“Inviting Methodological Reworlding”: Toward a Pluriversal Future

Abstract

This conceptual paper, co-authored by two academics of color, confronts the enduring coloniality embedded in academic research methodologies. Written both as critique and as method, it refuses the constraints of Western epistemological traditions that privilege objectivity, linearity, and disembodied knowledge. Instead, it enacts a methodological rupture—centering lived experience, relationality, and epistemic sovereignty. The paper identifies multiple features of dominant methodology that operate as mechanisms of exclusion: the insistence on objectivity, the privileging of linear structure, the erasure of the researcher’s body, and the universalization of Western epistemes. Through personal reflection, theoretical interrogation, and deliberate formal disruption, it invites readers into a pluriversal methodological future where multiple knowledge systems coexist without hierarchy. Practical possibilities include hybrid methodologies, co-theorizing with communities, relational ethics, language reclamation, and embodied ways of knowing. This is not an effort to reform the canon, but to rupture it—offering an invitation to imagine research as a site of resistance, care, and world-making.

Provocation—An act of disruption

A Litany for Survival

Audre Lorde

For those of us who live at the shoreline standing upon the constant edges of decision crucial and alone for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice who move in doorways coming and going in the hours between dawns looking inward and outward at once before and after seeking a now that can breed futures.

Becoming

Becoming is not a linear process. It unfolds in moments of friction, of doubt, of reaching for language that does not yet exist within the sanctioned templates of academic life. It happens between meetings, under breath, in emails sent but unsent. It happens quietly, and then all at once. Western academia endures with impressive tenacity. Its epistemological frames persist as the unspoken default, its methods enforced through editorial expectations, ethics forms, and curriculum templates. This endurance reproduces what Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (2021) “research through imperial eyes”—a gaze that renders Indigenous and Global South knowledges either invisible, extractable, or only legible once translated into Western terms. We have felt this gaze. It is the one that asks us to footnote our families, to anonymize our communities, to dislocate our identities from our analysis. It is the gaze that reads our work and says, “important perspective, but not theoretical enough.” And still, we look back. Following bell hooks’ (1994) invocation of the oppositional gaze, we write from the margins into the center—not to be absorbed, but to disrupt. As two scholars of color working within Western institutions, we do not claim neutrality. We work within and against the system, watching it closely as we attempt to reimagine what academic method can mean.

This paper is our act of becoming. It is the record of a dialogic exploration shaped by our refusal to replicate the form of the traditional academic article. As such, while this contribution conforms in some ways, it departs from a traditional, Western structure. Instead, we take up hooks' (2003) critique of the academy as a space structured by “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” and respond not just in content, but in form. Ours is a paper built from dialog, from the weaving of memory and resistance. We lean into Chilisa’s (2024) relational epistemology, one that understands knowledge as emergent from relationship, conversation, and collective reflection.

Our positionality—raced, gendered, and diasporic—offers both insight and tension. We are not outside the institutions we critique. We are salaried by them, held by them, and sometimes protected by them. We navigate what Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2014) describes as epistemicide—the historical and ongoing erasure of non-Western knowledge systems—while trying to seed new epistemic ground. These conversations, collected, curated, and shared here, are acts of resistance. They do not simply describe marginalization; they perform an alternative. They push against what Rizvi where even the structure of the academic article becomes a site of domination. We take seriously their call for decolonial methodologies in practice, ones that do not just theorize resistance but embody it.

The dialog in this paper is both methodology and political stance. It resists the authority of the lone, neutral author. It resists the assumption that method must be replicable, linear, or apolitical. It is, in itself, a practice of epistemic disobedience.

From these conversations, a dual purpose emerged:

First, to explore how scholars of color challenge methodological hegemony in higher education—not abstractly, but through the granular realities of daily academic life.

Second, to demonstrate how alternative academic forms—dialog, reflection, and storying—can serve as decolonial practices that unsettle dominant modes of knowledge production.

We do not claim to be the only voices doing this work. We are part of a much larger, vibrant constellation of scholars, our ancestors, activists, and students who have long pushed against the grain. We write in conversation with them, and in invitation. We invite other scholars of color, Indigenous academics, and those marginalized by Westernized notions of diversity to take up this conversation, reshape it, challenge it, and deepen it. This is not a claim to finality, but a gesture toward what is still becoming.

Positionality Statement: Why Us?

We write from the in-between: between nations, between languages, and between epistemologies.

We are both insiders and outsiders, visible in some rooms, invisible in others. We speak, knowing that our voices do not represent all who are marginalized in academia. But we write from where we are, because silence is no longer an option. As two racially minoritized women working within Australian higher education, we bring to this conversation not only our academic training but also the weight of colonization in our bones. Our journeys into research did not begin with textbooks or coursework. They began in classrooms where knowledge felt foreign, in conversations where our accents were corrected, in systems that demanded our presence but never fully made space for our ways of knowing.

