Njoki Nathani Wane – författare

This book analyses African foundations of gender, education, politics, democracy and institutional development by stimulating theoretical discourses. It offers a discursive framework on ways to examine the conceptualizations of African social development and a critical discourse on debunking the misconceptions that are attached to African location in the global arena. The volume challenges the danger of minimizing and oversimplifying the role of Africa in the international space. This will be ideal for researchers, students and scholars in the areas of African and gender studies, development, politics and education.

This multidisciplinary collection probes ways in which emerging and established scholars perceive and theorize decolonization and resistance in their own fields of work, from education to political and social studies, to psychology, medicine, and beyond. In this time of renewed global spiritual awakening, indigenous communities are revisiting ways of knowing and evoking theories of resistance informed by communal theories of solidarity. Using an intersectional lens, chapter authors present or imagine modes of solidarity, resistance, and political action that subvert colonial and neocolonial formations. Placing emphasis on the importance of theorizing the spirit, a discourse that is deeply embedded in our unique cultures and ancestries, this book is able to capture and better understand these moments and processes of spiritual emergence/re-emergence. 

This volume explores the importance of inter-generational oral culture and stories that transcend time, space, and boundaries transmitted historically from one generation to the next through proverbs, idioms, and folklore tales in different geographical and spatial contexts. These important stories and their embedded life lessons are introduced, explained, and supplemented with pre and post educational activities and lesson plans to be used as learning resources. The centering of orality as a tool and medium for educating the future generation is a reclamation and reaffirmation of Indigeneity, Indigenous knowledges. and non-hegemonic approaches to support students in a socio-culturally sustaining manner. Through this understanding, this book explores the interconnectedness between culture, traditions, language, and way of life through oral storytelling, sharing, and listening.   

In the last two decades, we have witnessed the quest for decolonization; through research, writing, teaching, and curriculum across the globe. Calls to decolonize higher education have been overwhelming in recent year. However, the goal of decolonizing has evolved past not only the need to dismantle colonial empires but all imperial structures. Today, decolonization is deemed a basis for restorative justice under the lens of the psychological, economic, and cultural spectrum. In this book, the editor and her authors confront various dimensions of decolonizing work, structural, epistemic, personal, and relational, which are entangled and equally necessary. This book illuminates other sites and dimensions of decolonizing not only from Africa but also other areas. This convergence of critical scholarship, theoretical inquiry, and empirical research is committed to questioning and redressing inequality in contemporary history and other African studies. It signals one of many steps in a bid to consultatively examine how knowledge and power have been both defined and subsequently denied through the sphere of academic practice.