization
and transnational processes must be brought into conversation with
work produced by scholars in the Global South. Second, we need to
examine how looking at global and transnational phenomena from
“other” epistemological perspectives could tell a diferent story of
global processes and open up new possibilities for collective futures.
hird, we must build knowledge on globalization from below, center-
ing the theorizing, knowledge claims, and praxis of research partici-
pants. Blurring the lines between producers and objects of knowledge
has the potential to contribute to the decolonization of our disciplines
and also to improve the quality of our scholarship. My argument
draws in particular from Raewyn Connell, Arturo Escobar, transna-
tional feminism, and indigenous theories of subjectivity and ongoing
colonialism.

S cholarship on globalization—perhaps especially that coming from my

own ield of sociology—has tended to focus on the development of macro-
level explanations and grand theories. As globalization is frequently assumed
to be a universalizing, homogenizing process, so too, theories about globaliza-
tion tend to tell a single, structural narrative about the nature of globalization
and its efects.1 Moreover, this narrative is predominantly told from the per-
spective of the Global North.
In this essay, I seek to trouble this narrative of globalization. I argue that
work on globalization needs to be decolonized. By this, I mean three things.
First, as Raewyn Connell has pointed out, we need to bring Northern theory

Vol. 8:2 139

 on globalization and transnational processes into conversation with work pro-
duced by scholars in the Global South. Second, as Arturo Escobar has argued,
we need to examine how looking at global and transnational phenomena from
epistemologically and ontologically “other” perspectives could in fact tell a
very diferent story of global processes and collective futures (“Worlds and
Knowledges”). hird, and closely related to this, we need to make a stronger
efort to build knowledge about globalization from below, centering the theo-
rizing, knowledge claims, and praxis of our research participants. Blurring the
lines between producers and objects of knowledge in traditional scholarship
has the potential to contribute to the decolonization of our disciplines and also
to improve the quality of our scholarship. In developing my argument, I draw
in particular from Connell and Escobar as well as transnational feminism and
indigenous theories of subjectivity and ongoing colonialism, both of which
have provided particularly important analyses of why North-centric scholar-
ship is so problematic. In the irst section of this essay, I summarize Connell’s
and Escobar’s critiques of dominant globalization theory. In the following two
sections, I turn to the insights of transnational feminism and indigenous/na-
tive studies to argue for the epistemological and methodological decoloniza-
tion of scholarship on globalization and transnational processes.
he call to decolonize our scholarship is, of course, not entirely new (al-
though it has been made less forcefully in some disciplines—like sociology—
than others). It has roots in postcolonial scholarship, indigenous scholarship,
and now the body of work known as the “decolonial turn.” I conceive of this
essay as a bringing together of several perspectives that contribute to thinking
through the goal of decolonizing globalization studies. his review is not ex-
haustive, and it focuses mostly on my own region and substantive areas of schol-
arly engagement (women’s and indigenous politics in Latin America). While I
do draw from some postcolonial feminist scholars, the essay is more irmly en-
gaged with scholarship on decolonialization in the Americas. As Walter Mi-
gnolo has noted, postcoloniality and decoloniality are projects with diferent
genealogies, even as they have “complementary trajectories with similar goals of
social transformation” (xxvi).2 In addition to diferences in these schools of
thought, distinct cultural contexts and colonial histories mean that while the
various regions of the Global South are linked to one another in important
ways, the Global South is not a universal or homogenous subject. In exploring
the relationship of academic scholarship to decolonial futures, then, it is not my
intent to make universal or totalizing claims about the Global South.
In addition, I want to make clear that the decolonization that I am advo-
cating goes beyond the decolonial turn in scholarship in order to coincide with
indigenous and Afro-Caribbean scholars and activists who call for attention to
decolonial praxis. his approach entails paying attention not just to producers
of scholarly knowledge in the Global South (although this surely is important)

140 Vol 8:2 The Global South

but also to how people on the ground live and understand their experiences.
Decolonizing our scholarship, moreover, necessarily calls us to take seriously
the potential of scholar-activism, such that the decolonizing goals of our work
do not stay ixed in academia but actually engage social problems in global and
transnational contexts, in this way hopefully making our academic production
less subservient to the forces of colonization and also perhaps contributing to
actual decolonization on the ground.

