Decolonial feminisms and epistemic injustice – thinking about, with, and beyond new materialisms and posthumanism

This paper builds on work in progress by the Decolonial Feminisms group within the COST Action CA19129 Decolonising Development Theory, Teaching and Practice. It aims to explicitly document ongoing conversations, identify the main issues for development theorizing, teaching, and practice, and to find ways to approach the issues through collective feminist theorizing and praxis. Here, we focus on themes relevant to epistemic injustice via an ongoing engagement with, and critique of, new materialist and posthumanist frames. Our conversations reconnect decolonial feminism with classic ecofeminist theory and theorizing, to push beyond the limitations of new materialist and posthumanist theorizing (Coole and Frost 2010; Braidotti 2022). Decolonial feminism aligns and combines different routes and strategies to subvert dominant epistemologies, while remaining vigilant about depoliticization and over-universalization. Feminist epistemologies foreground feminist standpoints (Harding 1987) that reflect partial, situated knowledges (Haraway 1988), embracing an embodied sense of the political, while seeking collective, emancipatory goals. Decolonial feminisms interrupt and challenge over-universalization by questioning theory’s own entangled roots in colonial forms of division, dehumanization, oppression, exploitation, erasure and dispossession. Feminism paved the way for posthumanisms and new materialisms to emerge (Braidotti 2022; Coole and Frost 2010), by providing ‘the conceptual bedrock from which our knowledge-making practices originate, and the dysfunctions found therein’. Feminist critiques of epistemic injustice bring the ‘turn to matter’, situatedness and embodiment to the fore, highlighting fundamental connections between thought and matter, and rejecting divisive, binary and hierarchical structures of thought (Chihaia 2023). Decolonial feminism foregrounds the constitutive divisions of race as both epistemologically and materially part and parcel of coloniality (eg. Oyěwùmí 1997), while refusing to ignore them (note: Su-ming Khoo disengaged from the Cost Action in October 2023 and contributes to this paper as an individual scholar, unaffiliated to a EU COST Action membership)