A Decolonial View

By: Kim Hoa Hof

One part of studying and fostering decoloniality for myself is to find practical tools to radically broaden academia. How can academia hold and reflect more of the world of knowledge production existing in the lives of the systemically underserved and marginalized? 

In the intersection of art and research (whatever is firmly outside of art in the humanities) I’m interested in poetic language as knowledge production. (Lee 2014, 30-31, Lykke 2014, 34-35) Poetry is often seen as something outside of knowledge, something only emotional or artistic. Yet, poetry can create its own kind of knowing. It does not offer facts or fixed answers but shows truths that can only be felt, glimpsed, or lived. Through rhythm, images, and fragments, poetry gives shape to what ordinary language cannot hold—grief, longing, memory, and the body’s quiet knowledge.  

Writing in this way is also an act of risk (Lee 2014, 12-13). To write poetically is to open oneself, to let words carry both strength and vulnerability. It resists being reduced to one single story or identity. Instead, it allows space for contradiction and for the possibility that meaning may shift over time. 

Poetry also bends time (Lee 2014, 115-117). It moves between past and present, between what is gone and what still lingers. It makes visible the moments where we are out of step with the world, where ordinary measures of time and truth no longer apply.  

Seen this way, poetry is not a decoration to thought but a method of knowledge. It produces knowledge through openness, through its ability to hold complexity, and through its insistence that imagination and lived experience matter. 

For all the above as well as further through beyond, this is one more text with the purpose of reminding academia that it needs the expansion of a lyrical language as one way of producing knowledge.  

Academia as a search for new knowledge  

should  

know no  

outer boundaries but instead look for the edges as guidance 

for 

creating friction, 

cracks, 

boundary events, for 

light let through, to 

peak in to 

something  

before 

felt  

unknowable.  

The enemy SHOULD be 

The conservator 

The fan of 

formats and praxis and procedures… 

Paragrafryttarens höga häst 

Dasssss besserwisser 

The Singularity 

who 

already knows 

all there is to know 

about what you can know 

about knowledge. 

Fellow student—dear teacher,  

I have decided to urge you to allow your light to shine through. 

Stay in touch with your particular brand of silliness! 

Break stuff—without a plan on how to make it whole again! 

Lose yourself! 

Leave your bed unmade! 

Let in the mites! 

Look for them… they are crawling in new patterns over the peaks where your duvet fell this morning. 

Steep to 

find your accidental 

penicillin… 

References 

Lee, Mara. 2014. När Andra skriver: skrivande som motstånd, ansvar och tid. Glänta produktion. 

Lykke, Nina. 2014. Writing academic texts differently: intersectional feminist methodologies and the playful art of writing. Routledge. 

Read more poetry within academia 

Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1999. Borderlands/La Frontera. Aunt Lute Books. 

Hallgren, Hanna. 2013. “Prolog till den litterära vetenskapsteorin”. Tidskrift för genusvetenskap: nr 1 2013.