Description
In this paper, I explore the notion of research practice as a ‘disabling time/space’. I argue that despite a significant growth of de/post-colonial scholarship that questions rigid methodological frameworks, doctoral research in International Relations, and the social sciences more broadly, remains a site where the coloniality of knowledge and power often flourishes. Building on my fieldwork experiences in Colombia, I provide a critique of this 'research ecosystem' and indicate that its various elements, from the ethical reviews to insurance-related travel restrictions, become part of what can be described as a system of colonial gatekeeping. Rather than an enabling space of proximity, relationality and mutuality, research can end up reproducing peoples and spaces, as in the case of Black communities alongside Colombia’s Pacific coast, as dangerous, backward and unworthy. It is not only ethically problematic, but also epistemologically harmful, further reinforcing Western academia’s structural predominance. In an attempt to look for alternative approaches (‘enabling time/space’), I explore the notion of ‘thinking through struggle’ as a methodological and ethical commitment that allows us to move beyond a critique articulated against a set of rigid methodological and conceptual frames, and reimagine research as a process and social relation.
