Decolonisation is not a vibe: On anti-capitalist praxis, citation politics and epistemic refusal

Abstract

This paper argues that decolonisation in media and communication studies must be rooted in anti-capitalist praxis, not just symbolic critique. While the field increasingly gestures toward decoloniality through the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion, such moves often sidestep the material infrastructures, labour conditions, funding regimes and citation politics that structure how academic knowledge is produced. Drawing on critical scholarship from both the Global South and North, this paper reframes decolonisation as a struggle over intellectual economies, institutional geographies and epistemic authority. It proposes situated citation and co-theorisation as methodological refusals of canon and hierarchy, emphasising dialogic, power-aware engagements that foreground asymmetries rather than mask them through representational balance. The paper stages theoretical ‘pairings’ such as Ricaurte and Couldry, Birhane and Noble, Habermas and Mbembe to surface geopolitical tensions and illuminate plural epistemologies. In doing so, it models a citational praxis that treats theory as relational, contested and grounded in struggle. Refusal emerges here not as negation, but as a generative mode of insurgent scholarship: resisting extractive logics, rejecting capitalist metrics of ‘impact’ and centring labour, sovereignty and solidarity. Against the depoliticised uses of decolonisation as a theme or aesthetic, this paper insists on its radical potential as method, struggle and material intervention. It calls for a structural reorientation of the academy, one that redistributes power rather than simply diversifying its surface, and affirms that to decolonise is not to critique from within, it is to rupture and rebuild.