Multilingual un/learning for decolonizing management and organization studies research and education

Set up

The walls of the classroom of the Universidad Santo Tomás are light yellow, and while walking across the room, the brown, aged floorboards make a creaky sound. Different languages echo in the crisp mountain air that is finding its way in from the beautifully shaped, rounded windows. The diverse languages of the dominant remind us to pay homage and attention to the Indigenous roots of this particular place and to those languages and people who are on the periphery, silent and missing, and to all that remains unspoken. Some of us have met each other before, some are friends, and some are new colleagues.

A free-form writing session capturing our thoughts on the Gender, Work and Organization (GWO) 2022 conference’s theme, A (de)colonial view beyond the borders, is about to take place. Thoughts flow. Minds wander. The invitation in Spanish, Portuguese and English is to ‘write what comes through your fingers without further reflection on the structure of the writing, language chosen, punctuation, grammar or spelling’. As academics, we tend to overthink, but this time we are encouraged to be creative and embody writing continuously for 15 min to embrace the senses and emotions of that particular moment without stopping to edit or revise the text. Everything flows. No censoring. Within the walls of this classroom, a space is formed to critically reflect from a decolonial perspective on the connections and relationships nurtured beyond the temporal and material boundaries of the conference itself. In sharing the authors’ raw, handwritten texts, we contend that the field of management and organization studies (MOS) needs to continue learning to learn from different local perspectives and emerging, vibrant voices, particularly in relation to, and with the aim of undoing, the economic, sociopolitical and epistemic colonial constructs that perpetuate and enable exclusion (Allen and Girei, 2024; Banerjee, 2022; Liu et al., 2021), which signals the ethico-political practice of un/learning (Spivak, 1988).

While the need to say different things and do so differently has been well articulated in recent feminist MOS literature (e.g. Helin, 2021; Kaasila-Pakanen and Mandalaki, 2023; Pullen et al., 2020; Weatherall and Bridgman, 2025), in times of neoliberal and far-right ideologies reproducing imperialist, sexist and racist structures of domination and during times of war and genocide against populations and the killing and censorship of academics, there is urgency to speak up against the colonial, imperialist grounds that sustain such inequalities. Today, bell hooks’ (1995: 3) words resonate stronger than ever: ‘These days white racism can let it all hang out, hold nothing back.’ As feminist researchers, we break our silence and complacency across our different geographies, locales, career stages, personal situations and intersectional profiles. We write in feminist solidarity rooted in global justice (Pratt et al., 2025) and act as allies (Dar et al., 2020), connecting our voices against the colonial dominant structures that censor and erase embodied subjectivities in social and epistemic terms. Creating knowledge, knowing and learning are processes more often than not bound by borders, cramped or confined within the limits of certain languages, perspectives, disciplines and the epistemes guiding these. These borders are often predefined, reproducing a heteronormative, White, Eurocentric perspective of the world in which the experiences and knowledge of Global South voices and bodies are continually erased (Dar et al., 2020; Dotson, 2014; Zulfiqar, 2025) through epistemic violence and oppression (Dotson, 2011; Spivak, 1988). Writing as a collection of authors with different positionalities commits us to holding ourselves accountable for unlearning our privileges (Spivak, 1985), identifying and working against various exclusionary practices of othering (of lived experiences, peoples and knowledges) and exploring how it is to learn otherwise (Rojas, 2007; Spivak, 1992). In this way, we seek to participate actively in efforts to decolonize MOS research, classrooms and pedagogies (Abdallah, 2024; Bell et al., 2021; Chatrakul Na Ayudhya et al., 2023; Girei, 2017; Jamil et al., 2024; Nkomo, 2021; Shymko et al., 2022; Ul-Haq and Westwood, 2012; Ulus, 2015; Woods et al., 2022; Zulfiqar, 2025).

This text enacts decolonial resistance to challenge, undo and move beyond colonial systems of power, knowledge and identities in MOS. In this context, decolonial resistance refers to an active refusal of White dominance, heteropatriarchy and to any system of economic and political power that functions through racial exploitation, forced migration and harm. Equally, it relates to an act of epistemic disobedience (Mignolo, 2009b), delinking from the supposedly neutral, objective standpoint of Western science that upholds the above-mentioned oppressive systems and building knowledge grounded in local histories, lived experiences and worldviews. In the free writing session, our reflections emerged from our individual experiences and positionalities, each shaped by our relational entanglements with specific histories, institutions, spaces, places and people. The act of writing itself became a form of epistemic delinking, refusing the universalized, disembodied voice of Western knowledge production to make space for ‘other modes of thinking, knowing, sensing, and living’ (Walsh, 2018: 81).

