The African Studies Global Virtual Forum 2022–23, led by Dr. Sinfree Makoni, seeks to decenter hegemonic epistemologies and to decolonize the Western canon to facilitate other ways/waves of knowing. Through a series of online conversations, participants in the forum will challenge the notion of the “universal truth” and discuss how the only truth that is universal is the truth of complexity. To decolonize knowledge, epistemic perspectives need to be pluralistic in ontologies, cosmologies, and insights, and the emergence of Epistemologies of the South is one such response to the decolonial turn.
Sinfree Makoni is Interim Director of African Studies, Professor of African Studies and Applied Linguistics at The College of Liberal Arts of Pennsylvania State University in the United States.
On December 2, 2022, Sandew Hira was invited to give a lecture titled: Epistemology: the manipulation of the mind through knowledge production, based on chapter five of his book Decolonizing The Mind.
Click here to view the lecture.