How to bring creativity to your research

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Last year I wrote a post to announce this forthcoming series. Now, I am delighted to say, it is no longer forthcoming – it’s here! 

The first book in the series, Photovoice Reimagined by Nicole Brown, is published today. There are three others scheduled for publication this year. Fiction and Research, by Becky Tipper and Leah Gilman, will be published in July; Doing Phenomenography, by Amanda Taylor-Beswick and Eva Hornung, will follow in September; and Encountering The World with i-Docs, by Ella Harris, will be available in December. Three more are currently in the writing phase, two proposals are out for review, and I am in discussions with eight or nine other authors or teams of authors about possible future publications. Potential topics under development include enhanced interviewing, poetic inquiry and decolonisation, sandboxing, using comics in research, creative sonic research methods, zines in the research encounter, mapping, journey mapping, inclusive creative fieldwork, creative evaluation, visual scribing, urban exploration, visual methods in practice and emoji coding. 

I decided to edit this series because I knew there were not enough publication opportunities for people writing about creative research methods. That meant students and researchers wanting to learn more about these kinds of methods were struggling to find relevant information. The books in the series are short, practical how-to books, designed to help researchers learn enough to try out the methods for themselves.

This kind of initiative also helps to establish the legitimacy of creative research methods. Now, in the first half of the 21st century, creative research methods are following a similar trajectory to that of qualitative methods in the second half of the 20th century. It may surprise you to know that economists began adopting qualitative methods as early as the 1960s. After much debate, psychologists began using qualitative methods in the 1980s and engineers joined in in the 2010s. Other disciplines also expanded their methodological repertoires and, as a result, academic journals publishing qualitative research were set up for areas of study formerly thought of as quantitative. For example, the journal Qualitative Health Research was founded in 1991, though Qualitative Psychology was not set up until 2013.

At present, creative research methods are perhaps most firmly established in the discipline of education, I suspect because it is such a creative profession. But I am seeing creative methods being used and promoted in a very wide range of disciplines, such as facilities management, health and the politics of fashion. This is reflected in the doctoral students I teach on courses for the National Centre for Research Methods, doctoral training partnerships and universities. Students come to learn about creative methods from arts and humanities and social sciences disciplines. So far, so unsurprising. But I also get engineers, physicists, business students, computer scientists – all sorts in fact. 

In the Euro-Western world we think of creative research methods as new. However, the work of Indigenous methods experts such as Bagele Chilisa from Botswana, Margaret Kovach from Canada and Linda Tuhiwai Smith from New Zealand shows us that creative methods are in fact very old indeed – tens of thousands of years old, in some cases, so very much older than the ‘scientific method’ which has only dominated research in the Euro-Western world for the last few centuries. ‘Older’ does not necessarily equal ‘better’, but in this case I think it does. The scientific method has its place but is not the be-all and end-all of research. Creative methods are more likely to treat people holistically, take context into account and produce rich data and analyses. The scientific method assumes a level of universal consistency and uniformity, while creative methods make space for individual particularities. 

Creative Research Methods in Practice is a small but tangible step on our journey away from the dominance of positivism and post-positivism. These stances emphasise objectivity, which is unachievable, and usually consider experiments to be the ideal form of research. Again, there is a place for experimental methods, but there is also a role in research for all sorts of creative methods, from participatory approaches to autoethnography, board games to computer games, apps to zines. And these are the kinds of methods I aim to showcase in the series. If you would like to write a book for this series, please do get in touch.

Can You Help?

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Dear Friends,

If you are not an academic and my work has had an impact on you, I would like to hear about that. Also, if you are, or were, an academic and my work had an impact on you at a time when you were not an academic, I would like to hear about that too. I am specifically interested in the impact of any of the following:

    • Open courses on Creative Research Methods and/or radical Research Ethics that I have run for NCRM in the UK, online, or in person.

    If you can help, please use my contact form (or my email address, if you have it) to send me a message about which of the above resources had an impact on you and the difference(s) made to you – whether to your thinking, work, career, life, anything at all. Your message can be as short or as long as you like. 

    Many thanks and kind regards,

    Helen

    Creative Methods in Unlikely Places 

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    I am finding creative research methods in more and more unexpected locations. I stumbled across a fascinating example while researching the ethics of project management for a book I’m co-writing. It is in the International Journal of Project Management which is not a journal I have read much from until recently. The author is Jan Bröchner, an Emeritus Professor from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, who specialises in facilities management in construction organisations. Does he sound like a creative methods person to you? He didn’t sound like one to me – but my stereotyping was soon overturned as I began to read his article. 

    Bröchner gathered and analysed fictional accounts of construction project management. He was particularly interested in the way project managers’ individual values were expressed in these accounts. He cites a book from 1994 called ‘Good Novels, Better Management’ as foundational to the idea that fiction can be relevant for organisational research. This is a book I have on my shelves from my doctoral student days 20 years ago! My PhD focused on storytelling and organisations. Though I have lost touch with this area of research since then, it is good to see how it has developed. Bröchner cites other relevant work from 1995 to 2019 to support his contention that studying fiction is more use than conventional research methods for investigating the ethical dilemmas that project managers face and for gaining insights ‘into less desirable managerial behaviours’ (Bröchner 2021:594).  

    Bröchner drew on the values identified by the Polish-American psychologist Milton Rokeach in the 1970s as the internal reference points people use to formulate their attitudes and opinions. (I’m not sure how universal these are, as values can be influenced by society, religion etc and may change over time, but most of them seem reasonably widespread.) Bröchner used a five-step method for finding and working with his fictional data. First, he defined the criteria for selecting his data: they had to be novels, short stories, or plays; available in English, French, or German; with at least one construction project as a prominent feature; and a character who is the construction project manager. Using these criteria, he found fourteen novels, two short stories, and four plays for his dataset. The literature he selected ranged from Aristophanes’ play The Birds, written in 414 BC, to The Victoria System, a novel by Éric Reinhardt published in 2011. 

    In the second and third steps, Bröchner wrote one short summary to highlight the relevant action; and another to briefly summarise any other relevant details of background information. Here is an example: 

    Peter Ackroyd: Hawksmoor (1985) 

    Novel. Two intertwined murder stories. One featuring a satanist clerk of works (or supervisor) responsible for building seven churches in 18th-century London. The other concerning the same churches and a 1980s detective.  

    Background: Career of Nicholas Hawksmoor (d. 1736) as assistant to Christopher Wren and supervising architect. (Bröchner 2021:600) 

    Bröchner found that all the authors had relevant personal experiences, and many worked hard to understand construction project management (Bröchner 2021:601). 

    In the fourth step, Bröchner used the Rokeach values as pre-determined codes and applied those codes to his data. And in the fifth step, he used the results of that coding process to assess how each of the values was represented by the authors, and how frequently each occurred.  

    Bröchner found that the top five values were Imagination, (Mature) Love, Ambition, Courage, and Happiness (Bröchner 2021:600). These may not be the first five values you would expect a construction project manager to have. Values such as capability, logic, self-respect, politeness, and a sense of accomplishment seem more likely (and yes, those are Rokeach values too). So Bröchner’s findings are surprising and therefore interesting. He expresses a hope that his pioneering work will shift the focus from ‘management methods that are intended to lead to successful project outcomes to an acceptance [of] project managers as human beings’ with their own values and personal commitments to balance with their work and ethical considerations (Bröchner 2021:602). 

    I think this is one of the key benefits of creative research methods: they facilitate people being accepted as people. We are slowly moving away from the idea that people should compartmentalise themselves so that when you are at work your personal life is irrelevant, and only your work-related knowledge and skills can be of use. Creative methods offer an opportunity for people to bring all their knowledge, and skills, and imagination, and ideas, and courage, and love into their research work. With creative methods, there is no need to exclude anything except whatever is not useful for the task in hand. 

    Why Did I Edit Such an Expensive Book?

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    The Bloomsbury Handbook of Creative Research Methods, published last month, is at present only available in hardback at a recommended retail price of £140, or as an ebook at £126. Regular readers will know that I have ranted on this blog before about the iniquitous prices charged by some academic publishers, and advocated working with not-for-profit university presses. So, it is reasonable to ask me, as some people have: why did I agree to edit this expensive book for Bloomsbury?

    The backstory is this: Maria Brauzzi, an editor at Bloomsbury who I did not know, emailed me in late 2021 to invite me to edit a Handbook of Creative Research Methods for them. At the time I had started work on editing a creative data analysis book for Policy Press with Dawn Mannay and Ali Roy, and chapter proposals were landing in my inbox. We received over 60 proposals, most of which were good. We had originally intended to produce a normal-sized book with around 12 chapters, but with so many good proposals to choose from, Policy Press agreed to produce a Handbook of Creative Data Analysis with around 30 chapters. (I’m delighted to say that is now in production and will be published in early September.)

    Even so, selecting the chapters to include in the Policy Press Handbook was tough. Then I had a brainwave! I hadn’t replied to Maria at Bloomsbury because I couldn’t decide whether to accept her invitation. So, I emailed back and told her I had too many good proposals to fit into the Handbook I was doing with Policy Press, and asked whether I could pivot some of them into the Handbook she wanted to commission for Bloomsbury. She said ‘yes!’ so I ended up being sole editor of one Handbook and lead editor of another at the same time. 

    I do not recommend this course of action unless you have, as I had then (and I’m glad to say, have again now), a solid, competent, and reliable support worker or other assistant. I could not have edited this Handbook without my support worker’s help. But editing it meant I was able to offer publishing opportunities to people who deserved them, including some people from marginalised groups. I’m glad I could do that, even though it meant working for a publisher who screws royalties down to the bone, lower than any of my other publishers, while earning a massive profit by selling books at prices that most people can’t afford.

    So, to redress the balance a tiny little bit, I am offering a free copy of the Handbook to one of my blog followers. If you’re not a follower yet, you should be able to see a ‘Follow Blog Via Email’ notice with space to enter your email address. Any blog follower who wants a chance of a free copy needs to comment below and check back here a week after this blog has been posted to see who has won. My support worker will put all the names in a hat and pick one at random, then add a comment stating who will receive the free copy. I will post a book to that person, wherever they are in the world. 

    Congratulations to Lucia 🎉 our winner of the prize draw for a free copy of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Creative Research Methods!

    What you might have missed!

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    In case you missed it, here is the start of a new ‘back to basics’ series on Youtube!

    Let’s talk about ‘What is…?’!

    The first 5 videos in the series are here:

    In addition to all that, here is a new video introducing the Independent Research Ethics Committee: (Intersectional Ethics, Not Just Risk Management – irec.org.uk)

    The Bloomsbury Handbook of Creative Research Methods

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    I am delighted to announce the publication of this book which I have edited. I am sorry it is very expensive – I hope Bloomsbury will produce a paperback in due course, and in the meantime, you should be able to get hold of a copy if you have access to an academic library.

    The book has 22 chapters in nine sections with 2-4 chapters per section. The first section is an overview with chapters on creative research methods and ethics, creative research methods in the geo-political south, digital tools for creative data analysis, and human geography and creative methods. The other sections are on narrative inquiry, poetic analysis, visual methods, creating visual art, participatory textiles, embodied performative methods, participants as experts, and creative collaboration. I chose these divisions. The content of the book is so rich that there are many other ways I could have divided the chapters. For example, I could have had a section on digital methods, or one on multi-modal methods, or one on feminist research. I made the choices I did with two key aims: first, to make the book flow as well as possible from start to finish, and second, to highlight some of the key points that were coming through in the chapters. Of course this book is in no sense exhaustive, but it does provide some useful insight into the scope and range of creative methods in the 2020s.