In developing this text, we acknowledge our diverse and intersectional differences and positionalities, while also seeking to offer a holistic approach (McCall, 2005). Such an approach does not intend to erase individual subjectivities behind a comfortable ‘we’ but rather unite them across situated differences against the colonial systems of domination that reproduce structural injustices and the epistemic erasure of the marginalized (Ahmed and Ali, 2017). Using ‘we’ is employed here reflexively with careful consideration of the authors’ individual respective situatedness, unequally distributed privileges and vulnerabilities, as well as the related power dynamics unavoidably informing any collective making, which we do not intend to idealize. Further, we recognize the risk of simplifying embodied intersectional realities through reference to Global North and South perspectives. Acknowledging the wealth of intersectional profiles geographically positioned across Northern and Southern hemispheres, we do not use this distinction to denote geography. Following Mahler (2017), we use it as a deterritorialized marker of differential exposure to capitalist globalization, while recognizing that this distinction itself may inadvertently reproduce the binary logic we seek to unsettle. Furthermore, such a reference is used to denote the Western ideological and institutional grounds upon which academic knowledge traditionally develops in MOS and beyond, calling for this to be subverted. Thus, we use these terms because of their political potential, their ability to make visible the asymmetries through which MOS knowledge continues to be produced and legitimized.

By decolonization, we refer to the ‘diverse epistemic and ontological criticisms and refusals of Eurocentric modernity and its capitalist, patriarchal underpinnings’ (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021: 720). In Mignolo’s (2013: 249) words: ‘a movement of theoretical, practical, political and epistemological resistance to the logic of modernity/coloniality’. Fals Borda (2001) also contributes to the critique of Western positivism characterized by neutrality, universality and objectivity, which supports the ideological status quo and inhibits social transformations. At the same time, we hold the (im)possibilities of decolonizing MOS with honesty and care. Decolonization cannot be fully achieved from within the institutional structures that sustain colonial knowledge relations, including business schools, international journals, conferences and high-ranked funded research projects such as the European Union (EU) Horizon. The question is not simply whether we can decolonize, but what forms of partial, situated, and contested practice might open fissures in colonial epistemes. Such practices enable us to inhabit decolonial spaces and offer decolonial gestures.

As White/Western/Northern scholarship continues to uphold authority and govern MOS (Allen and Girei, 2024) while maintaining others in check throughout the knowledge production process (Ibarra-Colado, 2006), many academics from the margins are more likely to model their work according to this tradition, even locally (e.g. Ballestrin, 2013; Kothiyal et al., 2018). Decolonial feminists such as Maria Lugones (2010), Chandra Mohanty (2013), Vivian Matias dos Santos (2018) and Djamila Ribeiro (2018), among others, have long called for overturning the heteronormative, patriarchal, racist, epistemic, but also cognitive and affective grounds of social, political and economic colonial organization. Putting forward the contextual experiences of epistemically marginalized identities such as social positions that are made peripheral in systems of power, often based on race, Indigeneity, gender, sexuality, class and disability, these theorists advocate for further engagement with Indigenous knowledges and practices. Such practices do not involve appropriation or extraction of local knowledge but rather the creation of space/s for such knowledge to emerge as an epistemic insurgency (Pio and Waddock, 2021; Santos, 2018) rooted in relational engagements and exchanges (Girei, 2017). While embracing the wide range of organizational and individual responses and other forms of resistance intended to promote greater justice and equality in society throughout, decolonial approaches may thus highlight and amplify the transformative potentials of different feminist perspectives (Santos, 2018).

There is an increasing need for such endeavours in the current landscape where ‘most business and management schools remain on the periphery of debates about decolonising higher education, even as business schools in diverse locations function as contested sites of neocolonialism and expansion of Western neoliberal perspectives’ (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021: 718). Boshoff (2009) particularly criticized the lack of North–South academic cooperation, marked in particular by a relationship of domination rather than genuine collaboration. As a practical action (Girei, 2017), we write to join debates on the need to question White Eurocentric systems of domination in MOS knowledge creation (Allen and Girei, 2024; Dar et al., 2020; Nimruji and Gavin, 2025; Nkomo, 2021). This is a one-way flow of knowledge from the Global North to the margins, inviting spaces for experimentation at the intersections of art, writing differently, theory, methods, epistemologies and ontologies from the South (Gilmore et al., 2019; Mandalaki et al., 2022; Shymko et al., 2022). Our contribution to this debate lies in how we seek to un/learn from and perform decolonizing through relational, embodied and multilingual writing.

