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Written from a diasporic colonised Indo-Gangetic Punjabi Sikh perspective, this piece is an act of epistemic disobedience and seeks to refuse the terms of engagement set by the Eurocentric academy.
Sophia rigorously engages with critical whiteness studies, Afro-pessimism, decolonial feminism, and Indigenous knowledge systems. The text weaves together theoretical frameworks from scholars across the Global South and the Black Radical Tradition, examining how the colonial matrix of power structures modern institutions—including universities—and perpetuates racial hierarchies through epistemic violence and the naturalisation of white supremacy.
This work:
Traces coloniality through the entangled triskeles of security/silence/trauma
Centers Blackness as a methodology for understanding global coloniality
Traces connections between caste, race, gender, and colonial violence (e.g. the Boston Tea Party to the East India Company, Convenant Chain to Roman law etc)
Refuses to separate the particular from the universal
Challenges IR's mythologies and erasures
Practices Indigenous storytelling as scholarly resistance
Demonstrates how the academy remains complicit in epistemic violence against Black Indigenous scholars
This is offered freely because knowledge-sharing is a sacred responsibility, not a commodity. If this work resonates with you—if you see yourself in it, if it helps you identify with the subjugated rather than the subjugator, if it supports your own decolonial praxis—optional contributions are welcome as tokens of reciprocity (just click here) and collective care in a capitalist world that monetises the ability to live.
Content warning: This work discusses violence, trauma, genocide, enslavement, and ongoing colonial harm. It also refuses academic "respectability politics" and may make readers uncomfortable (though, is precisely the point).
For whom this is written: Those ready to identify with the oppressed rather than demand they assimilate; those willing to do the uncomfortable work of re-membering; those who understand that decolonization is a verb, not a metaphor.
Written from a diasporic colonised Indo-Gangetic Punjabi Sikh perspective, this piece is an act of epistemic disobedience and seeks to refuse the terms of engagement set by the Eurocentric academy.
Sophia rigorously engages with critical whiteness studies, Afro-pessimism, decolonial feminism, and Indigenous knowledge systems. The text weaves together theoretical frameworks from scholars across the Global South and the Black Radical Tradition, examining how the colonial matrix of power structures modern institutions—including universities—and perpetuates racial hierarchies through epistemic violence and the naturalisation of white supremacy.
This work:
Traces coloniality through the entangled triskeles of security/silence/trauma
Centers Blackness as a methodology for understanding global coloniality
Traces connections between caste, race, gender, and colonial violence (e.g. the Boston Tea Party to the East India Company, Convenant Chain to Roman law etc)
Refuses to separate the particular from the universal
Challenges IR's mythologies and erasures
Practices Indigenous storytelling as scholarly resistance
Demonstrates how the academy remains complicit in epistemic violence against Black Indigenous scholars
This is offered freely because knowledge-sharing is a sacred responsibility, not a commodity. If this work resonates with you—if you see yourself in it, if it helps you identify with the subjugated rather than the subjugator, if it supports your own decolonial praxis—optional contributions are welcome as tokens of reciprocity (just click here) and collective care in a capitalist world that monetises the ability to live.
Content warning: This work discusses violence, trauma, genocide, enslavement, and ongoing colonial harm. It also refuses academic "respectability politics" and may make readers uncomfortable (though, is precisely the point).
For whom this is written: Those ready to identify with the oppressed rather than demand they assimilate; those willing to do the uncomfortable work of re-membering; those who understand that decolonization is a verb, not a metaphor.