    The authors come from Australia, Canada, Belgium, India, Ireland, Nepal, the UK and the US, and include doctoral students, independent researchers, practice-based researchers and senior professors. Each chapter is excellent, important, and potentially useful for researchers. They all tell previously untold stories. Perhaps because of my interest in research ethics, Caroline Aldridge’s chapter seems particularly important to me. It highlights some of the barriers that can still face researchers wanting to use creative methods. Caroline is a former social worker and a bereaved mother whose son died as a result of mental illness. She wanted to investigate how other similarly bereaved parents experienced professional and organisational responses and investigations following their child’s death. Caroline worked with potential participants, via a private Facebook group, to co-create a research design which used participatory textiles. These would include a mixed-media quilt co-created with participants, plus researcher-created mixed-media visual vignettes. Both are tried and tested techniques. Caroline did this work carefully, respectfully, and ethically, using all her trauma-sensitive professional social work and insider researcher skills. Then her proposed approach, with all its supporting evidence, was rejected by her university’s research ethics committee. They wanted her to use more conventional methods where the researcher retains more power and the participants are simply providers of data. This left Caroline with a choice of doing her work ethically while disobeying the ethics committee, or obeying the ethics committee and, paradoxically, doing less ethical research. She made a third and very difficult choice and, with considerable sadness, suspended her doctoral research. Many researchers have faced similar dilemmas but they are rarely reflected in the literature. I am grateful to Caroline for agreeing to write a rather different chapter than she had originally proposed, because I think these stories need to be heard.

    The overview chapters are important too. Su-ming Khoo, from the National University of Ireland, explores the relationships between creativity, art and science, with an unflinching look at the dark side of creativity, and demonstrates the place of creativity in ethical decision-making as well as research methods. Bibek Dahal and Suresh Gautam, from Nepal, show us where the differences and similarities lie in creative research methods in the geo-political North and South of the world. Christina Silver, Sarah L. Bulloch and Michelle Salmona, from the UK and Australia, outline the role of computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software packages in creative data analysis. Nadia von Benzon from the UK traces the development and use of creative research methods in geography, and considers some ways in which creative research methods transcend disciplinary boundaries. Taken together, these lenses – ethical, global, digital and disciplinary – tell us a lot about where the field of creative research methods is at present.

    Overall the book gives us a good insight into a global field in which people are reviewing and developing methods, identifying new ethical difficulties and finding ways to overcome them, making good use of technology, and working across disciplines. It also shows that creative research methods are local, manual, and applicable within single disciplines. And it clearly demonstrates that creative methods are not only useful for gathering data but can also be useful at every point from research design to dissemination.

    I would love to know which chapter (or chapters) of this book seems most important to you, and why. Perhaps you could tell me in a comment.

    Why Bother With Creative Research Methods?

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    Conventional research methods are good methods. Creative research methods, in themselves, are not better than conventional research methods. Sometimes all you need is to do some interviews and, if that’s the case, there’s not much point deciding to design an app and ask participants to use it to create multi-media data. But I have argued for many years that it is worth knowing about as many methods as you can, because that gives you a better chance of answering your research questions. Methods are tools, and the more tools we have in our toolboxes – within reason – the better equipped we are to do the work we need to do.

    Several client meetings recently have gone like this:

    Client: We need to use more research methods, not just surveys and interviews. Can you help?
    Me: Yes indeed I can. I think methods X, Y and Z might suit you.
    Client: But it will take us time to learn those methods and we don’t have any spare time.
    Me: 🤦‍♀️

    In these situations it is my job to find helpful arguments that will encourage my clients to find the time they need for the work they want to do. Here are four of the main arguments I use in this situation.

