ABSTRACT
This chapter problematizes the challenges of post/de-colonial research in the context of China’s south–south development cooperation, and discuss anti-coloniality as a potential frame to reconceptualize researcher positionality. Among many aspects of the politics of knowledge production, the aim of this short discussion is to explore the post/de-colonial dimensions of researcher positionality. Postcolonialism is an epistemology that unpicks various colonial legacies in knowledge production after the formal end of colonial rule. Instead, decolonialism “encourages re-thinking the world from Latin America, from Africa, from Indigenous places and from the marginalized academia in the global South, and so on”. A key concept in decolonialism is the idea of ‘co-production’ of knowledge, recognizing and emphasizing the agency of the researched. Anti-colonial research is also useful in terms of its recognition of the uncomfortableness in contested researcher positionality and sees the unsettledness as a productive source of knowledges.
