This two-day conference will explore the theme of decolonisation through different modalities of learning from and generating knowledge with marginalised communities located in former colonies of the Global South. The primary research question is: “How can we constructively work towards problematising and reducing power imbalances in knowledge production between the Global North and the Global South in the fields of gender and sexuality studies?“ The central focus of the conference is the contribution to and extension of historical debates around the project of decolonisation. It is now a key framework and theoretical concept for scholars across many social science disciplines, including gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies, social anthropology, cultural studies and sociology. The decolonial framework exposes the project of knowledge production as a homogenised, standardised, positivist endeavour lacking diversity. This conference challenges the universalist understandings of gender, queer and sexuality that the Global North generates in an attempt to generate meaningful potential alliances between the Global North and the Global South. The main themes of the conference will be the interplay between institutions (family, state, socio-political), gender, sexuality and the implications of decolonisation on them; secondly, pedagogical and research approaches centred on decolonial perspectives as ways of understanding gender and sexuality. The relevance of the research lies both in the field of gender and sexuality studies and in the social sciences in general. Because this event will conjure responsible, answerable, enriching and socially aware knowledge by bringing in nuanced perspectives of those who have borne the brunt of the colonial project. In doing so, the organisers, speakers and participants aim to critically reflect on how this category of knowledge about gender and sexuality has come to exist, recognising how the creators of this knowledge are potentially invested in settler and extractive colonial societies.

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