    1. You will get better quality data.

    Study after study after study, using creative methods, report that their authors are absolutely sure they have richer, more useful data than they would have been able to obtain using conventional methods. Of course there is a difficulty here that any researcher will recognise: no control group. Even so, the sheer number of times this appears in the literature, from sources independent of each other and with experience of using both conventional and creative methods, suggests that there is some truth in the assertion.

    2. Funders and commissioners often appreciate a more creative approach these days.

    A sensible and well thought through creative approach can help your work to stand out from the crowd. After all, there will be lots of other people who think they can’t find the time to learn about the creative methods that might help them to do their work more effectively. And this means that funders and commissioners will read lots of applications recommending surveys, interviews, and focus groups. If your application recommends collage, digital storytelling, and poetic analysis – OK there is no guarantee of success, but it should at least pique the readers’ interest and be more memorable than most.

    3. After the initial set-up stage, some creative methods can save you time.

    This applies particularly to creative methods that give participants a high level of control over creating data. These may be low tech, such as diaries, or high tech, such as apps. Getting participants to keep a diary is potentially a big win, with lots of data being generated with little or no researcher involvement. It’s a good idea to provide some structure, e.g. asking participants to answer three questions each week, or to record their reflections on a particular issue on one weekday and one weekend day – whatever works for your research project. And diaries may be written, or audio-recorded, or even drawn or stitched. Using apps in research can be expensive, especially if you need to commission a bespoke app, but can also have big potential advantages. For many participants, apps are user-friendly (though not for all, so you need to offer an analogue alternative too). And data generated using an app is immediately available to the researchers for analysis. So, for both of these methods and many others besides, there is a chunk of work to be done in setting up the method, but once that is done, they really can save you time in the long run.

    4. Creative methods can be more ethical.

    Please note I am definitely not saying creative methods are more ethical. But they can be, and where they are, this is an argument worth making. For example, some creative methods of gathering data can facilitate the involvement of participants in the initial phase of data analysis. Enhanced interviewing is one such method, where the interview can include questions about participants’ interpretations of the photos they have taken, or the artefact they have brought, or whatever is being used to enhance the interviews. Creative methods of presentation can be more engaging for audiences, and help them to understand more fully and remember better the messages you convey. There are plenty of other such examples of ways in which creative methods can support and augment researchers’ ethical work.

    So those are the four main arguments I use. If you know of others, please share them in the comments.

    #ICRMC 2024!

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    The International Creative Research Methods Conference was a tremendous success. So I’m going to do it again next year, on 9-10 September, at the same venue in central Manchester, England. Once again I need to sign a contract with the venue for a five-figure sum, which is scary – but not quite as scary as last year, because I feel more confident that people will come. If anything goes wrong, I am at risk of losing half of my life savings, so it is still a big gamble, but it feels like less of one than last year.

    Also the organisation is so much easier! Last year my support worker and I spent weeks researching venues. This year it took me approx 30 seconds to email the venue and request the same spaces for next year. And I am grateful to people who attended this year and offered their help as we prepare for next year’s conference; I am glad to be able to ask different people for help this year. I have already called on one of those people for feedback on the draft call for proposals. This is now finalised and available here. Deadline: 15 December. Go go go!