DECOLONIZING GLOBALIZATION THEORY

Recent work by Connell, Escobar, and others has drawn attention to how dom-
inant work on globalization and transnational processes might be limited by
the domain assumptions and methodological decisions of its authors. Focusing
on sociological theories of globalization, Connell provides an incisive critique.
She argues that, almost to a one, the theories of globalization with currency in
the Global North “see and speak from the Global North”—or, in her preferred
terminology, the “metropole”— rarely citing scholars from the Global South or
building on theory developed there (368, 379). Connell argues, moreover, that
Northern theories of globalization are extremely limited because, despite some
variations, they “share an intellectual strategy.” She explains:
hey leap straight to the level of the global, where they reify perceived
trends as the nature of global society. he trends thus reiied are based on
concepts that have previously been worked out, not for speaking about
colonies, empires, or world afairs, but for speaking about metropolitan
societies—that is, the cluster of modern, industrial, postmodern, or
postindustrial countries that had been the focus of theoretical debates in
sociology for decades before. (373)

Connell identiies three dominant narratives that deine global society by the
spread of attributes previously identiied with the Global North—modernity,
postmodernity, and capitalist processes of exploitation and accumulation—
throughout the rest of the world. Rather than a unique research agenda, Con-
nell argues, globalization theory thus represents a “scaling up” of preexisting
theories, leading to unresolvable debates about three central dualities: local/
global, homogeneity/diference, and dispersed/concentrated power. Despite the
fact that many globalization theorists posit themselves oppositionally vis-à-vis
neoliberal globalization, Connell argues, the strategy of scaling-up is shaped by
a desire to avoid engaging pre-existing theories that did address global power
diferentials. “he sociological discourse of globalization, as it emerged in the
early 1990s,” she writes, “explicitly distanced itself from theories of imperial-
ism, and had at best an embarrassed relationship with world-systems analysis”
(376). Scaling up, rather than developing new theory based in transnational

Decolonizing Globalization Studies / Patricia Richards Vol. 8:2 141

 practices, means that our theories view the world from an implicitly Northern
perspective.
As a result, other standpoints are excluded. Connell writes:
Here, for instance, are the authors whom Hardt and Negri consider
helpful for thinking about transition from the possible to the real:
Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Deleuze. Not Gan-
dhi, not Fanon, in fact no one with a black face, no women, and no one
from outside Europe. Neither Bauman nor Beck, nor Robinson nor Kell-
ner nor Sassen, refers to non-metropolitan social thought when present-
ing theories of globalization. (379)

he same, she argues, is true of Giddens. Connell argues that, partly a product
of the legitimation procedures of the Northern academy (with an inordinate
focus on citation and ailiation), the exclusion of standpoints from the Global
South results in the erasure of important collective experiences that organize the
social world—most importantly colonialism. Recognizing people in the Global
South (Connell’s analysis focuses mostly on scholars including Vinay Lal, Pau-
lin Hountonddji, and various intellectuals from Iran) as producers of globaliza-
tion theory is important not necessarily because of what they could “add” to
Northern theory but because these theories “challenge the terms in which the
theory is constituted” and therefore lead us in entirely new, potentially more
fruitful, analytical directions (381).3 As Shannon Speed has noted, the insight
that the social sciences have colluded with colonial power “by producing repre-
sentations that supported colonialist logics and rationalities” (2) is not a particu-
larly new one, having been made by Edward Said and many other postcolonial
scholars. But the point that colonialism is contemporary and ongoing and in-
fuses global relations as well as academic production is certainly relevant.
A related critique comes out of the so-called “decolonial turn.” Scholars
associated with this project (including Enrique Dussel, Arturo Escobar, Maria
Lugones, Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano, Catherine Walsh, and others)
argue that modernity is rooted in the conquest and colonization of the Ameri-
cas, rather than in Eurocentric markers such as the Enlightenment or the In-
dustrial Revolution. Global capitalism, in turn, is modernity’s contemporary
manifestation. As Escobar argues:
From a philosophical and sociological perspective, the root of the idea of
an increasingly overpowering globalization lies in a view of modernity as
essentially an European phenomenon. Recent challenges to this view
from peripheral locations have questioned the unexamined assump-
tion—found in thinkers like Habermas, Giddens, Taylor, Touraine,
Lyotard, Rorty, etc., as much as in Kant, Hegel, and the Frankfurt
School philosophers before them—that modernity can be fully explained

142 Vol 8:2 The Global South

 by reference to factors internal to Europe. (“Worlds and Knowledges”
181)

Like Connell, Escobar suggests that this Eurocentrism is characteristic of

theorists across the political spectrum. In his view, most Northern theorists
“seem unwilling to consider that it is impossible to think about transcending
or overcoming modernity without approaching it from the perspective of the
colonial diference” (186).
Given that the domination of non-Europeans that is central to the devel-
opment of modernity entails repressing their knowledge and cultures, Escobar
argues for not just a descriptive change in how we characterize globalization
and modernity but an epistemological change in how we theorize global fu-
tures. He asks:
Could it be . . . that the power of Eurocentered modernity—as a partic-
ular local history—lies in the fact that is has produced particular global
designs in such a way that it has “subalternized” other local histories and
their corresponding designs? If this is the case, could one posit the hy-
pothesis that radical alternatives to modernity are not a historically fore-
closed possibility? If so, how can we articulate a project around this
possibility? Could it be that it is possible to think about, and to think
diferently from, an “exteriority” to the modern world system? (183)

I agree with Connell that scholars from the Global North need to seriously
engage the work of scholars from the Global South. I also agree with both
Connell and Escobar that doing so would change the presuppositions of most
dominant globalization theory. Nevertheless, beyond theory, I want to follow
transnational feminists and native/indigenous scholars including Andrea
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Shannon Speed, Ochy Curiel, and Silvia Rivera
Cusicanqui in calling for attention not just to alternative scholarly theories of
globalization but also to the praxis and knowledge claims of people at the
grassroots. How do those who experience the ravages of globalization and
ongoing colonialism most directly understand and theorize their own lives? It
is here that we should focus our scholarly attention.
Consideration of lived experience is important because, as Connell tells us,
it can change the content of our theorizing about global phenomena. But it also
has the potential to better ground that theory in a way that helps us to get be-
yond engaging one another in the academy without much connection to peo-
ple’s lives. As Light Carruyo has observed in relecting on development
scholarship, the ield “has not yet found a vocabulary to connect large structural
processes to the ways in which people live, love, and labor” or to understand
“the ways [people] challenge and negotiate broader structural processes” (7).

Decolonizing Globalization Studies / Patricia Richards Vol. 8:2 143

 Transnational feminism and native/indigenous studies prove insightful
here because scholars in these traditions tend to highlight the inequalities pro-
duced by global capital, focusing on linkages while rejecting facile comparisons
and interrogating binaries that operate as mechanisms of control and perpetu-
ate those inequalities (Kim-Puri). hey advocate examining the social relations
that produce particular subjects and forms of inequality and favor geographical
and historical speciicity in their analyses (A. Smith; Narayan). However, the
point of these analyses is not to stay at the level of the particular in some sort of
relativist analysis, but, rather, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty would have it, to
specify the particular in order to theorize the universal more fully. In an argu-
ment that focuses especially on the lives of women and girls, she writes:
here are causal links between marginalized social locations and experi-
ences and the ability of human agents to explain and analyze features of
capitalist society . . . My claim is not that all marginalized locations
yield crucial knowledge about power and inequity, but that within a
tightly integrated capitalist system, the particular standpoint of poor in-
digenous and hird World/South women provides the most inclusive
viewing of systemic power. (211)

his position holds that local experiences and knowledge do not just add to our
understanding of globalization but that careful study of local realities is abso-
lutely crucial to comprehending global capitalism. Our attention to these reali-
ties must be based not in the importation of theories built in the Global North.
Rather, we must build our theories and understandings of globalization based
on the realities and knowledge claims of people on the ground (recognizing, of
course, that there are elements of the Global North in the South and vice versa).
Several cautions are in order, however. First, this is not simply a call for
more attention to the “poor people” in the Global South. As Narayan has ar-
gued, scholars, activists, and journalists from the Global North display the
origins of their perspectives when writing about women in the Global South,
viewing “their subjects” as victims of “primitive” traditions and practices who
need to be saved from “death by culture,” rather than understanding the
women as historical agents in their own right. Second, I emphatically do not
want to fetishize the “local” or the “voices” of the oppressed. Instead, the point
is to break down the binaries of North/South, local/global, subject/object, and
self/other that facilitate ongoing global inequalities. As Jayati Lal has pointed
out, the “construction of subjugation, nativity, and insiderness, as privileged
epistemic standpoints from which to counter the universalism of Western
theory, are all premised on maintaining the same borderlines between Us and
hem, Self and Other, and Subject and Object that (we) wish to question in
the irst place” (198). hird, while, like Dorothy Smith, I believe that experi-
ence, particularly of subjugated individuals and groups, is important grounds

144 Vol 8:2 The Global South

for theorization, it is also necessary to avoid reifying identity and experience;
instead, these concepts should be interrogated as historical constructions
(Scott). To reiterate, my point is that greater attention to lived experience/
praxis is not supplementary but essential to improving scholarship on global
processes. My call is not just for a bottom up analysis but rather for centering
these “other” understandings of the world as a means of breaking down global
hierarchies and theorizing alternative and more just global futures.

EPISTEMOLOGICAL DECOLONIZATION

In this section, I explore some of the epistemological issues at the core of how
scholarship on globalization has reinforced coloniality. (Coloniality, according
to Quijano, is the condition that remains even after formal colonization has
ended.)4 Drawing attention to the epistemic aspects of inequality has long been
a central component of feminist and indigenous scholarship. Scholars in these
ields show that the marginalization of particular ways of knowing is absolutely
essential to upholding material inequalities. Who is considered a legitimate
knower? On whose knowledge are the norms and regulations of the social
world built? What knowledge is valued? What knowledge is considered biased
or suspect? he relevance of epistemic privilege to upholding ongoing colonial-
ism, racism, and sexism merits ongoing attention, as does the continuing strug-
gle, even in the face of universalizing global processes, to assert one’s self, or
one’s collectivity, as a subject of the social world rather than solely its object.
Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith points out the damage done to in-
digenous peoples by epistemic privilege.5 Her work elucidates the relationship
between dominant epistemologies and colonialism. She explains that the very
notion of a “discovery” of the “new world” is rooted in an epistemological posi-
tion that privileges colonizers’ ways of knowing over those of the indigenous.
Colonialism rests on the notion that colonizing settlers are the “knowers” and
the indigenous that which is to be known. And it is colonial knowledge on
which the dominant system comes to be built—so European/Northern
knowledge about everything from how to set up a state and legal system to
property ownership, the relationship between humans and the environment,
religion, language, cultural practices, education, and healthcare are privileged
as correct and legitimate ways of knowing, while indigenous knowledge in
these same areas is marginalized, annihilated, or viewed as suspect and sub-
jective. his epistemic aspect of the ongoing colonial relationship justiies dis-
possession to this day.
Although Tuhiwai Smith speaks to its efects on indigenous peoples in
particular, epistemic privilege has similar, though not identical, efects on
other subaltern groups. Epistemic privilege both justiies and perpetuates his-
torical and contemporary inequalities. It is relected in transnational and state

Decolonizing Globalization Studies / Patricia Richards Vol. 8:2 145

 policies as well as everyday practices. It is essential to communicating and
engraining race and gender hierarchies, and it sets the conditions that justify
symbolic, legal, and material violence against dispossessed and marginalized
communities. his is a relationship that runs North-South but also pervades
the Global South and Global North.
As Connell argues, we need to account for the ways in which academic
scholarship produced in the Global North has upheld the colonial relationship.
I want to emphasize, though, that there are power dynamics not only between
scholars from diferent parts of the world but also within them. he authors of
Ta iñ ijke xipa rakizuameluwün: Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país
Mapuche, a book published by the Comunidad de Historia Mapuche (Mapuche
History Community) in 2012, make this point when they write of the tensions
of being treated as objects of research rather than agents of knowledge. As they
write in the introduction, “oicial” knowledge production has contributed to
the dispossession of the Mapuche, perhaps especially through the use of “native
informants.” Regardless of the good intentions of many of these scholars, Ma-
puche respondents’ conceptual and analytical contributions have often gone
unrecognized. hey see authorship of their own texts as one means of “exercis-
ing practical and epistemological sovereignty” (20). Héctor Nahuelpan Moreno
expands upon this position, emphasizing the importance of developing a “rela-
tionship of greater autonomy and critical dialogue with the hegemonic aca-
demic perspectives that have been developed to study us” (127). He follows
Tuhiwai Smith in noting that “colonialism still hurts, it destroys and reformu-
lates itself constantly, which demands that we pay attention and analyze how
we were colonized, to know what it means in terms of our recent past, and also
what it means for our present and future” (125).
At a 2013 panel on the book at the Latin American Studies Association
Annual Congress, several of its authors echoed these relections. Susana
Huenul Colicoy observed that there seems to be an academic elite with “con-
stant funds to study the Mapuche” while many Mapuche with advanced de-
grees have no access whatsoever to the academy. his is a colonial relationship,
she said, and academic work should be subject to the International Labor Or-
ganization’s Convention 169;6 indigenous people should have a right to partici-
pate in intellectual production. Herson Huinca Piutrin asked, with some
irony, “What is the history of the researchers? Who is a specialist on the fam-
ily of Bengoa?” (José Bengoa is a well-known Chilean scholar who has written
several books on the Mapuche.) Moreover, he added, while the goal of decolo-
nization will surely beneit the indigenous, Chileans (like people from the
Global North) also need to decolonize their thinking. hese observations sug-
gest two important points. First, academics need to account for our ongoing
complicity with the colonialism, racism, and classism that continue to shape
the lives of dispossessed communities in the Global South and North. And

146 Vol 8:2 The Global South

second, the low of power is not only from the Global North to the Global
South but also circulates unequally within the Global South. Dealing with
these inequalities is essential to understanding global processes and the poli-
tics of academic production alike.
What happens if we take these claims seriously? Here I return to Esco-
bar’s point that theorizing from a “position of exteriority” may allow us to
imagine diferent collective futures (“Latin America”). He sees potential for
this in the “relational ontologies” of indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants.
He deines these ontologies as ones that “eschew the divisions between nature
and culture, individual and community, us and them that are central to the
modern ontology (that of liberal modernity).” Escobar argues that struggles in
Chiapas, Bolivia, and elsewhere are ontological in the sense that they have the
“potential to de-naturalize the hegemonic distinction between nature and cul-
ture on which the liberal order is founded” and on which further dichotomous
distinctions—such as those “between civilized and Indians, colonizer and
colonized, developed and underdeveloped”—are based (“Latin America” 39).
While recognizing that relational and dualist ontologies coexist in the con-
temporary world, Escobar provides plentiful examples of epistemological and
ontological challenges to modernity/coloniality. For example, in their new Con-
stitutions, Bolivia and Ecuador recognize themselves as plurinational states. he
Ecuadorian Constitution states that development should be based on sumaq
kawsay (the term refers to collective well-being in Quechua). he Bolivian Con-
stitution says society should be based on a similar concept, the suma qamaña.
hese concepts are based on “ontological assumptions in which all beings exist
always in relation and never as ‘objects’ or individuals.” Other examples include
the Zapatista concept of “mandar obedeciendo” (to lead by obeying), the view
that representational entities should be embedded in communities, and the
granting of Constitutional rights to nature (pachamama) in Ecuador (“Latin
America” 39). As Hale observes, while rooted in empirical trends, Escobar’s vi-
sion remains largely prophetic. But that some indigenous and Afro-descendant
peoples are drawing from other epistemological and ontological positions could
contribute to the development of alternative ways of thinking about social, po-
litical, and economic organization. his should lead us to take seriously the
knowledge claims and praxis of these and other subaltern communities.
Making our scholarly theorizing of the global context less North-centric,
actively engaging with these relational ontologies, centering “other knowledges”
or the “epistemologies of the south” (Sousa Santos), participating in “epistemic
disobedience” (Mignolo): all of this is essential in order to envision a way out of
the continuation of the violence—legitimized by racism and sexism and rooted
in colonial power—that undergirds the global system. In order to challenge
global economic organization, we must irst challenge the knowledge systems
that naturalize the subordination of some groups of people for the gain of

