ABSTRACT
How might a researcher use Indigenous African knowledge systems to develop a decolonial dance education research paradigm and scholarly writing? What Indigenous African knowledge systems can anchor dance education research? These questions have been critical in framing the decolonial dance education research and writing paradigm that the author uses as a researcher. In this chapter, the author draws on his autoethnographic reflections to critically examine how he has developed and applied the African philosophy of Ubuntu as a hermeneutic phenomenology to frame the ethics, agenda, logic, conceptualization, spirit, contextualization, and vision of his research projects in Indigenous dance practices. The analysis unpacks the author’s reflexivity and positionality as being-in-the-world and being-with-others-in-the-world of fieldwork. Moreover, the article dissects how the Kiganda tradition of okuluka omukeeka (weaving the mat) provides a methodological formula, logic, and creed that the author has employed to conduct fieldwork, analyze data, and write scholarly works. These decolonial paradigms, which confront, decenter, and critique the existing hegemonic Anglo-European research and writing canons, reveal the complex possibilities and pathways that are available for dance researchers to engage Indigenous knowledge systems as valuable and valid markers in the process of decolonizing academic research and writing in dance education.