    International Creative Research Methods Conference 2023

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    It was such an amazing couple of days! People came from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the US, India, Nepal, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, and all over the UK – maybe other countries too but those are the ones I know about. And the people attending online were all over the world as well. This photo shows most of the 180 people at the venue for the first keynote, given by Pam Burnard from Cambridge University here in the UK. She talked about the importance of rebellion and disobedience, and demonstrated her points through poetry, sound, wool throwing, interaction, art, and dynamism. The keynote on day 2 was given by Caroline Lenette from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She talked about anti-colonial practice and gave us a preview of her tremendous new resource: The Anti-Colonial Research Library. Both keynote speeches are now online and available for you to view via the links in this paragraph.I was astonished and delighted that both keynote speakers attended the whole conference. The biggest complaint I had from in-person delegates was that there were too many interesting sessions and it was very hard to choose. By the morning of the second day, some people were telling me they had stopped trying to decide and were picking sessions at random because they knew all the sessions would be good. There was much more laughter, and many more hugs, than I have experienced at a conference before. And we had such a diverse group of people which made for rich conversations. As well as the international diversity, there were different genders, ethnicities, abilities – we had presentations from researchers with intellectual disabilities, neurodivergent researchers, researchers with physical disabilities, and others – and a wide range of disciplines. People came from the private sector, academia, the non-profit sector, and self-employment. And everyone was willing to be generous, collegial, and supportive of others. One colleague said to me that it was an unusual conference, in his experience, because there was nobody he was trying to avoid.We did our best to make it inclusive. It wasn’t perfect; the venue doesn’t have a hearing loop, and I will raise that in my feedback because it prevented at least one person from attending. But we had a quiet room, and communication badges, and the venue was entirely accessible for those with physical disabilities including one person who came on a mobility scooter. The feedback I have heard and seen so far has been glowing. Examples include:”It was a brilliant, wonderful conference, and the best online conference that I’ve ever attended.””Excellent few days in Manchester for #ICRMC where the vibe was most welcoming and the content engaging, important and imaginative. Everything you’d want a creative methods space to be. Thanks and congrats to all involved.”And lots more in the same vein. Dawn Wink, from Santa Fe, wrote a whole blog post about the creativity, research, and passion at the conference.I have been imagining and dreaming of this conference for years. I am so, so happy that at last I have been able to do it. We didn’t make a big surplus – I don’t have the final figures yet, but I think around £3-4,000 – and that will help to fund a keynote speaker from the majority world for next year. Yes, we will be doing it again; I have already booked the venue! Save the dates: 9-10 September 2024, Manchester, England. Hope to see you there!

    Why We Need To Learn About Colonialism

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    When I learned history at school, it was all about European royalty and battles from the distant past. This was in the 1970s when Britain was an even more overtly racist country than it is now. Yet I learned nothing about the British empire, or about other empires either. At least not from my lessons; what I learned about the British empire, I learned from the fiction I read.

    My father took care to provide diverse reading for me, including books by African and Caribbean authors, and Enid Blyton’s books were banned from our house because of their overt racism and sexism. But a number of other authors whose work had racist elements slipped through, such as Hugh Lofting, Willard Price, and Laura Ingalls Wilder. From these books, and from the wider culture around me, I learned that the British empire had been a great endeavour in which brave pioneers had travelled, and sometimes settled, in lands where no white man had ever been. This was a heroic narrative involving encounters with ‘the other’, i.e. black and brown people, who were generally either hostile or servile. They were sometimes treated by the white characters with respect and kindness, but they could never, ever, be equal. The white people in the stories ended up richer in some way or another, and the black and brown characters were incidental to that story. The fundamental message was one of white superiority, whether on an individual, local, national or global scale.

    I have written before on this blog about my own racism. In recent years I have been taking steps to educate myself about colonialism and its impacts. This mostly involved reading a bunch of books. As always with my book-related posts, I am not presenting this as any kind of exhaustive or authoritative list, but simply the books I have chosen to read.

    The first book I read was Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor. This is a dignified, scholarly, polite assessment of Britain’s looting and ravaging of India over 200 years from the mid-1700s to the mid-1900s. Tharoor builds his argument carefully, piece by piece, giving credit where it is – occasionally – due. He acknowledges that the English language was and is a valuable legacy for India (p 202). But he concludes, unequivocally, that ‘The India that succumbed to British rule enjoyed an enormous financial surplus, deployed a skilled artisan class, exported high-quality goods in great global demand, disposed of plenty of arable land, had a thriving agricultural base, and supported some 100 to 150 million without either poverty or landlessness. All of this was destroyed by British rule.’ (pp 219-20)

    Then I read Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain by Padraic Scanlan. This is written more like my school history books, with lots of names and dates. It focuses on slavery, primarily British slavery albeit in a global context, defining England as ‘among the world’s largest slaveholding powers and one of its most prolific slave traders’ (p 28). Scanlan covers the rise and the fall of the slave trade, and carefully documents how the official end of slavery did not in fact end ‘Britain’s entanglement with slavery’ as ‘British industry and finance remained deeply connected to enslaved labour’ (p 373).