Decolonizing Globalization Studies / Patricia Richards Vol. 8:2 147

 others. As scholars we are frequently complicit in these knowledge systems,
despite our best intentions.
Nevertheless, even within the decolonial turn, there is still a politics of
knowledge circulation. Scholars from the Global South, particularly indige-
nous and feminist scholars, have criticized the coloniality paradigm, arguing
that the theories and practices of indigenous people/scholars are often margin-
alized from these “radical” theories that are supposedly about them. Melissa
Forbis and I have outlined these critiques elsewhere, but they bear repeating
here (“Re-centering Knowledge”; “Teoría y praxis”).7 Aymara scholar/activist
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui forcefully argues that coloniality scholars build on
contributions produced in the Global South without adequately crediting
them. Dominican scholar/activist Ochy Curiel suggests that one reason for
this exclusion may be that many theorists of coloniality, although originally
from Latin America, are now located in US universities and have scant contact
with movements and communities in the South actively engaged in decolonial
thought and practice. his is a grave error. As Rivera Cusicanqui puts it, “It is
not possible to have a theory or discourse of decolonization without a decolo-
nizing practice” (62). Huinca Piutrin reinforced this point at the 2013 LASA
session mentioned above. He argued that the concept of “epistemological sov-
ereignty” used by the Mapuche History Community and other indigenous
organizations should not be a theoretical term alone. Instead, people’s every-
day experiences should be the basis for thinking it through. Focusing on
praxis, and not theory alone, is essential to decolonization.

DECOLONIZING METHODOLOGIES

To decolonize research on globalization also requires methodological change. I

am thus also interested in collective thinking about how to further develop
methodologies that acknowledge the co-produced character of all knowledge
as we theorize our way around transnational processes, and also contribute to
decolonizing practices on the ground. he questions we ask, how we position
ourselves vis-à-vis our research participants, how we carry out our research—
all of these issues are of the essence. his is a conversation that has a long trajec-
tory—with links to participatory action, collaborative, and activist research.
Here I review what I consider to be some of the most compelling approaches,
with potential to contribute toward emancipatory, decolonizing objectives.
Andrea Smith’s 2010 essay bringing Native studies into conversation with
queer theory is instructive. Describing the dilemma for Native and indigenous
people vis-à-vis academic scholarship, she writes:
he very quest for full subjecthood implicit in the ethnographic project
to tell our “truth” is already premised on a logic that requires us to be

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 objects to be discovered. Furthermore, within this colonial logic, Native
particularity cannot achieve universal humanity without becoming “in-
authentic” because Nativeness is already fundamentally constructed as
the “other” of Western subjectivity (42).

Moreover, scholarship about Native peoples and other subjugated groups often
devolves into merely representing the voices of the oppressed—a politics of
inclusion rather than radical transformation—which ultimately does little
more than “providing Native [or other] commodities for consumption in the
multicultural academic-industrial complex” (63). Instead, research should ex-
pose the structures, institutions, and interactions that result in systematic dis-
possession and inequality.
Smith turns to queer theory’s “subjectless critique” to resolve these dilem-
mas. A subjectless critique is one that displaces the subject (“the native” in this
case) in order to focus our analysis instead on the broader social relations (e.g.
settler colonialism) that have produced that subject. In addition to helping
resolve these dilemmas, Smith writes: “A subjectless critique helps demon-
strate that Native studies is an intellectual project that has broad applicability
not only for Native peoples but for everyone” since “the logics of settler colo-
nialism structure all of society, not just those who are indigenous.” She writes
of the need to denaturalize the conditions of domination, including those re-
produced by the “colonial academy” (44). However, Smith also emphatically
cautions that the subjectless critique can serve to disguise the power (epistemic
and otherwise) of the white supremacist, settler subject. She argues that what
she terms an “identity plus” politics—marking “all identities and their rela-
tionship to the ields of power in which they are imbricated”—might be more
along the lines of what is methodologically necessary (63).
In her inluential book, Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith
lays out various ideas for an indigenous research agenda. Many of her ideas also
apply to other subaltern communities. She names decolonization, healing,
transformation, and mobilization as processes that “connect, inform, and clar-
ify the tensions between the local, the regional and the global” and “can be
incorporated into practices and methodologies” (116). Although Tuhiwai Smith
is critical of labels like “collaborative” or “emancipatory” research, which can
hide hierarchies, paternalism, and colonialist assumptions, she does seem to
advocate community action research that is rooted in respect and honesty. She
also presents the model of “bicultural research,” in which indigenous and non-
indigenous researchers design and work on projects together. (See Leyva, Bur-
guete and Speed for a compelling example of this type of research.)
Tuhiwai Smith provides a list of methodological considerations for cross-
cultural research:

