C2 Reading Test – Decolonizing Knowledge Production in Academia

Read the passage (~400–430 words) and choose the best answer (A–D).

Calls to “decolonize” knowledge production rarely mean discarding science or rejecting rigor; they question who sets the terms of rigor and which epistemologies are treated as credible in the first place. Canon formation in many disciplines still reflects imperial histories: archives gathered under unequal conditions, citation networks centered on metropolitan universities, and methods calibrated to problems defined far from the communities they affect. When scholars highlight this scaffolding, critics sometimes accuse them of politicizing research. But the point is analytical: knowledge has supply chains, and supply chains have power.

Proposals differ in intensity. At the pragmatic end are redistributive fixes: fund field sites led by local investigators; require data-sharing agreements that return copies to origin communities; diversify editorial boards and grant panels; and publish multilingual abstracts so findings circulate beyond English-dominant spaces. A stronger program is epistemic pluralism: treat other ways of knowing—oral histories, land-based observation, communal inference—not as “colorful context” but as methods with distinct validity conditions. Pluralism is not romantic relativism; it asks what counts as evidence for whom and for which question.

The sticking point is standards. If pluralism is embraced carelessly, peer review can fracture into parallel universes of criteria. Yet maintaining a single, metropolitan benchmark replays the very exclusions decolonization targets. Some departments experiment with tiered justification: studies must justify methods relative to the community and phenomenon under study, while also making translational claims—arguments legible across knowledge systems. In this framing, rigor is not watered down but made explicitly situated.

Institutions often reach for quick optics—renaming courses, adding elective modules—without shifting budgets or governance. Token inclusion risks turning decolonization into a branding exercise: a new label over an old pipeline. Meaningful change looks slower and duller on paper: co-authorship rules that prevent extractive publishing, IRB templates that ask how benefit flows back, hiring that values community-engaged scholarship even when it yields fewer high-impact, single-author papers. None of this guarantees better answers; it does, however, broaden who gets to frame the questions.

Decolonization, then, is less a purge than a rebalancing of authority. It measures success not merely by topical diversity but by altered flows of attention, money, and authorship. The risk is performative reform; the opportunity is methodological imagination—disciplinary habits reworked so that knowledge is more accountable to the worlds it claims to describe.