Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s book critiques how Western research has historically served as a tool of imperialism and violence against Indigenous communities.

Drawing from Māori experience and global Indigenous movements, Smith lays out how research methods, institutions, and knowledge hierarchies must be radically restructured. The book proposes alternative, community-led approaches that are accountable to Indigenous values and epistemologies. Through case studies, interviews, and political critique, Smith empowers Indigenous researchers and allies to reclaim agency in the production of knowledge. Decolonizing Methodologies is required reading across disciplines for its clarity, depth, and radical ethics.

This reference was recommended by the Bartlett Pan-African Indigenist Collective.

The Collective is a space for critical dialogue, activism, and scholarship that foregrounds Pan-African Indigenist ways of knowing, being, and creating. Formed by members of the Bartlett community dedicated to uplifting the voices, knowledge, and cultural legacies of people of African heritage and their respective Indigenous communities and lands, it aims to challenge colonial legacies and inspire transformation within institutional structures, research and curricula. By integrating creative and scholarly practices, the Collective works to restore narratives that have been silenced or misrepresented. Their work advances decolonial efforts in higher education by creating inclusive spaces and centring diverse African knowledge systems. Bartlett Alternative recognises the Collective’s vital contribution to broadening intellectual and cultural horizons through radical inclusivity and exclusivity, and thanks them for sharing resources that foreground lived experience, land-based knowledge systems, and epistemic justice.

Department Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment