Indigenous Knowledge System and Decolonial Turn: Global South in Focus

deadline for submissions: 
July 15, 2025
full name / name of organization: 
Bodoland University
contact email: 

International Seminar

Indigenous Knowledge System and Decolonial Turn: Global South in Focus

16 & 17 October 2025

Venue: Bodoland University, Kokrajhar

A Special Issue will be published in Bandung: Journal of the Global South (De Gruyter Brill)

 

Organiser: The Department of English, and Department of History, Bodoland University in Collaboration with Birangana Sati Sadhani Rajyik Vishwavidyalaya, Bhattadev University is organising an international seminar on the theme “Indigenous Knowledge System and Decolonial Turn: Global South in Focus.” Our aim is to create an academic repository of such knowledge systems through serious academic deliberation; and on a prescriptive note, it can be a helpful tool for disseminating information on sustainable lifeways at a time when the world is grappling with climate change challenges. We believe indigenous cosmologies are more earth-centric and may be the key to some of the crisis created by western individualism, modernity, and consumerist behaviour.

 

Concept note:

The perpetuation of global capitalism, euphemistically termed globalization, in contemporary times is indicative of global coloniality. The end of colonization does not necessarily guarantee the end of coloniality. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres explains, coloniality “refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations” (243). Although the newly formed nations decolonized their countries of white settlers, they “failed in offering wellbeing to the majority” (Mignolo 14), as governance fell into the hands of local elites and the colonial matrix of power continued to persist in mutated forms. From educational models to economic planning, and from ideas of development and wellbeing to notions of what is modern and scientific - all came to be determined by rubrics of Western-centric universals.

Therefore, colonial prejudices continue to form a significant part of our subjective selves even today. The open-endedness of capitalism, class and caste relations, gender binaries, and racialized anthropology have become universal frameworks for determining social relations. In order to dismantle this colonial matrix of power that perpetuates inequality, domination, subordination, and unequal land rights, it is essential to take a decolonial turn and look into indigenous knowledge systems for local solutions. In challenging the coloniality of Being and a Western-centric world, the damné (see Frantz Fanon), therefore, must reclaim the indispensability of their existence as equal producers of knowledge, countering centuries of what Robin Dunford terms “colonial epistemicide.” All forms of decolonial cosmopolitanism, then, should begin not only by interrogating the existing colonial matrix of power and Being, but also by obliterating global coloniality and global capitalism. This would enable indigenous and native communities to create a pluriverse in which diverse indigenous cosmologies can coexist without privileging one over another.

This seminar aims to open up a space for decolonial thinking and indigenous knowledge systems that will contribute to the growth and sustenance of a pluriversality.

We invite contributions on the following themes (but not limited to):

  1. Indigenous knowledge system and climate change
  2.  Indigenous knowledge system and decoloniality
  3. Indigenous knowledge system and Modernity
  4. Indigenous knowledge system and Education
  5. Indigenous knowledge system and customary law
  6. Indigenous knowledge system and the idea of Dharma and religion
  7. Indigenous knowledge system and culture
  8. Indigenous knowledge system and food
  9. Indigenous knowledge system and dress
  10. Indigenous knowledge system and family values
  11. Indigenous knowledge system and ethics
  12. Indigenous knowledge system and land rights
  13. Indigenous knowledge system and Sustainable Development Goals
  14. Indigenous knowledge system and border thinking
  15. Indigenous knowledge system and pluriversality
  16. Indigenous knowledge system and film
  17. Indigenous knowledge system and performative art
  18. Indigenous knowledge system and gender relations
  19. Indigenous knowledge system and cosmology
  20. Indigenous knowledge system and governance
  21. Indigenous knowledge system and happiness and well-being
  22. Indigenous knowledge system and recovery
  23. Indigenous knowledge system, literature, folktales, and epics.

 

Submission guidelines: Structured Abstract (500 words) along with author bio-note should be emailed to buengseminar@gmail.com

Registration Fee:

Research Scholars: Rs 1200 only

Faculty members and others: Rs 3000

Foreign Participants: $50

Note: Registration link and details will be communicated to participants later.

Format: MS word document, Times New Roman, 12 points, 1.5 spacing, 1.27 cm margin

Last date for abstract submission: 15 July 2025

Decision on acceptance of abstract shall be communicated by 12th June 2025

Registration: 21st July – 25th July 2025

 

Convener: Dr Pratusha Bhowmik, Assistant Professor, Bodoland University

Co-conveners: Dr Debajyoti Biswas. Associate Professor, Bodoland University, Kokrajhar

 Dr. Manash Pratim Borah, Birangana Sati Sadhani Rajyik Vishwavidyalaya

 Dr. Debabhuson Borah, Birangana Sati Sadhani Rajyik Vishwavidyalaya

Coordinators:

Dr Chandrima Sen, Department of English, Bodoland University

Dr. Nushar Bargayary, Department of History, Bodoland University

Dr. Kuruvella Babu Shankar Rao, Department of English, Birangana Sati Sadhani Rajyik Vishwavidyalaya

 

Members of Organising committee:

All Faculty Members of the Department of English, and History, Bodoland University.

 

 

Outcome: After peer-review of the shortlisted articles, a special issue will be published by Bandung: Journal of the Global South (Scopus Q1), and an edited book will be published by De Gruyter Brill. The special issue will be edited by Debajyoti Biswas (lead guest-editor) and Pak Nung Wong (Editor-in-Chief). For more information visit journal website.