    Next came Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera. Sanghera’s chatty journalistic writing style initially made his book seem like an easier read, but – unsurprisingly, given the subject matter – it was as demanding as the others. Sanghera, though, has a unique view in both directions. As a British Sikh, he has been on the sharp end of colonialism, but also had to face up to Sikh collusion in some aspects of colonisation, such as Sikhs’ participation in violently quashing the Indian rebellion against British rule in 1857. Sanghera describes facing up to this as ‘onerous’ (p 153) and acknowledges the possibility that the history of colonialism ‘is just too painful to digest’ (p 208).

    I am grateful to Sanghera because I, too, find the process of facing up to this history to be onerous and painful. I realise that this may be seen as a form of ‘white tears’ – what right do I have to feel sad about a change to my national narrative when millions of lives were stolen? Yet I think if we do not acknowledge the potential and actual emotional impacts of this facing up process, we are effectively expecting people to learn about dreadful atrocities without any emotional consequences, and that is unrealistic.

    Learning about this stuff is tough. It is also vital.

    The next book I read was The New Age of Empire: How Racism and Colonialism Still Rule the World by Kehinde Andrews. Andrews demonstrates that the systems developed as colonialism was formed are still in action today. He also argues that we need to know about this because ‘The world can only ever be as equal as the knowledge it is built upon’ (p 2). Andrews asserts that ‘the premise of this book is deeply optimistic’ (p 205), but I have to say it didn’t seem so to me and I’m not sure how it could. The author does, though, express a hope that I share, which is that ‘understanding the scale of the problem and the limits of the solutions offered can spark a genuine conversation about how to overhaul this wicked system.’ (p 207)

    Now I am reading Epistemic Freedom in Africa: Deprovincialization and Decolonization by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni. The author draws primarily on theoretical and research work from African, Asian, and south American scholars. He shows us, among other things, that not only lands and bodies but also people’s minds are colonized by the global dominance of Eurocentric thought and ideas. ‘Epistemic freedom is fundamentally about the right to think, theorize, interpret the world, develop own methodologies and write from where one is located and unencumbered by Eurocentrism.’ (p 3).

    Although these books are justifiably angry, they are not polemics. Each engages with other structural inequalities such as sexism/patriarchy and class as well as racism, embraces nuance, and looks forward as well as back. Of course there is much, much more to each book than I have been able to explain here. I would recommend them all to anyone wanting to learn more about colonialism.

    Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s book seems to me to be truly optimistic, perhaps because it offers a key to action I can take. It is easy to feel powerless in the face of colonialism, not least because that is partly what colonialism is designed to achieve. And for sure what I can do is only a minute fraction of what is needed. It is a truism that I can only do what I can do, but that truism is used too often to absolve people from the need to act. I think it is equally true that I should do what I can do. And what I can do – what I realise, now, I have been doing for years – is to encourage people towards epistemic freedom.

    This blog and the videos on my YouTube channel are funded by my beloved Patrons. Patrons receive exclusive content and various rewards, depending on their level of support, such as access to my special private Patreon-only blog posts, bi-monthly Q&A sessions on Zoom, free e-book downloads and signed copies of my books. Patrons can also suggest topics for my blogs and videos. If you want to support me by becoming a Patron click here. Whilst ongoing support would be fantastic you can make a one-time donation instead, through the PayPal button on this blog, if that works better for you. If you are not able to support me financially, please consider reviewing any of my books you have read – even a single-line review on Amazon or Goodreads is a huge help – or sharing a link to my work on social media. Thank you!