Against mastery: Epistemic decolonizing in the margins of the Business School

Abstract

In this provocation, I argue that epistemic decolonizing is an opposition to the Master promulgator of knowledge, the Western/Eurocentric epistemic subject position. This epistemic refusal of mastery can only happen in the margins of the Business School, and as such, it is always an unfinished project whose incompleteness should be celebrated. To develop my argument, I proceed in three steps. First, I conceptualize the Business School as a postcolony, that is, a realm of extended epistemic domination rooted in the institution’s colonial historical role. Second, I suggest an alternative understanding of the margins not only rooted in spatiality, location, or identity but as a specific minoritarian epistemic position against mastery within the postcolony. These margins are not stable and immutable but relational, constantly being made, re-made, transformed, and negotiated. They are the location for an affirmative, generative and imaginative ongoing sabotage of epistemic domination. Finally, I offer that epistemic decolonizing as a minoritarian engagement, is unavoidably incomplete, unfinished, and unfinishable as knowledge always already exists and is always already weaved from a multiplicity of entangled historical, cultural, political, and disciplinary threads.