We come to this work not as neutral observers but as deeply implicated participants, committed to unsettling the methodological norms that have long confined, erased, or distorted the lives of those we care about.

This paper is born of conversation, slow, circular, and spiraled. We deliberately step away from the linearity of conventional research writing, embracing instead a dialogic form that mirrors our process of becoming. The format, inspired by yarning, is both method and metaphor: a relational, respectful, and reciprocal way of making sense of the world (Dawn & Bridget, 2010; Geia et al., 2013). This choice reflects our commitment to decolonizing methodologies, not just in principle, but in practice.

Pearl Subban is a Melbourne-based academic in the Faculty of Education, with over two decades of experience across school, university, and equity leadership contexts. A South African by birth, Pearl carries the legacies of apartheid and colonial violence into her scholarship—not as a burden, but as a compass. Her work is rooted in race, racism, and social justice in education, and she brings to this dialog an unwavering commitment to re-centering marginalized voices and transforming research spaces into sites of inclusion, not exclusion.

Urmee Chakma is an academic at another Melbourne institution and brings to this paper over 15 years of teaching experience in higher education. As an Indigenous Chakma woman from the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, Urmee’s academic life has been shaped by deep personal entanglements with coloniality and marginalization. Her research spans migrant academic identity, citizenship education, and the integration of Indigenous knowledge in education. Having crossed cultural and institutional terrains, she speaks with a voice that holds both the trauma and the wisdom of those crossings.

Together, our intersectional identities complicate and enrich the conversation. We recognize, with Santos (2014), that the epistemicide of colonial knowledge systems is ongoing—sustained through methodological hegemony that positions Western ways of knowing as default, and all else as deviation. Our dialog resists this. It does not seek to replicate dominant research forms. Instead, it offers a living, breathing conversation where memory, story, and subjectivity are held as legitimate knowledge.

Urmee once described her place in academia as “a simultaneous sense of belonging and non-belonging” (Chakma & Sultana, 2024). That tension is not just theoretical—it is daily, embodied, and exhausting. But it is also generative.

Our intention here is not to speak on behalf of all scholars of color, nor to claim a universal decolonial stance. Rather, we aim to open space. To begin. To hold the door ajar for others navigating similar contradictions. We acknowledge that ethical research, particularly in decolonial contexts, requires more than a methodological shift. It demands attentiveness to power, consent, reciprocity, and accountability. We do not take lightly the relational commitments that this kind of work entails. This paper, and the conversations that shape it, invite readers to reconsider the authority of academic structure. We break from traditional hierarchies in research writing—not to reject rigor, but to reclaim it. To demonstrate that methodology can be rigorous and relational. That theory can emerge from yarning circles, kitchens, corridors, and country.

We begin, then, by asking why our stories are so often told without us and what becomes possible when we tell them ourselves.

“Nothing about us, without us.” Not as slogan. As standard.

In writing together, we seek to humanize research, to honor the lived experiences of those whose knowledge has long been extracted but not respected. We center race, language, and culture not as variables to control, but as conditions through which knowledge is made. And in doing so, we challenge the very foundations of how knowledge is imagined, validated, and shared.

Ultimately, we believe that decolonizing methodologies must not only disrupt existing systems but empower communities to lead their own inquiries, in the languages, rhythms, and relational protocols best known to them.

Awakening

There is no singular moment that marks an awakening, only a slow, unshakeable knowing that what we were taught as “method” does not recognize us. It begins in whispers: a reviewer’s comment, a methodological rubric, a supervisor’s frown when our voice breaks through the text. The dissonance is subtle at first, but it grows. Eventually, the misalignment between Western academic traditions and our lived experiences becomes impossible to carry silently. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2021) writes, research is not neutral, it has long been the machinery through which “imperialism and colonialism are regimes of knowledge” (p. 67). We have felt this regime intimately: in the pressure to cite whiteness, in the exile of our mother tongues from the literature review, in the ways our questions are reframed to fit “acceptable” lines of inquiry. The methods we were trained to master do not see our communities. They do not hold our grief or our joy. They produce knowledge about us, but never with us.

We learned to write in a voice that was not ours. We learned to ask questions that dismembered the stories we were raised with. Our awakening began when we could no longer make those edits in good faith.

To name this is not simply to reject, it is to awaken. It is to realize, as Spivak (1988) reminds us, that epistemic violence is not abstract. It is experienced. It is cumulative. It is embedded in every expectation of neutrality, every erasure of the body, every footnote that translates theory but not spirit. In the cracks of that violence, we began to look differently.

