Decolonizing research methods: A call for anti-racist research practices.

By Alessandra Cuzzolino

Modern Western academia, including the humanities and social sciences, is based on the reproduction of colonial systems of knowledge. What counts as knowledge, who is authorised to produce it, and which voices are legitimised within the academic discourse, have historically been shaped by Eurocentric views over ontology – the philosophical study of being – and epistemology – the philosophical study of knowledge. These European perspectives aim to place Western thought at the apex of rationality, objectivity, and universality. From the creation of educational institutions designed to train the administrators, missionaries, and civilising agents of the empire from the seventeenth centuries, to the emergence of ethnography as a discipline grounded in the observation and classification of the colonised other, academic knowledge production has long been entangled with projects of oppression and repression. 

Aiming for research practices that can be accountable to the communities they engage, with this blog post I want to reflect on the possibilities of integrating just research practices in the fieldwork, even at the cost of sacrificing the so-long unchallenged neutrality of academia. In my time in academia until now, ethnographic methods are those that I have dealt the most with, hence I will keep my focus on those to avoid generalisations. Ethnography is a branch of anthropology which refers to the study and recording of human cultures. Its methods vary from participant observation to different kinds of interviews and conversations with what is referred to as the subject of the study. 

Fundamental to the humanities and social sciences, these ethnographic methods are embedded in asymmetrical power structures, assuming the Western researcher as a neutral observer of the non-Western communities as objects of the study. In all honesty, these same assumptions can be said about the way in which western professionals, humanitarians, or corporations interact with non-Western bodies as well.

The interpretation of the world given by such asymmetrical interactions justified colonial intervention by classifying societies in the Global Majority world as primitive and as in need of saving. However, after the formal end of (most) colonial rule, these methodological legacies continue to reverberate: researchers trained in Western institutions still reproduce extractive research practices, knowledge hierarchies, and outsider interpretations that silence or flatten local epistemologies. To put it simply, while many countries might have been formally liberated, coloniality lives on.

In recent decades, scholars from postcolonial, decolonial, and Indigenous traditions have challenged these foundations, arguing that academia must disrupt the colonial structures it is based on, reimagining research in a way that confronts its epistemic violence. In this sense, decolonising research methods does not simply mean including more diverse participants or conducting fieldwork ethically, but it requires questioning who defines research questions, whose knowledge counts as theory, and which ways of knowing are made visible or invisible. It involves recognising that categories such as objectivity and validity are not neutral but embedded in Western ontological assumptions.

If we persist in the assumption that research—AKA the creation of knowledge—is not neutral, we must then consider which power dynamics we are recreating while conducting our research. This inevitably puts in question the neutrality of the researcher, who is supposed to never intervene for the sake of the neutrality of research. But what if said researcher is perpetrating those uneven power relations? On whose shoulders are we constructing new knowledge? And what does neutral mean, then? Am I being neutral if I do not speak up when presented with oppression? Am I not taking sides by remaining silent?

A decolonized research approach demands reflexivity not only about the researcher’s positionality but also about the institutional and historical forces that shape the research process: this includes acknowledging how language, disciplinary boundaries, and methodological norms can marginalise local understandings and reduce lived experience to data.

Source of image: Unsplash

Alternative text: two white hands holding cardboard protest signs. The one on the left reads “No justice No peace. Worldwide solidarity!”. The one on the right reads “White silence = Violence”

Anti-racist research practices 

One of the modes in which researchers can break this extractivist pattern is by adopting anti-racist research practices in their studies with racialised communities. These practices aim to detach themselves to this presupposed neutrality of knowledge production, and recognize that remaining silent while witnessing oppression is not a neutral stance. 

The assumption of adopting these practices is that they cannot only result in on-paper prioritization of the voices of the marginalized groups that the research is based on: addressing the positionality of the author while doing nothing concrete to overturn extractivist practices is hence not enough. In this way, by reframing components of the research process, anti-racist research practices promote more equitable knowledge production by centering the individual's experience with racism and its impact in their lived experiences.

The first time that I came in contact with anti-racist research practices was about a year ago, while I was conducting fieldwork for my Master's thesis. My research topic was easily prone to fall into racist frameworks, both because of my positionality as a white European researcher, and for my interaction with humanitarian organisations who aimed to combat what is referred to as modern day slavery. This term has been brought to popularity during the 20th century during the boom of the humanitarian sector, and refers to situations of exploitation in which a person cannot refuse or leave because of coercion, violence, or abuse, and it is in many cases conflated with the concepts of human trafficking or the sex trade, no matter if the latter is voluntary. The use of the term is however criticized by many who point out the loss of nuance in the term slavery, and the coerced loss of agency that the people referred to as modern slaves undertake. Those humanitarian organisations who focus on this subject have a tendency to put on a white saviour cape, victimizing people of color while removing their agency at the same time. 

When I interacted with them, and noticed the paternalising and racist language that was being used to describe the Black women these organisations were declaring to be helping, I started to question my choice of methodology and access to the field. First of all, I had been taught throughout my Bachelor's and Master´s degrees that a researcher must remain neutral. To these epistemological considerations, there was also the worry of losing access to my research field, which would have made me unable to complete my Master´s thesis. 

However, after many considerations (and many conversations with my thesis supervisor), I decided that not reproducing those systems of oppression for me took priority over the successful outcome of my research project: after all, negative results are as important in academic research as positive ones. Hence, for me adopting anti-racist research practices in my fieldwork took on the appearance of encouraging conversations with the interlocutors presenting racist behaviors: I did not shy away from questioning such behaviors and I refused to show neutrality in these oppressive systems.

Decolonising research is therefore both a methodological and political project. It is a commitment to dismantle the extractive logics of academic knowledge production and to cultivate research practices grounded in reciprocity, accountability, and respect. It requires researchers to recognise the limits of their own epistemic frameworks, to listen differently, and to allow for the possibility that the people we work with do not simply inform research, but directly shape its direction, meaning, and theoretical possibilities.