This article is inspired by feminist decolonial ethnography in the analysis of the Rafiki group, an informal network of domestic workers in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It explores their collective efforts to challenge exploitation and promote change, providing insights into a decolonial and feminist approach to prefigurative politics. Using Pedagogies of Unlearning, the analysis focuses on the Rafiki group meetings’ content, form and particularities of locality. The findings highlight the importance of embracing the diversity and complexity of life’s work and prefigurative politics. The research findings support a pluralistic perspective, drawing on studies from diverse cultural and geographical contexts to deepen our understanding of collective unlearning and social transformation.

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Background: This article contributes to the literature on gender and academic mobility by contrasting how postcolonial knowledge relations are played out in Swedish, Mozambican and South African academic workplaces. More specifically, it explores the experiences of gendered and racialised inequality in everyday academic working life in the three countries.Sample and Method: The respondents are Mozambican scholars who have participated in a Swedish development-aid-supported PhD training programme in which mobility is mandatory. Using an online survey and interviews, their experiences of gendered and racialised inequality are theorised through the lenses of postcolonial knowledge theory and feminist translocational intersectionality.Results: The results point out the importance of highlighting the complex ways in which bodies and spaces are mutually produced and how these change in different postcolonial translocal academic settings and create differing conditions for academic work. In this context, the concept of ‘embodied discursive geographies’ is suggested as a way forward.

Set in a Swedish university context, this article explores the complexities of postgraduate supervision among a group of students who are seldom included in research on the internationalisation of postgraduate supervision – development-aid-funded PhD students. The results highlight the importance of acknowledging students’ prior knowledge and mobility trajectories as crucial for developing emancipatory international supervision. Here the concept of ‘translocal supervision’ is suggested as a theoretical contribution to the field of ‘intercultural supervision’. 

In this chapter, we intend to explore the social processes involved in constructing a research topic as invalid and the role of affect in these processes. Taking research policy in the context of higher education as our field, and research from critical race theory 1 as our example, we study the discursive limits and conditions for research on the location of non-Western researchers in Swedish higher education, and on racial discrimination. We also address the dominant discourses that are activated when research using the concept of race is presented and discussed in public.