Homi Bhabha’s (1994) concept of the Third Space offered language for what we had long sensed but could not yet articulate: the in-between is not a failure to assimilate, but a space of potential. In the Third Space, binary logics—colonizer/colonized, objective/subjective, and West/other—begin to dissolve. What emerges instead is hybridity, contradiction, and multiplicity. This space is not a refuge, but a methodology. Rizvi and Lingard (2009) remind us, this is where new epistemic configurations become possible, not by transcending our positionality, but by dwelling within its friction.

We do not seek to be methodological purists. We write from the murky, generative edges. We craft method from fragments, memory, tension, and hope.

Our awakening is not a linear arc but a circular return to what we had always known but had been asked to forget. It is a refusal to continue reproducing the conditions of our own erasure. It is also a recognition that we are not the first to carve new paths. Indigenous scholars and community researchers have long created methodologies that honor land, kinship, and spirit.

We walk alongside these legacies, drawing on yarning as both method and metaphor—a conversational practice rooted in relational accountability and story-sharing (Bessarab & Ng'Andu, 2010). Yarning disrupts Western paradigms by positioning story as data, dialog as theory, and relationship as research design. It opens space where method is not a script but a rhythm—responsive, co-created, and alive. This, too, is awakening: the act of choosing methodologies that reflect our realities rather than confine them. Of choosing the circle over the grid. Of choosing voice over citation. Of choosing care over compliance.

We are still awakening.

My personal experience as an academic of color deeply informs my understanding and approach to decolonising methodologies. Having navigated academic landscapes often dominated by Eurocentric paradigms, I am acutely aware of the biases and exclusions inherent in colonial methodologies. These experiences drive me to challenge and dismantle these structures, advocating for the inclusion of diverse voices and perspectives that have historically been marginalised. For instance, I have encountered curricula that predominantly feature Western narratives, sidelining the rich histories and contributions of other cultures, including the Indigenous Peoples. This exclusion has fuelled my commitment to integrate more inclusive content, ensuring that my teaching and research reflect a broader, more equitable representation of knowledge. (Urmee)

Urmee’s experience reflects what Ahmed (2012), terms “institutional whiteness”—the embedded nature of white colonial frameworks within academic structures (Ahmed, 2012). Her the reference to “Eurocentric paradigms,” resonates with Mill’s (1997) concept of “epistemologies of ignorance,” where Western knowledge system systematically exclude other ways of knowing (Sullivan & Tuana, 2007). Urmee’s acknowledgment that, “my personal experience as an academic of color deeply informs my understanding...,” aligned with what hooks (1994) terms “teaching to transgress” using marginalized positionality as a site of resistance and knowledge production (hooks, 1994). Urmee’s conscious acknowledgment of her racialized experiences is a marked effort at counter storytelling, challenging, and the narratives within academia that are shaped by white narratives (Delgado & Stefancic, 2016).

In my academic journey, the impact of colonial methodologies has been palpable, especially during my PhD, I struggled to find suitable theorists whose work resonated with the experiences of me and my participants—Indigenous minorities in Bangladesh. Western theories often did not capture the nuances and realities of their lives, making it challenging to frame my research within the existing theoretical paradigms. Additionally, writing for publications is I find strictly prescriptive. We always need to follow a certain structure prescribed by the “reputed” journals. These encounters have highlighted the pervasive influence of colonial legacies emphasising the urgent need for systemic change. (Urmee)

Urmee’s struggle with Western theoretical frameworks during her PhD research with Indigenous minorities in Bangladesh exemplifies what Spivak (1988) terms “epistemic violence,” or the systemic exclusion of subaltern knowledge systems (Brunner, 2021; Morris & Spivak, 2010). This experience parallels Tuhiwai-Smith’s (2021) critique of how Western research paradigms often fail to capture Indigenous realities:

Western theories often did not capture the nuances and realities of their lives, making it challenging to frame my research within the existing theoretical paradigms.

Her reflection demonstrates what Bhabha (1994) describes as, “hybrid spaces,” where scholars of color must navigate between colonial academic requirements and decolonial aspirations (Bhabha, 1994). Urmee’s difficulty in finding relevant theorists illustrates what Collins (2000) terms, “the outsider within” status—being simultaneously part of while alienated from academic institutions (Collins, 1986).

By embracing decolonising methodologies, we strive to create academic environments where the contributions of all cultures are recognized and valued. This involves not just diversifying content but also rethinking pedagogical practices to foster more inclusive and equitable learning experiences for all students. Last year I co-authored a publication where we did not follow the traditional structure, instead, it was a conversational, post-qualitative, decolonial methodology. I plan to continue doing that, challenging the existing methodology in this way. (Urmee)

Urmee’s critique of prescriptive publication requirements aligned with what Wynter (2003) identifies as “coloniality of knowledge”—the ways academic institutions maintain colonial power through standardized forms of knowledge production (Wynter, 2003). She reflects on “reputed journals,” which underlines Mignolo’s (2007) the concept of the “colonial matrix of power” which operates through academic gatekeeping (Mignolo, 2007). Urmee explored alternative publication formats demonstrating her willingness to create new forms of expression that transcended colonial boundaries. Her use of “conversational, post qualitative, decolonial methodology,” exemplifies a need to challenge traditional and academic hierarchies. It is evident that Urmee is keen to integrate diverse content to transform her teaching and pushes beyond inclusion to a pedagogy that is culturally sustainable (Sheikia & Greg, 2018). As part of this push-back, she aligns with those teaching systems that challenge academic norms, center marginalized experiences, and create spaces for alternative knowledge systems (Ladson-Billings, 2005).

Growing up in South Africa, I witnessed first-hand the enduring legacies of colonialism and apartheid, which continue to shape the country’s social, economic, and educational landscapes. As a teacher and now an academic of color, these experiences have deeply influenced my understanding of and approach to decolonising methodologies. For me, everything is about race. My academic journey, from my early education in a post-apartheid context to my current role, has been marked by the visible and invisible remnants of colonial structures within education. (Pearl)

Pearl’s positioning within South African post-apartheid education exemplifies what Ndebele (1991) calls “the rediscovery of the ordinary”—articulating the way the daily experiences of racism under apartheid in its aftermath shaped the consciousness of people of color. Pearl’s admission that, “everything is about race,” reflects a dominant thinking that understanding and being in the world is often perceived through the lens of racial power structures (Kincheloe & Steinberg, 2008). Her personal experience has become a site of knowledge production when she argues that, “by challenging who gets to speak, whose knowledge is deemed legitimate,” we “engage with diverse ways of knowing” (Gqola, 2021). In Pearl’s case, Western theoretical dominance produced a diverged system that privileged Western knowledge while subordinating African epistemologies, a situation evident in South African higher education. This is often termed, “cognitive imperialism” (Hoppers, 2002), in African education systems, which articulates how black consciousness is suppressed and racial power operates through white knowledge systems.

Throughout my career, I have observed how colonial methodologies still dominate many aspects of academia, particularly in how knowledge is produced, validated, and shared. As a student, I often encountered curricula that prioritized Western theories, thinkers, and perspectives, marginalising the voices and experiences of people of color and non-Western scholars. This exclusion, subtle at times and overt at others, reinforced a hierarchy of knowledge that placed European and Western intellectual traditions at the center, while African and Indigenous epistemologies were peripheral, if acknowledged at all. This experience ignited in me a desire to challenge these hierarchies, not only for myself but for the students I teach and mentor. (Pearl)

It is evident that Pearl is committed to decolonizing methodologies which exemplify a form of freedom within academia and we need to break free from this struggle to liberate knowledge production from colonial paradigms. Most academics of color acknowledge this as a challenge of knowledge hierarchies while centering marginalized perspectives within what is now counted as legitimate knowledge in higher education (Mbembe, 2015). Pearl has struggled with the tensions of an altered identity, largely on account of persistent colonial disempowerment which saw people of her race group being relocated across the world, finding it almost impossible to be authentically connected with the land. Racial awareness and her positionality as an academic of color became a tool for both personal and institutional transformation. She acknowledges that there are multiple ways of knowing, which her fellow South African Jonathan Jansen (2009), terms “knowledge in the blood,” referencing the nature of knowledge within lived experience.

In my teaching and research, I now strive to adopt and promote decolonising methodologies, which center marginalized perspectives and challenge dominant narratives. As an academic of color, I am acutely aware of the power dynamics that underpin the knowledge systems in which we operate. My positionality allows me to approach this work with a personal understanding of how exclusionary practices can hinder intellectual and personal growth. For me, decolonising methodologies are not just about diversifying content but about fundamentally reshaping how we produce and share knowledge—by challenging who gets to speak, whose knowledge is deemed legitimate, and how we engage with diverse ways of knowing. (Pearl)

Here, Pearl articulates the ongoing struggles and aspirations of women of color in academia as they work toward decolonizing methodologies. The assertion that we strive to “center marginalized perspectives and challenge dominant narratives” reflects a key tenet of decolonial theory: the need to disrupt Eurocentric epistemologies and reposition historically excluded voices within knowledge production (Mignolo, 2011; Smith, 2021). By explicitly acknowledging the power dynamics embedded within academic knowledge systems, she foregrounds the critique that institutions of higher education have long served as sites of colonial continuity (Mbembe, 2015).

Pearl’s awareness of positionality—how her identity as an academic of color informs their approach to decolonial work—is central to critical race theory (CRT), which asserts that racial identity shapes lived experience and epistemological standpoint (Collins, 2000; Crenshaw, 1989). Her recognition that exclusionary practices hinder both intellectual and personal growth echoes Patricia Hill Collins’ (2000) concept of outsider within status, wherein scholars of color navigate predominantly white institutions with an acute awareness of their marginalization. However, rather than solely critiquing these structures, she actively works toward transformation by advocating for alternative ways of knowing, aligning with Tuhiwai Smith’s (2021) call for decolonial methodologies that not only critique but reconstruct academic knowledge systems.

I have also experienced the resistance that comes with attempting to decolonize academia. The structures in place are deeply entrenched, and many within the academic community may not see the need for change or understand its significance. However, I draw strength from my own journey and the journeys of my students, many of whom face similar challenges navigating an academic system that was not built with them in mind. (Pearl)

Pearl highlights the institutional resistance that often accompanies attempts to decolonize academia. Like Urmee, the statement that “many within the academic community may not see the need for change” reflects Ahmed’s (2012) analysis of institutional whiteness, where diversity and decolonial efforts are often met with defensiveness or superficial inclusion measures rather than structural transformation. Her commitment to change despite this resistance demonstrates an engagement with racial agency (Mirza, 2018)—the process by which women of color assert intellectual and pedagogical autonomy in academic spaces that were historically not built for them. Furthermore, the reference to students navigating an exclusionary system underscores bell hooks’ (1994) notion of education as a site of both oppression and possibility, where critical pedagogy can serve as a means of resistance and empowerment.

Confronting

There is a pivotal moment in the intellectual journey of many scholars of color, often unnamed, sometimes delayed, always formative, when the methodological frameworks we are expected to adopt reveal themselves not as neutral tools for inquiry, but as instruments of containment. These frameworks, rooted in Enlightenment ideals of universality, objectivity, and order, often fail to hold the complexities, spiritualities, and epistemic weight of our lived experiences. They ask us to produce research about our communities, but not with them. They ask us to narrate our resistance, while adhering to the very forms that silenced that resistance in the first place. This moment can be understood as one of epistemic rupture, what Walter Mignolo (2009) terms epistemic disobedience, the refusal to continue legitimizing a “zero-point epistemology” that claims neutrality while reproducing Eurocentric dominance. For scholars emerging from the Global South or racialized communities in the North, this confrontation is not merely theoretical, it is existential. It is a standing at the threshold of the academy and saying, in the words of Audre Lorde (1978, 1993), “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

We call this moment confrontation. Not a polite methodological disagreement. Not a footnote acknowledging positionality. But a reckoning. A refusal to continue performing objectivity, neutrality, and distance as the cost of academic legitimacy. A recognition that much of what counts as “rigorous research” is underpinned by epistemological violence: the silencing of story, the sanitizing of rage, the erasure of the body.

In this paper, we explicitly confront the deep structures of coloniality embedded in academic research. Drawing on critical race theory (Delgado et al., 2017), Indigenous methodologies (Barnhardt, 2008; Watson, 2012), African and Afrocentric epistemologies (Chilisa, 2017; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018; Ntseane, 2012), and Southern decolonial thought (Mignolo, 2011; Santos, 2014), we identify and resist four dominant features of Western methodological frames. These are not merely stylistic conventions; they are sites where colonial power operates under the guise of academic standardization. Each of these features functions as a methodological checkpoint, determining whose knowledge counts and whose must be translated to fit. Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2016) argues, the modern university enforces a monoculture of knowledge, where ways of knowing from the South are deemed “local,” “alternative,” or “non-theoretical,” even when they are philosophically robust, historically deep, and communally grounded.

This confrontation is not just about method—it is about being. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) reminds us that “research is one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world’s vocabulary,” because it has long operated as a tool of extraction and objectification. For us, to confront research methodologically is also to reclaim research as a site of possibility, healing, and resistance. It is to engage in what Eve Tuck (2009) calls desire-based research, which honors the full humanity of those who have too often only been framed through deficit or trauma.

Thus, we identify four colonial features we resist in this methodological stance:

The Insistence on Objectivity—Western methodologies uphold the ideal of the objective, detached researcher as a marker of rigor (Harding, 2016; Smith, 2012). Yet, as Patricia Hill Collins (1990) asserts, this form of knowledge production masks the partiality of dominant perspectives while marginalizing situated, embodied knowledges (Hill Collins, 1990).

The Privileging of Linear Structure and Coherence—Dominant academic forms demand clarity, order, and linearity. In contrast, Afrocentric and Indigenous ways of knowing often move in cyclical, relational, or spiral forms (Chilisa, 2017; Kovach, 2009), where knowledge emerges through connection rather than control.

The Erasure of the Researcher’s Body—Western paradigms ask researchers to be disembodied observers. Yet, the body is central to knowledge for scholars of color. The body remembers what theory forgets (Anzaldúa, 1987; Tuck, 2009).

The Universalizing of Western Epistemes—Research methods derived from European modernity are presented as universal, when in fact they are deeply culturally and historically specific. Mignolo (2009) argues, to challenge this universality is to delink from epistemic imperialism and open space for pluriversality.

We do not confront lightly, but we recognize that the cost of avoiding confrontation is the ongoing loss of epistemic self-determination. Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni (2013) reminds us, true decolonization requires epistemic freedom—the right to theorize from one’s own location in the world, drawing on one’s intellectual inheritance. This insistence on thinking and building from within resonates with Mahatma Gandhi’s vision for India. Gandhi did not envision the nation’s future through the lens of Western modernity; he imagined an India shaped by Indian hands, grounded in its own spiritual and social traditions. Like Gandhi’s swaraj, our methodological stance is not an act of destruction, but of reimagining—a refusal to replicate borrowed blueprints and an invitation to craft anew. This paper, then, does not aim to improve traditional research methods; it seeks to break them open, to make space for forms capacious enough to hold grief, story, spirit, contradiction, and joy. We confront not out of anger, but out of care—for our disciplines, our students, and the futures our research dares to imagine. If knowledge-making is a form of world-making, then we ask: what kind of worlds are we complicit in sustaining when we refuse to confront the colonial roots of our methods?

In this paper, we choose to confront, and in doing so, we choose methodological freedom.

Inviting Methodological Reworlding: Toward a Pluriversal Future

If method is not merely a tool but a worldview in motion, then reimagining method is not a technical exercise—it is a political, spiritual, and epistemological act. To reworld method is to resist the singularity of what Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar (2010) describe as the universe of modernity/coloniality, and instead open ourselves to the pluriverse, a world where many worlds fit, and where many ways of knowing and researching can coexist without hierarchy.

This is not a utopian gesture. It is an ethical imperative.

The pluriverse invites us to do more than diversify our sources or add Indigenous stories as illustrations to Eurocentric theories. It calls for a paradigm shift, where we recognize that Western research methodologies are just one way of knowing—and not always the most appropriate, ethical, or resonant. The invitation to methodological reworlding is not just about inclusion; it is about legitimacy. It is about affirming that knowledge produced through oral traditions, embodied practice, collective memory, or cosmological insight is not anecdotal—it is theory.

We are not asking to be added to existing methodological frameworks. We are asking what happens when the frame itself is redrawn, or perhaps, when it is replaced by a circle, a spiral, a drumbeat.

Reworlding as Plural and Practical

To imagine a pluriversal methodological future is to embrace multiplicity, not as fragmentation, but as richness. It is to resist the demand for convergence and instead nurture co-existence. It is to center relationality, accountability, and sovereignty in research. Here, we offer a few practical orientations, not as prescriptions, but as possibilities, to support this reworlding of method.

Hybrid Methods

Rather than privileging disciplinary purity or adhering to methodological orthodoxy, decolonized research invites hybrid methods that braid together multiple knowledge traditions. Such approaches acknowledge that no single method can fully apprehend the complexity of lived experience, particularly for women of color whose epistemologies are shaped by intersecting histories of colonialism, migration, and resistance (Chilisa, 2024; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021). A single project might weave narrative inquiry with decolonial storytelling, while incorporating participatory mapping, speculative fiction, or arts-based visual practices grounded in Indigenous cosmologies (Leavy, 2020). For example, a South African scholar could integrate Ubuntu ethics with feminist participatory action research to explore collective healing after gendered violence (Nwoye, 2017). Similarly, an Afro-Caribbean researcher might juxtapose ethnography with ancestral dreamwork, positioning the latter as a legitimate site of knowledge production (Alexander, 2005). These hybrid configurations do not dilute their constituent traditions; rather, they offer layered and relational ways of seeing, knowing, and being. By holding space for both/and—quantitative and qualitative, embodied and archival, and local and global—they resist the binaries imposed by colonial epistemologies and affirm that valid knowledge can emerge from sites long dismissed as “unscientific” within Western research paradigms.

Co-Theorizing with Communities

Methodological reworlding calls us to dismantle the binary between the researcher and the researched. Rather than extract knowledge from communities, we engage in co-theorizing with them. This shifts the research process from one of translation to one of relational theorization, where knowledge is built collaboratively and contextually. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) reminds us that Indigenous methodologies foreground relational accountability: who you are matters, how you enter a space matters, and why you are doing the work must always remain transparent. Research becomes a site of reciprocal learning, not of expert authority. Decolonized research methodologies call for moving beyond single-discipline or orthodox approaches toward hybrid methods that create space for multiple epistemologies to coexist (Latulippe, 2015; Smith, 2007). Such hybridity should not be seen as a dilution of rigor but rather as an enrichment of inquiry, enabling relational, embodied, and place-based understandings to emerge (Kennedy et al., 2022). Brett Smith’s (2007) work on creative analytic practice demonstrates how narrative, performance, and artistic modes can be integrated with conventional research to capture experiences that might otherwise remain obscured (Smith, 2007). Similarly, Rosemary Hill (2020) shows how Indigenous ecological knowledge and Western science can be braided together, producing outcomes that are culturally respectful and contextually grounded (Hill et al., 2020). More recent research underscores the importance of reciprocity, ensuring that methodological hybridity is shaped by co-design with communities so that benefits are shared and responsibilities honored (Gerrard et al., 2025). In this regard, scholarship by Indigenous researchers foregrounds the centrality of Indigenous governance and protocols in research design, ensuring hybrid methods remain accountable to the knowledge systems they draw from (Maracle et al., 2025). Latulippe (2015) extends these perspectives by framing hybridity as the creation of an “ethical space” where Indigenous and Western epistemologies meet without assimilation (Latulippe, 2015). Hybrid methods—whether participatory mapping with oral history or archival research with land-based practice—offer layered, relational, and culturally grounded pathways that resist colonial boundaries.

What would research look like if we approached every encounter as a conversation among knowledge holders, not as a data collection event, but as a communal thinking process?

Reclaiming Language as Epistemology

Language is not neutral; it is epistemic terrain, shaping the ways we know, relate, and imagine (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 1988; Mignolo, 2011). When we write only in English, or adopt academic tones that sever us from our home languages and speech patterns, we reproduce colonial logics of legitimacy (Canagarajah, 2013). Reworlded methodology invites us to write, speak, and theorize multilingually, refusing the dominance of monolingual knowledge production. This might mean embedding untranslated words, proverbs, or idioms that carry epistemic depth (Anzaldúa, 1987, 2015), or writing bilingual papers that hold multiple linguistic worlds in tension. It can include inserting prayer, song, or silence into academic presentations, recognizing these as valid communicative acts (Smith, 2021). Such practices resist the flattening of meaning for the sake of readability, peer review, or “international” standards. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1988) indicates, language is both memory and metaphor—it determines the contours of what can be imagined. To reclaim our languages is to reclaim our right to theorize from where we stand, grounding research in our cultural, historical, and spiritual locations. In doing so, we disrupt the epistemic violence of linguistic erasure and affirm that knowledge-making is inseparable from the languages in which it is born.

What theories and ways of knowing are we silencing when we write only in the tongue of the coloniser?

Embodied and Affective Methods

Colonial methodologies have historically demanded the separation of intellect from emotion, and theory from embodiment, positioning the body as a source of bias rather than knowledge (Smith, 2021). Yet, our bodies are living archives, inscribed with histories of knowledge, trauma, joy, and resistance (Alexander, 2005). Gloria Anzaldúa (1987) speaks of la facultad—a heightened perception rooted in the body’s capacity to sense the unspoken. Tuck and Ree (2013) note that some stories live in the bones, resisting textual capture. Scholars of sensory and embodied research, such as Sarah Pink (2015) and Andrew Sparkes (2009), demonstrate how sensory ethnography and creative analytic practice open research to felt, affective, and multisensory dimensions. The extensive literature on embodied ethnography—from Loïc Wacquant’s (2004) carnal sociology, to Ashley Mears’s (2015) fashion ethnographies, Markula and Silk’s (2011) dance-based inquiry, Kelly Dombroski’s (2025) theorization of “pluriversal bodies,” and Lee et al. (2021) foundational discussion—underscores that the body is not simply a vessel but a site of theorizing. Embodied methods, whether through movement, ritual, breathwork, or stillness, reposition the sensory, affective, and intuitive as central to knowledge production, resisting colonial hierarchies that privilege the abstract over the lived.

Ethics Beyond Compliance

Institutional ethics processes often begin and end with securing procedural approval, reducing ethical practice to a formalized checklist (Smith, 2021). Yet for many communities, ethics is not an administrative hurdle—it is a lived, relational commitment embedded in cultural protocols, spiritual responsibilities, and collective well-being (Chilisa, 2024). Relational ethics require accountability not only to participants but also to ancestors, descendants, and the land on which research takes place (Wilson, 2008). Within Indigenous research paradigms, knowledge is understood as co-owned, and the researcher is positioned as a guest whose conduct must honor existing relationships (McConnell et al., 2009). In such contexts, informed consent is not a single signed document but an ongoing, dialogic process negotiated throughout the research (Kovach, 2009). Stories and findings are returned to communities in accessible forms, and research benefits are shared collectively rather than accruing solely to the academic (Tuck & Yang, 2014). The central question shifts from “Did I follow the protocol?” to “Did I honor the relationship?” This reframing demands humility, reciprocity, and a willingness to be guided by the community’s own ethical frameworks, recognizing that true ethical practice extends far beyond institutional compliance into the realm of sustained relational responsibility.

Refusal and Opacity as Methodological Praxis

Reworlding method requires a rethinking of visibility and transparency as unquestioned virtues in research. For scholars of color, particularly those writing from marginalized or racialized positions, the constant demand to disclose, explain, and render one’s self or community fully legible can itself enact epistemic and affective violence (Simpson, 2007). Édouard Glissant (1997) asserts the right to opacity—the principle that not all knowledge must be made transparent to those who demand access. In this sense, refusal is not obstruction; it is protection, a form of methodological sovereignty that preserves what must remain guarded (Glissant, 1997; Tuck & Yang, 2014). Opacity makes space for knowledge that is held in ceremony, conveyed through relational protocols, or intentionally withheld from circulation in academic journals (Kovach, 2009). This aligns with Eve Tuck’s (2009) call for desire-based research, which resists reducing people to their wounds and instead foregrounds complexity, self-determination, and futurity. In a pluriversal methodological landscape, refusal and opacity are not absences but active presences—affirmations that some stories live beyond the reach of extractive inquiry. They honor the silences, the unsaid, and the untranslatable, insisting that ethical research sometimes requires closing the door.

What might it mean to honour opacity as a legitimate methodological stance?

An Invitation, Not a Conclusion

This section is not a conclusion. It is an invitation. To all who have felt the dissonance of trying to squeeze their knowing into Western containers: we see you. We are you. And we ask:

• What would it take to design a method that does not distort your truth?

• Who must you cite to feel seen?

• What would happen if your research was accountable to your grandmother and your students, not only your reviewers?

• What does your body already know that your training taught you to ignore?

A pluriversal future is not a distant dream. It is already being built, in classrooms, kitchens, forests, collectives, and conversations. Methodological reworlding is not a rejection of knowledge—it is a reorientation toward many knowledges.

Let us write, think, and build as if many worlds can, and must, coexist.

Coda: The Work of Return

We return now, not to close the loop, but to honor the spiral. In many Indigenous and diasporic traditions, return is not repetition, it is revisitation. It is the movement back to a place changed, carrying what was gathered along the way. The work of return is not about completion. It is about becoming accountable to the stories that brought us here. Throughout this paper, we have confronted, disrupted, and reimagined the forms and assumptions that have long governed what counts as legitimate research. We have named the violences hidden in objectivity. We have written our bodies back into the page. We have refused the grammar of linearity and claimed language as a site of epistemic freedom. We have insisted that story is theory, that refusal is method, that opacity is not a lack but a stance.

But we return knowing that the work is unfinished.

We still hesitate before pressing “Submit,” wondering which reviewer will misread our rupture as incoherence.

The other replays a whispered moment of hesitation, “I didn’t know we were allowed to write like this.”

We return changed by these encounters, sharpened by the politics of citation, softened by the intergenerational echoes in our bones. But we also return with new questions: What happens when these disruptions are no longer exceptional but foundational? What infrastructures, academic, spiritual, institutional, must we build to sustain a pluriversal future? How do we protect reworlded methodologies from becoming co-opted, flattened, or instrumentalized? We have no desire to romanticize resistance. This work is exhausting. It is slow. It is often lonely. It means writing into spaces that were not built to hold us. And still, we write. Because to refuse is not only an act of rebellion, it is an act of care. A commitment to future scholars who will read our work and find themselves less alone.

We write with the memory of those who never made it into the archive.

We write for those still translating themselves in the margins of method textbooks.

We write knowing our words will not land gently everywhere.

But we also write with joy. With humor. With ancestors in our sentences. We write because we believe that another way is not only possible, it is already here. In kitchen-table conversations. In youth collectives. In ceremonies. In classrooms where students are learning to unlearn. In research that breathes. So, we end not with a summary, but with a provocation:

If your method cannot hold your grandmother’s wisdom, your mother’s pain, your peoples’ suffering, your own contradictions—then is it really your method?

If your citation list does not reflect the people who shaped your voice—then whose voice are you protecting?

If your research makes you invisible to yourself—then what are you actually finding?

The work of return is not just ours. It is yours now, too. What will you choose to unsettle?