Decolonizing Globalization Studies / Patricia Richards Vol. 8:2 149

 Who deined the research problem? For whom is this study worthy and
relevant? Who says so? What knowledge will the community gain from
this study? What knowledge will the researcher gain from this study?
What are some likely positive outcomes from this study? What are some
possible negative outcomes? How can the negative outcomes be elimi-
nated? To whom is the researcher accountable? What processes are in
place to support the research, the researched, and the researcher? (173)

She also explores some “strategic directions” for developing indigenous meth-
odologies based in indigenous epistemologies, such as asserting self-determi-
nation over research needs, procedures, and priorities; training indigenous
researchers; establishing accountabilities and appropriate ethics; and engaging
in education of the wider community (192). Both sets of considerations seem
like a good place to begin in order to establish programs of research that do not
contribute to or reinforce dispossession and inequality.
Shannon Speed has engaged the question of decolonizing research by
turning to the practice of activist anthropology.8 She explains: “Critically en-
gaged activist research . . .entails an overt positioning of the researcher vis-à-vis
the research subjects, integrates those subjects into the research process, and
recognizes and validates ways of knowing and theorizing social processes other
than academic ones” (1). hat inal factor is of particular interest to me here.
Decolonizing academic production, Speed writes, entails establishing a difer-
ent relationship with research participants, “one in which they are not the ‘ma-
teria prima’ of the research but rather are theorists of their own social processes
whose knowledge difers from but is equally valid and valued as anthropologi-
cal knowledge and theorizing” (8). Conducting activist research and decoloniz-
ing the research relationship entails a critical engagement and the mutual
deinition of goals through dialogue with participants; the process and prod-
ucts alike are part of the activist orientation. Speed cautions that power still
deines this relationship, but insists that “despite the contradictions and dilem-
mas posed by activist research, it ofers better possibilities for addressing the
problematic nature of anthropological knowledge production than do the alter-
natives of continuing to rely on a nonexistent objectivity or a retrenchment in
the realm of the theoretical and the textual . . .” (14). Globalization scholars,
including myself, have much to learn from these approaches.

CONCLUSION

he authors cited in this article seem to be making essentially the same point:
we need more theorizing of globalization from the other end of the power struc-
ture, based in the knowledge claims and praxis of our research participants.
Such theoretical change will necessarily be accompanied by methodological

