Vincent Mauricio Kadiri

Fellowship

Mercator Fellowship on International Affairs

Period of the Fellowship

October 2021 - September 2022

Project title

Decolonial approaches in the natural sciences

Short biography

Can science ever be truly objective or apolitical if researchers are always also exposed to the politics of their time? To this day, colonial dynamics can be found, e.g., in textbooks, since non-European knowledge has been systematically delegitimized or appropriated since colonial times. Decolonial scholars in the humanities who push for a refocusing of non-European knowledge in curricula and promote polycentric modus operandi have a head start over the natural sciences in this respect.
The aim of the project is therefore to identify approaches to dismantle colonial “legacies” in the natural sciences together with activism, IOs and NGOs, to find ways towards just, human-centered science.