Thammasat University students interested in science, technology, political science, history, sociology, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 8 May Zoom webinar that asks Is Science Colonial? Possibilities and challenges for creating other ways of doing research from the Global South.
The event, on Wednesday, 8 May 2024, starting at 6:30pm Bangkok time, is hosted by the University of Sheffield, the United Kingdom.
The event announcement explains:
This seminar will address the colonial characteristics of science. Based on Participatory Action Research experiences with people living in poverty, indigenous communities and immigrants in various Latin American countries (Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru), the speaker, James Moura (Associate Professor at the University of the International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony in Brazil and Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol), will present decolonial strategies […]
James Moura is a Community Psychologist. He works as Associate Professor at the University for International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony (Brazil), coordinating Participatory Action Research about mental health with indigenous and quilombolas communities. He is a Visiting Professor in the Program for Community, Liberation, and Indigenous Eco-psychologies at the Pacifica Graduate Institute (USA). […]
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of colonial science.
Students are invited to join the Zoom meeting for the event at this link:
https://zoom.us/j/95853615476?pwd=YmRoNEVpKzNDV1FNR1pvR2xVa2FyQT09
An article from 2018 published in Smithsonian Magazine notes,
Since its birth around the same time as Europeans began conquering other parts of the world, modern Western science was inextricably entangled with colonialism, especially British imperialism. And the legacy of that colonialism still pervades science today.
As a result, recent years have seen an increasing number of calls to “decolonize science”, even going so far as to advocate scrapping the practice and findings of modern science altogether. Tackling the lingering influence of colonialism in science is much needed. But there are also dangers that the more extreme attempts to do so could play into the hands of religious fundamentalists and ultra-nationalists. We must find a way to remove the inequalities promoted by modern science while making sure its huge potential benefits work for everyone, instead of letting it become a tool for oppression. […]
For imperialists and their modern apologists, science and medicine were among the gracious gifts from the European empires to the colonial world. What’s more, the 19th-century imperial ideologues saw the scientific successes of the West as a way to allege that non-Europeans were intellectually inferior and so deserved and needed to be colonized.
In the incredibly influential 1835 memo “Minute on Indian Education,” British politician Thomas Macaulay denounced Indian languages partially because they lacked scientific words. He suggested that languages such as Sanskrit and Arabic were “barren of useful knowledge,” “fruitful of monstrous superstitions” and contained “false history, false astronomy, false medicine.”
Such opinions weren’t confined to colonial officials and imperial ideologues and were often shared by various representatives of the scientific profession. The prominent Victorian scientist Sir Francis Galton argued that the “the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own (the Anglo Saxon).” Even Charles Darwin implied that “savage races” such as “the negro or the Australian” were closer to gorillas than were white Caucasians.
Yet 19th-century British science was itself built upon a global repertoire of wisdom, information and living and material specimens collected from various corners of the colonial world. Extracting raw materials from colonial mines and plantations went hand in hand with extracting scientific information and specimens from colonized people. […]
Modern colonial science
Since the formal end of colonialism, we have become better at recognizing how scientific expertise has come from many different countries and ethnicities. Yet former imperial nations still appear almost self-evidently superior to most of the once-colonized countries when it comes to scientific study. The empires may have virtually disappeared, but the cultural biases and disadvantages they imposed have not.
You just have to look at the statistics on the way research is carried out globally to see how the scientific hierarchy created by colonialism continues. The annual rankings of universities are published mostly by the Western world and tend to favor its own institutions. Academic journals across the different branches of science are mostly dominated by the U.S. and western Europe.
It is unlikely that anyone who wishes to be taken seriously today would explain this data in terms of innate intellectual superiority determined by race. The blatant scientific racism of the 19th century has now given way to the notion that excellence in science and technology are a euphemism for significant funding, infrastructure and economic development.
Because of this, most of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean are seen either as playing catch-up with the developed world or as dependent on its scientific expertise and financial aid. Some academics have identified these trends as evidence of the persisting “intellectual domination of the West” and labeled them a form of “neo-colonialism.”
Various well-meaning efforts to bridge this gap have struggled to go beyond the legacies of colonialism. For example, scientific collaboration between countries can be a fruitful way of sharing skills and knowledge, and learning from the intellectual insights of one another. But when an economically weaker part of the world collaborates almost exclusively with very strong scientific partners, it can take the form of dependence, if not subordination.
In a 2018 article in Scientific American, a researcher from Sri Lanka recalled
my first experience with “parachute science” or, as some might call it, “colonial science”—the conservation model where researchers from the developed world come to countries like mine, do research and leave without any investment in human capacity or infrastructure. It creates a dependency on external expertise and cripples local conservation efforts. The work is driven by the outsiders’ assumptions, motives and personal needs, leading to an unfavorable power imbalance between those from outside and those on the ground.
I have been talking about the need to end parachute science for years now, starting with a keynote at the International Marine Conservation Congress in 2016, many efforts in between and, most recently, at a U.N. Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development planning meeting where I reminded private foundations of their role in ensuring this does not continue. I was seeing a shift in thinking, but it still didn’t seem obvious to many that if we are to protect the vast majority of our planet, we need the vast majority of our world’s population onboard and working together.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)