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Refusing coloniality: an ethical praxis of paying attention to words in academic writing
Book chapter

Refusing coloniality: an ethical praxis of paying attention to words in academic writing

Elizabeth Mackinlay
Working with Theories of Refusal and Decolonization in Higher Education, pp.164-179
Routledge, First edition
2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003367314-14

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Abstract

The etymological roots of the word "refusal" have a decolonial story to tell deeply entangled with the return and rejection of unwanted requests, rule, and rights. The contemporary university itself is rooted in "coloniality", not least of all in the matter of academic words and writing, and thereby, complicit in capturing, confining and containing bodies of knowledge in servitude to coloniality and for this we are all accountable - and yet, I often think and wonder have we have stopped paying attention? In this chapter, I bring the work of feminist and Indigenous scholars together with my own as a white-settler-colonial-feminist-woman in the academy to ask, "How might an ethical writing praxis of paying attention to words through refusal move us closer to the possibility of decoloniality in the academy?" Grounded in a commitment to refuse the established norms of academic writing, this chapter departs radically in its presentation by threading theory-as-story in relationality with one another through an interplay of main text with footnotes. This is a deliberate provocation to readers to delink from the usual way of reading academic writing and invites a careful, intentional and agential engagement with the multiplicities inherent within this text to follow the words that ask us to pay attention around.

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