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change. I will conclude by recapping four general (and interrelated) areas for
theoretical and methodological development toward which these authors point
us. All of these are related in some way to centering the knowledge claims and
praxis of research participants in the construction of knowledge about transna-
tional and global processes.
he irst is to better theorize the linkages between global systems and
structures and local people on the ground. Carruyo’s call for more attention to
the role of humans in creating social structure, living out our lives in contexts
constricted by it, and resisting domination is especially relevant here. Closely
related to this, the second is to listen to the theorizing being done by our re-
search subjects. How do people understand their worlds? his call is especially
relevant for scholars interested in how indigenous peoples and other marginal-
ized groups experience global processes. As Speed has argued, this is impor-
tant in order to better relect the reality lived by research participants but also
because it often results in better research.
he third is to continue to work against reifying identities without failing
to see how important identity continues to be to social processes in the context
of globalization. Instead, the idea is to theorize how particular subject positions
are articulated or mobilized in particular contexts and to what purposes. As
Andrea Smith has written, the goal needs to be to understand the social rela-
tions that produce particular subjects and forms of inequality, rather than tak-
ing those for granted, while simultaneously being careful not to reproduce or
disguise the power (epistemic and otherwise) of the white supremacist settler
subject.
Fourth, we need to better connect the substance of our research to strug-
gles for justice and decolonization on the ground. Mohanty’s 2002 call re-
mains relevant today. She writes:
It is especially on the bodies and lives of women and girls from the hird
World/South—the Two-hirds World—that global capitalism writes its
script, and it is by paying attention to and theorizing the experiences of
these communities of women and girls that we demystify capitalism as a
system of debilitating sexism and racism and envision anticapitalist resis-
tance. hus any analysis of the efects of globalization needs to centralize
the experiences and struggles of these particular communities of women
and girls.

Some might broaden that to include the men and boys on whose bodies and
lives global capitalism also writes its script, but the general point stands. To
the extent that a struggle for a better world is a central part of why we study
global and transnational processes, we need to do a better job of articulating
just why what we do matters and connecting it to the communities it most
matters for.

Decolonizing Globalization Studies / Patricia Richards Vol. 8:2 151

 As scholars focusing on globalization, transnational practices, and global
justice, we need to consider seriously how knowledge production from above
ultimately may lead to the empowerment of (some) human beings in the
Global North and a perpetuation of global inequalities rather than the trans-
formation of those inequalities and positive change for human beings occupy-
ing the Global South (or as Mohanty would say, recognizing the unequal
distribution of resources within both hemispheres, the 1/3 and 2/3 world).9
heorizing from the bottom up, privileging the praxis of those who reside in
that 2/3 world/Global South, making space for them in the academy, and at-
tempting to decolonize our disciplines as well as contribute through our work
to broader struggles for decolonization, together represent a modest proposal
for beginning this change.

Notes

1. As Connell points out, this narrative may focus on homogenization or heterogeneity, but in either
case, it tends to be an all-encompassing narrative told from the perspective of the Global North.
2. Although a full accounting of these trajectories is beyond the scope of this article (interested
readers should see Mignolo’s text), postcolonialism as a school of thought has its origins in the former
French and especially British colonies, while decoloniality has roots in Spanish and Portuguese
colonies and is the broadly favored concept in the Latin American context.
3. Jean and John Comarof make a distinct though related point in arguing that regions of the Global
South, and Africa in particular, are important sites of analysis because they represent modernities in
their own right, which are not imitations of or reducible to the Euro-American one, and also because,
having experienced the imposition of structural adjustment and the related economic and organizational
forms, they ofer privileged insights into capitalist futures for the Global North as well.
4. I ind some utility in the concept of coloniality, especially insofar as it points to the ongoing efects
of colonialism in structuring all of society. However, it is worth noting that many indigenous scholar/
activists, such as the members of the Mapuche History Community, critique the term based on the
fact that, by deining formal colonialism as “of the past,” the concept may draw attention away from
ongoing colonialism in their territories.
5. his paragraph draws from my 2013 book.
6. his Convention, established in 1989, is one of the most important international documents
recognizing indigenous rights.
7. “Teoría y praxis” is forthcoming in a volume edited by Andrea Alvarez and América Millaray
Painemal Morales.
8. In advocating this approach, though, I want to make clear that I agree with Michael Burowoy that
our contributions “cannot be reduced to [their] activist or pragmatic moment, but [have] an
indispensable scholarly moment, requiring [their] own relative autonomy” (54). Nevertheless, Andrea
Smith’s observations on “opting out” point to the moral necessity of an activist engagement. She
writes: “A politics of ‘opting out’ clearly privileges those who are relatively more comfortable under
the current situation. For indigenous peoples, however, who face genocide, as well as all peoples
subjected to conditions of starvation, violence, and war, opting out is simply not an option” (48).
9. I’d like to thank Jef Jackson for his contributions to my thought process here.

152 Vol 8:2 The Global South

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