![]() ![]() ![]() The planned session therefore asks about the suitability of discourse-related as well as sociology of knowledge-related perspectives for the tasks of a contemporary and future decolonized social research that focuses on knowledge in social relations and the politics of knowledge – in Foucault’s words: the power/knowledge regimes – in the North/South relationship. Taking Hall’s and Smith’s arguments together, discourse research integrating “discourse”, “knowledge” and “power/knowledge” seems to provide research with a concept that allows for such inquiries. She argued that we should focus on questions “about the roles that knowledge, knowledge production, knowledge hierarchies and knowledge institutions play in social transformation” (Smith 2012: XII), and that we should look for methodologies suited to that purpose. ![]() A few years later, in her influential work on “Decolonizing methods”, Linda Tuhiwai Smith pointed out that in the context of a necessary “decolonization of methods”, the question of knowledge becomes of central importance. In the mid-1990s, Stuart Hall proposed to analyze discourses as knowledge processes: “Discourses are ways of referring to or constructing knowledge about a particular topic of practice: a cluster (or formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct associated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society” (Hall 1997a: 4). ![]()
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