Introducing ‘decolonising knowledge and knowers’

Universities in the global South continue to struggle to effectively respond to the ever-growing calls for transforming and decolonising curriculum knowledge. Largely shaped and influenced by the #BlackLivesMatter, #FeesMustFall, #RhodesMustFall, #OpenStellenboschCollective, and others, the calls for econtextual and transforming curricula remain central across different higher education institutions in the global South. In this introductory chapter, we make a case for why we need a book focusing on what we call ‘knowledge-building’ in transforming and econtextual curriculum knowledge. We argue that the current transformation and decolonial discourses tend to largely be emotive and often do not offer a bold proposition(s) on how to foreground and focus on how curriculum knowledge is constructed, legitimated, and reproduced in curricula. In this chapter, we propose an analytical framework called ‘Legitimation Code Theory’ and show how it could be useful to seeing the different epistemic struggles that occur in legitimating curriculum knowledge, potentially opening different epistemic and discursive spaces for decolonial and transformative interventions. Our focus ranges across science, education, philosophy, and history, and showcases what curriculum transformation and decoloniality could empirically look like in practice.