Doing Interdisciplinary Decolonial Research in a Digital Age The first lecture in the Breaking Disciplinary Barriers: Towards Interdisciplinary Horizons series
Event details
Academia today is witnessing several shifts and turns. A significant shift surrounds Interdisciplinarity in questioning the potential synergies between different fields to promote social justice and increased focuses on community-centred research practices. The discipline of Global Development Studies has become a promising hub for the overlap of different fields, such as STEM disciplines, Environment studies, Humanities, and Arts. Despite the increased awareness of Interdisciplinary practices in Global Development and other fields, there is a need for more knowledge regarding limitations and potentials concerning processes, procedures, and methods. An understanding of contemporary success stories in Interdisciplinary research practices is crucial toward achieving a fairer global society. A collaborative research environment promoting knowledge exchange will also foster the amplification of insights from such experiences.
In light of such a necessity, the newly established PhD student collective at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Global Development (IGDC), University of York is organising a semesterly seminar series. The inaugural seminar series is titled ‘Breaking Disciplinary Barriers: Towards Interdisciplinary Horizons’ and organised over three seminars. Speakers would discuss their research approaches towards interdisciplinarity concerning the experiences and challenges they have faced arising out of methodology, ontology, and epistemology in working beyond discipline silos. Speakers will also elicit their views into what they see as the potential interdisciplinarity agenda for new and current PGRs concerning incorporating interdisciplinarity norms in their study.
The first seminar focuses on interdisciplinary experience concerning decolonial approaches, ethnographies of indigenous populations, and information systems.
Dr. Hameed Chughtai (Lancaster University Management School) will be delivering this lecture. The aim is to do thought-provoking exploration of decoloniality in qualitative research methodologies. Dr. Chughtai will examine the methodological problem concerning a dominance of Westerns ideologies in critical and interpretive research and how it contributes to maintaining the epistemic hegemony of the West over the rest of the world. Dr. Chughtai will argue for developing a set of counter methodological perspectives grounded in decoloniality. A decolonial approach will increase and enhance qualitative researchers' participation from diverse non-Western backgrounds. It also encourages scholars to build on theories and knowledge from the Global South, East, and other non-Eurocentric perspectives. This approach allows the researchers interested in the diverse global contexts to engage with local knowledge, histories, and narratives to develop understanding and meanings from a local horizon and benefit the local communities.
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Hameed Chughtai is a Senior Lecturer at Lancaster University Management School, UK. He currently serves as an Associate Editor of the Information Systems Journal, guest Senior Editor for a special issue on 'Decoloniality in Information Systems' in the Information Systems Journal, and as incoming Chair of the Working Group 9.5 of the Technical Committee 9 (TC9) of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP). His research has appeared or forthcoming in journals, including the European Journal of Information Systems, MIS Quarterly Executive, Information Systems Journal, Communications of the Association for Information Systems, and the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography.