Academic hoaxing,decolonial politics,and epistemic pluriversality

Abstract

In this commentary, I engage with Matthew Hannah's call to foster greater humility and trust across disciplinary divides and epistemic cultures. Hannah's thoughtful and generative work on the purpose, function, and value of hoaxing in academia has inspired the following reflections on how such critical interventions could contribute to the expression of decolonial politics and the expansion of epistemic pluriversality. In foregrounding perspectives that centre the importance of unthinking mastery and cultivating pedagogies of relationality, I suggest that fostering humility in higher education is only possible when we begin to shed personal and institutional arrogance, opting instead to cultivate ties and relations with(in) insider, outsider, and liminal epistemic communities.

Introduction

In ‘Taking “Nonsense” Seriously’, Matthew Hannah (2026) invites scholars from across academic disciplines and epistemic cultures to create more room for humility, openness, and trust to inform our everyday exchanges and relations. For Hannah, the fact that academics do not readily share the same vocabularies, theories, methodologies, discourses, or worldviews should neither hinder nor undermine attempts to ‘support more constructive, cooperative bridge-building across our rich array of epistemic cultures’ (2024: 15) In terms of addressing one such bridge-building element of scholarly exchange, the realm of peer review (and of academic publishing, more broadly) has certainly fostered some of the best and worst qualities associated with both the shaping and maintenance of epistemological contributions. At its best, peer review serves not only to identify potentially innovative, insightful, and/or generative contributions to a given field, it also assists researchers in the strengthening and bolstering of their work; at its worst, the peer review process can invite all kinds of ethically dubious activities (e.g. fraud, misrepresentation), but it is most commonly distorted when it emboldens reviewers to unduly marginalise and dismiss research that does not satisfy disciplinary conventions or reinforce established canonical pillars.

One of the most egregious aspects associated with academic publishing and peer review is academic hoaxing. As Hannah so succinctly puts it, ‘hoaxes are often deliberately aimed at furthering polarisation’ (2026) – and it is precisely this question of polarisation that has preoccupied many scholars in their reflections and deliberations on the perceived purpose, function, and value of hoaxing in academia. Hannah's piece offers a nuanced appraisal of the work that academic hoaxes perform, and it also illuminates what we stand to learn from them. If scholars were to consistently approach peer review (and, by extension, hoax-like deceptions in academia) in a spirit of humility, curiosity, and trust, they might actually improve, expand, and even deepen the foundations upon which epistemic cultures currently rest.

Unthinking mastery

Hannah's call to approach academic hoaxing as a discursive practice capable of instigating much-needed critical dialogue across disciplines has prompted me to reflect on the kinds of epistemological shifts I would like to see materialise more broadly. In my discipline (communication and media studies), scholarship has been dominated over the past 20 years by a group of 1675 highly cited scholars, of which 91.5% of this ‘communication citation elite’ are white, 74.3% are male, and 78.6% work in the United States (Freelon et al., 2023). The troubling dominance and ubiquity of whiteness in the academy (and in academic publishing) have spurred numerous calls to intervene on questions of race, inequality, and exclusion (Chakravartty et al., 2018; Hirji et al., 2020; Ng et al., 2020), and have foregrounded the need for a more radical feminist politics of citation (Ahmed, 2017). In terms of situating my own epistemological investments and commitments, I continue to be swayed to engage in ‘epistemic disobedience’ (Mignolo, 2009), to invest in the praxis of ‘unthinking mastery’ (Singh, 2018), and to divest and disinvest from the project of modernity (Machado de Oliveira, 2021; Vázquez, 2020). Commitments to these epistemological horizons have constituted nothing short of life-altering reorientations in terms of my teaching, research, service, ties, and relations. Indeed, such reorientations have had the distinct effect of sparking a much broader questioning of my own subjectivity as an academic labourer. In many ways, these shifts in orientation have precipitated a slowly unfolding process of undoing my settler colonial neoliberal academic subjectivity. This process has materialised through a desire ‘to delink from the traps of Western epistemic ontology and to open up to epistemic pluriversality’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: 240).

Following Mignolo and Walsh, I have become less invested in upholding cultures of experts and expertise and more interested in fostering communities of ‘engaged intellectuals still learning to unlearn in order to re-learn; to challenge our own histories, herstories, privileges, and limitations’ (2018: 245). Jack Halberstam describes this turn as an opportunity to usher in more undisciplined forms of knowledge and to ensure less disciplinary domination; one strategy for initiating change involves ‘untrain[ing] ourselves so that we can read the struggles and debates back into questions that seemed settled and resolved’ (2011: 11). For Julietta Singh, we have much to learn in rejecting mastery and its associated (neo)colonial foundations of domination and control. As she argues, to abandon mastery is to create room for vulnerable engagement(s) with ourselves and others and to disavow ourselves of the notion that scholars are masters of their domains: ‘Rethinking what we do as something other than mastery – whether over vast or miniscule, human or inhuman terrains – pushes us toward different forms of scholarship and different relations to our practices – indeed, toward different relations to the worlds we engage’ (2018: 93–94). It is only once we have begun to do away with our masterful subjectivities that we will be better equipped to cultivate generative forms of discomfort that enable us to negotiate the complex ethical predicaments and entanglements that define the current moment (Singh, 2018).

Pedagogies of relationality

Embracing humility and vulnerability as foundational elements in one's research life prepares the way for deeper and more persistent decolonial critiques to emerge. As Rolando Vázquez reminds us, decolonial critique involves not only ‘the critical analysis of the mechanisms of domination’ so deeply entrenched in the modern/colonial order, it also requires a delinking from epistemic oppression towards ‘set[ting] the conditions to listen to a plurality of epistemic and aesthetic realities’ (2020: 130). Importantly, Vázquez is not calling for the suppression of Western knowledge, but rather for a ‘humbling of modernity’, that is, for a decentring and diminishing of modernity's ‘position of domination and its implication with epistemic and aesthetic violence’ (2020: 170). For African media scholar Last Moyo, this humbling of modernity is at once a difficult and slow-moving project because most Western and non-Western scholars cannot easily escape the grips and rewards of Eurocentrism, a system that ‘has constituted the knowledge order or power structure of the modern/colonial/capitalist/patriarchal world system for the past 500 years’ (2020: 138). Despite these longstanding barriers to epistemic pluriversality, Moyo offers a hopeful assessment of how decolonial political struggles across the university may give rise to new possibilities: ‘In media and communication studies, decoloniality recasts new horizons for inclusivity, for a new world, and a new interdiscipline of dialogue and conversation between the centre and the periphery, East and West, and North and South’ (2020: 121). For such horizons of inclusive dialogue to materialise and subsist, Vázquez argues for ‘pedagogies of relationality’ capable of ‘opening up towards the worlds of sensing and meaning that have been subjugated, suppressed under the colonial difference. Instead of producing spaces for canonising, for the affirmation of representation, for the celebration of contemporaneity and abstraction, what would it mean to weave relations that cross the colonial difference, that are capable of listening, of hosting and not representing other worlds?’ (2020: 172).

Although it would appear that I have spent little time engaging with Hannah's actual essay, my aim has been to attend to the ongoing complexities associated with carrying out academic research as an insider, outsider, and/or liminal presence across diverse epistemic cultures. As Hannah suggests in the conclusion, scholars in their respective fields need not acquire deep familiarity with methods or bodies of knowledge that fall outside their immediate purview to participate in modest appraisals and evaluations of research outside their field. The dismissive and at times reprehensible responses to academic hoaxes issued by scholars aired in public offer but one example of what Machado de Oliveira (2021) refers to as the personal and institutional arrogance so consistently rewarded across academia. Hanging somewhere in the balance between arrogance and humility lies the researcher's capacity to decipher sense from nonsense, and serious from unserious scholarship. Hannah's call to foster greater humility and trust within insider and outsider epistemic cultures invites scholars/researchers to approach the whole of their work – teaching, research, service, ties, and relations – as opportunities to engage in a humbling of modernity. Whether hoaxes have the capacity to inspire some of the decolonial praxes referred to above remains unknown, but the desire to see experiments of this kind materialise should create space(s) for increased reflection on the part of various epistemic communities and their champions/detractors. Academic hoaxes remain hotly contested flashpoints for shoring up and/or diminishing the legitimacy of certain targeted disciplines or bodies of knowledge. Perhaps they might be refashioned to advance a wider array of decolonial critiques and to sketch new horizons of epistemic pluriversality.

Whereas hoaxes tend to leave a minimal imprint in both the short-term and long-term popular imagination, they do create the rather vague impression that epistemic change and transformation are upon us (for better or worse). Beyond the tenuous boundaries of academic arrogance and peer humility lie the unsettled, vulnerable, and relational attunements and reorientations currently redefining academic labour. ¹ The decolonial epistemological project described so compellingly by figures such as Singh, Vázquez, Moyo, and Machado de Oliveira requires the slow, sustained, unflinching, and resilient efforts of those seeking epistemic recalibration and renewal. The perceived punchiness and speed of academic hoaxes may hold some potential for articulating decolonial critiques and for instigating broader critical reflections on personal and institutional arrogance, but the decolonial manoeuvers of the present and not-so-distant future will demand unrelenting commitments to, and deeper investments in, the realisation of pluriversal epistemic communities.