SGO9210 – Emancipating knowledges and socionatures: anticolonialism and decolonisation debates
Schedule, syllabus and examination date
Course content
Calls for de- and anti-colonial practices and scholarship are growing from around the world. Scholarship emerging from Africa, South Asia and South America several decades ago laid important foundations for rethinking the conceptual and methodological basis for anticolonial thinking. Similarly, Indigenous and Latin American activist groups and scholars are now at the forefront of articulating what taking an anticolonial approach to scholarship and socionatural change might look like. In other parts of the world, calls for decolonisation are strong, but with somewhat different emphases and vocabularies. In this course, we read across conversations from different parts of the world on ontological pluralism, epistemological hegemonies, more-than-geographies and the emergent climate crisis. We emphasise situating conversations in their historical and geopolitical context and asking how these conversations demand that knowledges produced in Global North universities need to take seriously these critiques. These conversations lay a foundation for new imaginaries for an emancipated world.
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Course leaders:
Andrea J. Nightingale| University of Oslo, Professor of Geography, Department of Sociology and Human Geography
Andrea J. Nightingale is Professor of Human Geography, University of Oslo. Her current research passions seek to account for power and politics within dynamic and unpredictable environmental change. Her interests cross between energy transitions, climate change adaptation and transformation debates; collective action and state formation; the nature-society nexus; political violence in natural resource governance; and feminist work on emotion and subjectivity in relation to development, transformation, collective action and cooperation. She has worked in Nepal for over thirty years on natural resource governance and maintains a vibrant research collaboration there. Her work has expanded in the last ten years to collaborate on projects in Kenya, Nicaragua, Ethiopia and Peru. While living in Scotland, she did research on in-shore fisheries management. Her recent book is Environment and Sustainability in a Globalizing World, Routledge, 2019. She runs the ERC Advanced Grant funded UNRULY?project that looks at how power materialises through uncertainty to create unruly outcomes in energy infrastructures and other resource governance projects.
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Rahul Ranjan| University of Edinburgh, Lecturer in Environmental and Climate Justice, Department of Human Geography
Dr Ranjan is the Co-Director of the Centre for South Asian Studies and a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Environmental and Climate Justice at the University of Edinburgh. His research examines the urgent political struggles at the intersections of Indigenous lifeworlds, social movements, and extractive capitalism, with a core focus on how communities contest dispossession and mobilise alternative ecological futures. He is currently writing a new monograph tentatively entitled: "Fractures of the Himalayan Anthropocene" for the Cambridge University Press. It is based on over five years of ethnographic fieldwork in the Indian Himalayas, analysing the entwined terrains of environmental justice, Indigenous sovereignty, and the turbulent infrastructures of hydro-modernity—where dams, rivers, and mountains become sites of both violent transformation and anticolonial possibility.
His first book, The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in Contemporary India (Cambridge University Press, 2023), investigates the contested legacies of anti-colonial resistance and the political life of memory in contemporary Indigenous movements. He has also edited Governing the Crisis: Narratives of COVID-19 in India (Routledge, 2025) and At the Crossroads of Rights(Routledge, 2022), which collectively foreground shifting regimes of governance and lived struggles for rights and justice. Before joining Edinburgh, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oslo Metropolitan University, contributing to the Norwegian Research Council-funded project Riverine Rights, which explores the implications of recognising rivers as legal persons.Additional Lecturers:
Other lecturers with expertise in different parts of the world will be invited to give sessions. TBA
Learning outcome
The course will provide students with a broad overview of emerging global debates around de- and anti-colonialism and what it means to decolonise our research. Students apply critical theoretical approaches to think together about how to write and design research methodologies in anti-colonial ways. Particular emphasis is placed on research design and methodology as well as writing. The lectures will combine the creative use of texts and visual materials (documentary) to understand the situated forms of knowledges upon which scholarship rests. It enables participants to engage with conceptual lenses useful to case studies in non-western worlds. They will acquire skills to engage with their peers through closed group reading and receive feedback by mentors/peers.??
Admission to the course
The course is open to all PhD students who are doing research on questions that broadly pertain to the course themes. Although most suited to students working in the traditions of geography, anthropology, sociology, environmental humanities, political science, cultural theory and related disciplines, applicants from all disciplinary backgrounds will be considered. Likewise, applications are welcomed from across the globe, and from PhD researchers looking at anti-colonialism in any form. Applicants can apply at any stage of the PhD process, but may find it most rewarding if they have already conducted some of their own empirical research. Note that due to the popularity of this course, applicants must be enrolled in a PhD degree program.
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PhD students at the Department of Sociology and Human Geography register for the course in?StudentWeb.
Interested participants outside the Department of Sociology and Human Geography shall fill out this application form.
The deadline for registration is?10th June 2026.?After the deadline shall all applicants receive a note about if?the application is approved.
It is an in-person course and digital participation is not possible. We have no funds available for supporting PhDs travelling and staying in Norway, unfortunately.
Teaching
The course is run over 4 days August 31-Sep 3, 2026. It is expected that students will have read for the course BEFORE the in-person sessions begin. It is also required to turn in a paper draft before the course begins. All teaching is done in person, in Oslo.
Examination
The course earns 5 ECTS. Students are expected to read course material and write a 4000-word essay BEFORE the course begins. Students will receive feedback on the essay during the course. A final version of the essay is due October 30th 2026.
To pass students must: turn in a?draft essay by August 20th, 2026, participate in all lectures and group discussions, provide feedback on essays written by peers, turn in a?final draft of the essay October 30th 2026.
Essays to be sent to katalin.varga@sosgeo.uio.no.
Essay topic:?Drawing from your own PhD research, discuss how anti-colonial debates are relevant for your work. You can present an on-going article or chapter draft that engages decolonial thinking, discuss methodological challenges to implementing anti-colonial research, or reflect on how your work changes when taking an anti/de-colonial perspective.
Examination support material
All exam support materials are allowed during this exam. Generating all or part of the exam answer using AI tools such as Chat GPT or similar is not allowed.
Grading scale
Grades are awarded on a pass/fail scale. Read more about?the grading system.
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