Songing-Worlds as Inter-Epistemic Decoloniality

Department of Communication Science University of South Africa (UNISA)
28 October 2026 | 11:00 AM–12:00 PM | Muckleneuk Campus, Tshwane

This seminar introduces Songing-Worlds as an inter-epistemic approach to decoloniality, drawing on research encounters with singers and knowledge practitioners across Ireland, Azania, and Abya Yala. Grounded in Gaelic epistemic concepts such as dúchas, oideas, seanchas, and casadh, it reflects on how the sonorous practices of colonized people may encounter each other in ways that affirmative each others’ experiences of colonialism, autonomous conceptual worlds and sonic research practices.

The presentation engages with different schools of decolonial thinking and the tendency to measure resistance through prescribed forms of militancy. It asks whether indigenized song practitioners from different zones of colonized experience can determine the strategies for intervention into dominant institutions themselves, without arbitration by the academy or by external theories. The seminar presents a key research finding: through an exchange of Irish language songs with indigenous song practitioners in Azania and Abya Yala, pedagogical possibilities emerged to break down colonial knowledge structures through the humanizing methodologies embedded in indigenous sonorous practice.

Through Songing-Worlds, the seminar argues for a decoloniality that serves as an interlocutor between epistemic worlds without becoming their theoretical arbiter. Its task is to support the conditions through which indigenized knowledge traditions sustain themselves, encounter one another, and articulate their own philosophical possibilities beyond the epistemic authority of Anglo-modernity.