Writing against mastery with specific minoritarian epistemic positions (such as decolonial efforts that unsettle the Western/Eurocentric subject as the authoritative producer of knowledge and position the business school as a postcolonial extension of epistemic domination) suggests that epistemic decolonizing can only emerge from marginal positions that are not stable and immutable but relational, constantly being made, remade, transformed and negotiated (Abdallah, 2024). In the pages that follow, we present a tapestry of voices, each weaving their own understandings into the theme of a decolonial view beyond borders. The expression of voices resulting from the conference writing session can be understood as minor gestures (Manning, 2016), collective, concrete and situated acts of creating openings for something different to emerge and participate in redefining the tangible and intangible historical, epistemological and societal boundaries that frame our work as MOS scholars. As Manning (2016: 24) reminds us, these minor gestures are defined by their capacity to vary, not to hold or contain.

While we sought to create space for multilingual and embodied expression, some of our voices fell more easily into the registers of academic formality and theoretical distancing that MOS journals expect and reward. The tension between exploratory, first-person, uncertain prose and formal argumentation within this text reflects more than individual style: it may be read as a trace of what it means to be colonized not only by a dominant language but by dominant forms of knowledge production. Calling for local, vibrant voices as we do at the outset of this text, we also ask whether those voices are permitted to emerge from within us or whether the very act of writing for publication recruits us into a performance of epistemic authority that silences them. This is not a problem we have resolved; it is a tension we carry and partially make visible here as part of our collective practice of un/learning as we work both within and against inherited conventions of academic voice in MOS.

In this text, our motivation is to capture, individually and collectively, our shared journey in the particular context offered by the workshop and the conference. Challenging the intellectual capitalism and normative scholarly bodies and texts the international academic conference machinery tends to produce (Benozzo et al., 2019), the workshop provided us an opportunity to experience ‘conferencing otherwise’ (Osgood et al., 2020). Recognizing international academic conferences not only as infrastructures that shape legitimate knowledge but also as aiming to challenge the ways in which knowledge extraction often takes place there with informal circulation, organization and ‘linguistic filtering’ of ideas, relational labour and local perspectives within unequal configurations of visibility and recognition in the global political economy of knowledge production. This text has been influenced by ongoing and historical colonial violence that has shaped the contours of the present day and the privileged coming together of us, as writers of this text, in this neoliberal conference space. Our presence at the conference was entangled with histories of displacement, extraction and exclusion, as well as with the privileges that grant us access to international academic spaces. While we engage in efforts to resist this violence, we also benefit from the very structures it reproduces. As educators and researchers working within business schools across different continents, we recognize our complicity in the very structures we critique (Spivak, 1985). Although we live and work across global locations, our institutions are deeply embedded in Western epistemic traditions and organizational logics, and thus, this act of collective multilingual writing is entangled with the reproduction of dominant social formations and knowledge systems.

Acknowledging these multiple tensions, we hold space for accountability, complexity and hope that this collective piece, among others, may contribute to broadening the horizons of the continuous struggle to decolonize MOS research, writing and education. This is an ongoing, incomplete effort to transcend the theory-praxis and thinking-doing binaries traditionally reproduced in the academy (Anzaldúa, 2015; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Sandoval, 2000) to embody praxistical, other-oriented, relational onto-epistemological positions based on love, respect and caring for and with others (hooks, 2000; Jammulamadaka et al., 2021: 720). This multivocal and multilingual text attempts to break with the academic language hegemony (Andrew et al., 2020; Husillos et al., 2024) and offer reflexive and creative conceptualizations for transforming the ethico-political, social and economic futures of academia and this world meaningfully.

This is an invitation to question: (how) can we, as academics with distinct experiences, positionalities and voices, collectively create spaces to learn from, embody and engage in decolonizing MOS? Decolonizing MOS is a matter of academic survival, solidarity and ethical responsibility towards the bodies and knowledge that continue to be marginalized.

A collective writing process beyond borders

The authors of this text emanate from diverse intellectual and geographical places, currently situated in different academic institutions and career stages, across countries such as Colombia, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Australia, Spain, Finland, France and Switzerland. During the GWO conference workshop session that motivated writing this article, we embarked on a shared exploration into a theme that resonates deeply with the very ‘raison d’être’ of our academic profession and our onto-epistemological enquiries in this context: ‘Una visión (des)colonial más allá de las fronteras’, ‘Uma visão (de)colonial para além das fronteras’, ‘A decolonial view beyond the borders’. A writing workshop for the conference was organized by the local organizers and the GWO journal. Camilla, Emmanouela and Alison facilitated the session in Portuguese, Spanish and English. The invitation was openly addressed to all conference participants, and 35 participated in coconstructing the workshop. The workshop lasted for 1.5 h, and after a brief introduction, participants were asked to write freely for 15 min around the main conference theme. Some wrote their thoughts and feelings around the topic in their native languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, Finnish, Greek and French. Others did so in English. The idea was to unleash words through our embodied, affective and cognitive impulses, without filtering inspirations and waves of expression. After participants finished writing, some volunteered to read their texts while others shared the experience of sitting silently, writing. Beyond an intellectual space, the room quickly filled with emotions and affects that dripped through the written words and oral exchanges. Affect became the carrier of experiences, which somehow mitigated linguistic barriers. Before the session came to an end, the facilitators offered the idea of developing an academic text building on the workshop experience. Although all the workshop participants wrote, not everyone wished to participate in the development and writing of this text.

To bring the individual pieces written at the workshop into a common text, after the workshop ended, we engaged in a collective writing process aligned with our collective aims (Helin, 2023), both in terms of content and format, rather than adhering to what is usually expected from ‘academic writing’. While most texts were initiated and finalized during the workshop session, some were finalized later. Most of the texts seemed to have emerged from embodied processes submitted to the poetics of experience (Höpfl: 471 via Kociatkiewicz and Kostera, 2023), exposing vulnerability in incomplete experimental writing that also embraces the impossibility of absolute knowing in research writing and organizing (Kaasila-Pakanen and Mandalaki, 2023). Once the written texts were finalized and with everyone’s agreement, we formed a smaller group including authors from Colombia, Brazil, France, Austria, Finland, the United Kingdom and Australia (these countries reflect institutional affiliations, which in some cases coincide with nationality) to organize and develop the text’s first draft. To develop the text in a way that we felt did justice to each one of us individually and to all of us collectively, the smaller group read and reorganized the individual pieces and re/wrote the introduction and coda sections. We then coordinated reading each other’s parts and shared the text with the whole team of coauthors for feedback. This involved several necessary revisions until the larger team agreed with the final result. While the smaller team was formed for logistical and practical reasons across time zones and academic routines, the process of putting together the first draft and later working on the revisions was informed by frequent affective and reflexive exchanges within the smaller team; this also involved online meetings for common reflection. The aim was to bring together the creative, embodied and affective potentials of the authors’ intersectional voices, with sensibility and care, to surface the capacity to enact in our individual and collective ways our potential to decolonize management research and education. The current multilingual and multivocal textual expression took the form of a collaborative collage (Lafaire et al., 2022), better understood as colligere (see Kaasila-Pakanen et al., 2024) – a relational process which gave space to the building of academic community, within which we could rethink standardized research practices under colonial patterns of knowledge production and experiment with different ways of writing, thinking, relating and doing academic work. This process became a way of enacting academic activism and epistemic insurgency through everyday practices of research and writing.

During the process of developing the full text, we questioned ourselves about whether the texts should be presented in their original languages, since we did not want to create feelings of exclusion for readers and authors not speaking these languages. Exposing linguistic differences became necessary, not just methodologically but most importantly as a political practice and performative action towards decolonizing MOS. This collective praxis involves an invitation to train ourselves, as readers and writers of academic texts, to enhance our sensibility to and awareness of situated, unspoken realities often erased or lost in the English translation/s of academic thought, writing and understanding. Noting the need to include English translations, we also acknowledge the irony of having to ‘demote’, rewrite and append translations of the non-English contributions to make them understandable for an elite academic majority. Providing translations in the appendix, we invite readers to experience in the main article how it feels to not be in the privileged position of a fluent English speaker and writer. As much as we seek to enable an inclusive space for authors and readers, feelings of exclusion are possible and, although uncomfortable, can generate creative discomfort that is often necessary for feminist reflexivity (Hemmings, 2012).

In what follows, multilingual voices weave with the rest of the text, inviting readers to a reflexive reading process. Decolonizing, as it emerged through the workshop and subsequent relations with each other, as authors, involved staying attuned to affective experiences and shared moments of vulnerability, working beyond knowing towards unknowing and learning and unlearning. This text is a practical and performative attempt at decolonizing the boundaries of colonial structures of epistemic domination.

An urge for multilingual thinking/feeling/writing (English, Greek and Spanish)

I write. You stop. You write. I stop. Synchronicity. Thoughts interrupted by changing paces of pens and fingers running on keyboards. Disruptive. Maybe disrupted?

Here we are! Sitting in this conference room at the University Santo Thomas, in Bogota, reflecting and writing on decolonizing knowledge. It sounds like a joke. I have just started writing these lines and it all comes out in English – the language that has taught me how to write in and for academia. I sense unarticulated vowels and consonants entangled in the fine veins of my tongue, thought, sensed in other languages, starting with the language in which I first learnt how to cry and laugh. These are seated in restricted bodily regions, remnants of the epistemic filtering I have undergone, residing deep down still, blocked unmovable when I write, for academia. I feel dubious, dishonest for not listening to them, not valuing them enough, reminded of Camilla Sosa Villada who talks of writing as ‘el viaje inutil’ (i.e, ‘useless journey’). Who benefits?

μπροστά από την οθόνη συρρικνώνεσαι     the screen makes you shrink

το φως γίνεται ασπρόμαυρο            under the black and white light

και μαζί του και οι λέξεις           and the words

  ¿Cuáles son las fronteras entre lo que pienso, siento, escribo, leo, canto o bailo?

    En cual idioma bailo?

Which are the frontiers between what I think, feel, write, read, sign and dance?

  In which language do I dance?

     Whose linguistic, and along with it intersectional identity, is allowed access?

       Whose not?

I want to resist my academic habitus to write it all in English but it is just so much easier and more publishable. I will not hide it. On top, I find it really complicated to explain my work in Greek. I have hardly learnt to do so. Tasos, my new Cyprian friend and co-writer in this piece, resonates!

Anna-Liisa expressed a similar feeling for her native language, Finnish

Camilla for Portuguese

Katherine for Spanish

. . . we all had a story to tell about it . . .

are we ‘forced’ polyglots?

What do we lose when we lose the ability to articulate in the languages that provided us first access to knowledge, feeling and the capacity to touch? Do we inhabit our bodies enough?

Can/do we learn in the same way?

Can/do we teach in the same way?

Can/do we really engage in meaningful interactions?

Audre Lorde (2017) writes: ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’.

‘Mi casa es tu casa’¡Como se dice en español!

bodies we lose in translation

(Barros and Alcadipani, 2023)?

Can we bring them back to the bodies where they belong to dismantle the master’s house?

A few minutes before this exercise is over, feeling anxious. What is this nonsense? Can I ever present this to my colleagues? What will the editors and reviewers say? ‘Are you crazy?’. ‘Sorry’.

Trying to articulate in academese the polyglottic chaos I experience, on this ground where I step right now, is really challenging, maybe impossible. Colombia, a few years ago, offered me a place to call home and, with it, the linguistic, intellectual and cultural inspiration to go beyond borders, in my academic work. I am speaking of embodied, linguistic, affective but also geographical borders: visas, politics, flags, reviews, citations that create and surpass borders.

Being here and writing about this confuses me emotionally and cognitively. Images cross my head, swimming in a sea of vowels, consonants, music, poetries and colors. How can I bring this heaviness onto the page? Can we join each other’s words to create transfusions that disturb the linearity, rationality and seriousness of black and white? Maybe create a linguistic palette to speak of all the embodied, physical and affective conundrums going on here? An effort to speak chaos into language, not even knowing which language to use to do so in a way that does justice to the experience – at least speaking for my part. But I am not supposed to not know when I write for academia. Am I? And yet not-knowing is all I can claim, feeling stuck and liberated . . .

Can we cross each other’s boundaries through our (unknown) words?

What would such a text resemble?

I would give it a try? Shall we?

Colombia, June 2022

Dar la palabra a quienes no la tienen ¹   (Spanish)

Esta conferencia es mucho más que un simple congreso.

Si guardan la distancia necesaria a la investigación, al hablar de sus proyectos se siente una motivación tremenda viniendo del corazón y llegando al corazón.

Libertad de expresión: Pocas conferencias permiten dar un espacio tan grande sobre asuntos con poca mediatización, pero de importancia fundamental y eso en con una total libertad.

Compartir no es sólo una palabra sino mucho más. Compartir trabajos profesionales por supuesto, pero también cultura, experiencias de vida, y sentimientos es sin ninguna duda una de las mejores formas de aprender.

De hecho, dar la oportunidad mediante GWO de conocer e intercambiar aquí en Bogotá con personas del mundo entero es una suerte inestimable.

Además, cabe destacar el ambiente multicultural de la conferencia permitido por el formato multilingüe apoyado por GWO. Eso, además de reforzar los vínculos entre los investigadores crea una comunidad mundial más potente para sacar a la luz los temas fundamentales de GWO.

Queda mucho para llegar a una sociedad más inclusiva. Sin embargo, para lograrlo es imprescindible tener colectivos para liderar lo que Borda llama una descolonización intelectual de la sociedad es decir investigar concediendo la palabra y mediatizando a la minorías olvidadas con el fin de cambiar las mentalidades sociales . Esta prioridad es la esencia de la comunidad investigadora de GWO y la meta que intenta alcanzar diariamente.

Reconocer la humildad y otros modos de saber ²

Gender, Work and Organization Bogotá 2022 fue un espacio para evidenciar la humildad de sus oradores que entregaron en cada palabra un sentimiento que conectaba con los otros, aunque su realidad fuese desconocida por su trayectoria de vida, encontraron sonidos, gestos, ideas, imágenes e identidades que ubican al otro en su lugar y tiempo ¿Será que estos protagonistas desde otros lugares del mundo sintieron la seguridad de expresarse y presentarse tal y como son, con matices y diversos?

Se ha enseñado a contener los sentimientos, sin embargo, esos rostros no contaron una historia, sino que traspasaron las voces de miles de personas que no han podido escribir sus vivencias, preocupaciones, triunfos y desafíos. No se trató de un escenario netamente académico, se sintió y vivió como una máquina del tiempo, que recreó contextos, que hoy aún son desconocidos y se reconocen por los imaginarios dejados por hombres y mujeres de otras épocas.

Entonces, no fueron mujeres y hombres los que escriben sobre género, son seres humanos que comprenden que hay más de una identidad, rol, contexto y diversidad sobre el individuo, que se trata de comprender la sociedad a través de un lente mágico que va cambiando, que al escribir la historia a través de los roles, papeles y escenarios se está construyendo una narrativa, que expresa lo que se observa, se siente y lo que conmueve.

Finalmente, fue maravilloso recuperar esa historia oral para que no se obvie la posibilidad que tienen otras formas de transmitir lo recogido en las indagaciones o investigaciones.

Identificar la opresión entre la ‘élite’ de los ‘colonizados’ ³   (Spanish)

He encontrado en mis entrevistas con colombianos en el Reino Unido un poco esa estructura de clase social heredada de los tiempos de la colonia y asociada al hombre blanco. Por ejemplo, en la entrevista con el participante ‘x’, después de haberme dicho que es del sur de Bogotá me dijo que cada vez que una persona de Bogotá lo conoce, lo primero que le pregunta es por el barrio en el que vivió o vive su familia. Lleva más de 20 años en Europa y todavía sigue siendo asociado al lugar en el que creció y a todo lo que implica haber nacido en el seno de una familia de clase media baja.

Estamos hablando de personas colombianas muy privilegiadas, varias de ellas de Bogotá, personas que creen que hablan sin acento y que el resto del país habla otro tipo de castellano.

Persona que a pesar de sus privilegios olvidan que en países tan grandes como los Estados Unidos hay múltiples acentos, así como en su propio país, mucho más pequeño, también los hay. Estamos hablando de personas que se refieren a un acento en términos de pureza.

Es por eso que, el espacio Gender, Work & Organization celebrado en Colombia (2022), es sin duda alguna, un espacio macro que permitió repensar las realidades colectivas y menos las individuales, y en términos contraculturales, permitió repensar a esa elite minimizada por los patrones culturales hegemónicos y dominantes, así pues, este tipo de espacio, permite que desde el papel del ejercicio contable y una mirada hacia las organizaciones, se generen distintas cosmovisiones desde el punto de vista organizacional y contable, pero sobre todo realiza una invitación muy especial, que en términos textuales recaería sobre las siguientes cuestionamientos: ¿Cómo desde la formación del futuro profesional contable se puede coadyuvar a repensar las distintas problemáticas género, clase social, raza, entre otros?, ¿Cómo comenzar a consolidar espacios de brinden este tipo de discusiones? ¿Cómo desde las realidades de cada territorio y centros de educación superior para la formación en contabilidad se brinda espacios curriculares y extracurriculares de formación en genero y diversidad? ¿Qué prácticas o elementos didácticos se utilizarían para enseñar género en contabilidad?, sin lugar a dudas son estos cuestionamientos que pueden abrir otros escenarios de discusión académica en la comunidad contable en Colombia . . . ya que es considerado un asunto pendiente.

Desafiando procesos académicos dominantes, across languages, en dialogue ⁴   (Spanish and English)

Por múltiples razones me ha resultado extremadamente difícil reiniciar mis ejercicios de escritura desde el inicio de la pandemia COVID-19 y creo que el taller de escritura puede ayudar en esta reconexión. Me piden que desarrolle un texto libre en un cuaderno . . . algo inusual en esta era digital. Encuentro este proceso de embodiment, de personificación de un manuscrito, como algo simultáneamente sencillo, complejo y especialmente fascinante y motivador.

Al pensar en un tópico en el que pueda concentrar mi escrito en este espacio, tiempo y lugar, lo primero que viene a mi cabeza en este momento es la organización de una conferencia. Las motivaciones, los retos, los logros, los rostros sonrientes por el reencuentro . . . Pero no todo es agradable y muchas veces la organización no fluye de la manera esperada . . . Toca lidiar con la lucha permanente por espacios que promuevan la inclusión y la diversidad, con los aspectos logísticos, the language challenges, los fallos de la tecnología, los conflictos, la lista interminable de requerimientos institucionales, los desequilibrios entre vida personal y trabajo, la frecuente tensión entre las intenciones altruistas y ciertas pretensiones egocentristas, entre otras controversias que debemos incluir en el balance . . . Creo que hemos logrado resultados destacados y satisfactorios, donde persiste ese espíritu de compromiso con la academia, con la diversidad y con la construcción de lazos, no solo profesionales sino también de amistad y afectos que perduran en el tiempo.

Conjuntamente seguimos apostando a esta interacción y esperamos participar en nuevas iniciativas que trasciendan fronteras de diferente índole, beyond borders . . .

A pesar de las dificultades, controversias y voces en contra, sigo pensando que vale la pena. Más allá de las exigencias de los journals, de los rankings, de los incentivos (a veces perversos), de la presión por divulgar formalmente y ser citados (be cited or perish?), los eventos académicos deben seguir transformándose en espacios seguros para la conversación amable, para la retroalimentación rigurosa pero constructiva, para mirarnos a los ojos y sentir confianza, para seguir aportando al conocimiento y a las relaciones humanas, para sentirnos en nuestra propia habitación, recordando a Virginia Woolf, que dé alas a la creatividad pero no siempre en solitario sino también en comunidad.

. . .

‘At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial – and any question about sex [referring to women, gender] is that – one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker . . .’ (Virginia Woolf, 1929)

As a foreign-born academic, a woman of colour with Asian origins, there are always controversial thoughts coming into my mind in terms of how we can actually decolonise writing, or literature, or whatever the mainstream discourse has been standing for. I have to admit that, or at least to some extent, I’ve been constantly instrumentalized by academics from the Global North over the years of education and further training to become a ‘proper’ international critical scholar. However, I am also a feminist who, while being constrained by hierarchised relations that place academics from marginalised groups in more precarious and vulnerable positions, has a wild and resistant spirit throughout my body. The main reason for this is the fact that global north scholarship still ‘governs’ the field, upholds authority, and maintains others in check throughout knowledge production (Ibarra-Colado, 2006).

International journal publication is in itself an elite game, even for those from the Global North who sometimes feel like interlopers (e.g., Barros and Alcadipani, 2023). In contrast to existing international journal practices, decolonising the episteme requires great effort and transcends geographical borders. A journal would need to publish in multiple languages, have open access, and adopt a less Western-centric perspective on knowledge in order to be considered authentically decolonial. However, I am at scratch as to how and when we can succeed. My ‘inability’ to converse in my mother tongue occasionally makes me feel a little ‘weird’ (I lack the vocabulary for formal language). On the other hand, my scholarly writing has consistently been scrutinised for ‘perfect’ refinement.

. . . Questionner la langue avec laquelle on s’exprime ⁵   (French)

Malgré la difficulté que cela représente étant immergée dans un contexte anglophone, hispanophon et lusophone, j’ai décidé d’écrire en français – même si dans un but de décolonisation de la connaissance, je ne suis pas certaine que le français soit le meilleur des choix, symboliquement parlant, néanmoins c’est ma langue maternelle.

Je m’interroge alors sur le fait que le contexte francophone soit différent: il existe une communauté académique francophone dynamique qui publie ses articles en français. Mais est-ce du fait du passé colonial de la France et de la diffusion de la langue française à travers le monde?

Ne devrait-on pas chercher à disposer d’une production académique dans toutes les langues? En effet, ces phénomènes interrogent quant à la portée des travaux de recherche en gestion: comment diffuser la connaissance au-delà du monde académique si les académiques ne sont pas capables ell•eux-mêmes de discuter dans leur langue de leur travail?

Realidades escondidas de mujeres en el terreno contable ⁶   (Spanish and English)

En América latina, en las dos últimas décadas, se ha avanzado en la definición de planes de acción, con el fin de lograr una mayor participación de las mujeres en los espacios de poder y en todas las esferas de toma de decisiones en el ámbito estatal, para lo cual se ha promovido la emisión de leyes de cuotas y de paridad (Arias et al., 2024; Chamorro et al., 2022) Con este fin, países como Brasil y Honduras exigen una cuota de participación entre el 30% y el 40%, respectivamente, de mujeres en las listas electorales. A su vez, México estableció que los partidos políticos tienen que promover la paridad entre los géneros en las candidaturas a legisladores federales y locales. Cuba incluyó una medida tendiente a asegurar la participación de la población LGBTI, así como de los pueblos y territorios ancestrales en sus parlamentos. Y Ecuador ya cuenta con un 41,6% de mujeres en el Parlamento.

Además de los limitantes que tienen las mujeres en los espacios de poder, se reconocieron barreras sobre la participación de las mujeres en la ciencia, se plantea que se ven limitadas por responsabilidades familiares principalmente y esto conlleva a teorías como las llamadas ‘techo de cristal’ o ‘tuberías en fuga’ (González et al., 2022). Si lo analizamos lógicamente no dejan de tener razón estas teorías ya que sobre las mujeres recaen una serie de responsabilidades que le impiden dedicarse con mayor tiempo a la generación de conocimientos científicos (Chamorro and Irausquin, 2021). Es evidente que hacer ciencia es un plus en sus responsabilidades y concretarlo significa sacrificar parte de su trabajo, de la atención familiar, o su salud personal, esto último se traduce en perder horas de descanso, alimentación y genera trastornos físicos y psicológicos.

Es por ello que para muchos la propuesta del Congreso GWO 2022 sobre plantear ‘una mirada decolonial’ del género, el trabajo y las organizaciones, permitió una reflexión personal, académica y femenina sobre hacia las epistemologías feministas, las cuales cuestionan la economía capitalista e individualista y la visión androcéntrica de la ciencia. Particularmente, una de las investigadoras, enuncia . . .

Situaré mi voz en lo que Mignolo (2009) ha denominado ‘lugar de enunciación’, reconozco que mi formación ha estado impregnada de una visión funcionalista, cartesiana y positivista, dirigida a reproducir el poder hegemónico. Hago parte del grupo de académicos formados en Europa, inmersos en la cultura del ‘publicar o perecer’ que propende por publicar en revistas de élite y con preocupaciones angloeurocéntricas, atendiendo a un renovado orden de colonización del conocimiento, fenómeno que describe Ibarra-Colado (2006). Lo cual me hace dudar sobre la autoridad que tengo para escribir sobre el tema, sobre todo, teniendo en cuenta que hay militantes de esta ideología que orientan su vida y su inclinación académica a una lucha radical, sin reservas.

I will situate my voice in what Mignolo (2009) has called ‘place of enunciation’, I recognize that my training has been impregnated with a functionalist, Cartesian and positivist vision, aimed at reproducing hegemonic power. I am part of the group of academics trained in Europe, immersed in the culture of ‘publish or perish’ that tends to publish in elite journals and with Anglo-Eurocentric concerns, attending to a renewed order of colonization of knowledge, a phenomenon described by Ibarra-Colado (2006). Which makes me doubt about the authority I have to write on the subject, especially considering that there are militants of this ideology who orient their life and their academic inclination to a radical struggle, without reservations.

Lo anterior, cuestionó cómo la cosmovisión refuerza la lógica hegemónica que sigue teniendo asociados escenarios de dominación, jerarquización, exclusión y violencia, que por el status quo se normalizan y permanecen incuestionados. Siguiendo a Lugones (2014) estos esquemas no solo responden a asuntos y clasificaciones raciales sino también de género, de sexualidad, clase social y sus intersecciones. En ese sentido, el llamado sería a descolonizar nuestras estructuras, instituciones y realidades sociales, políticas, epistémicas, culturales, académicas y económicas particulares como latinoamericanas, indias, negras y mestizas (Ibarra-Colado, 2006), escapando de la universalidad y homogeneización de la humanidad, de las relaciones de dominación y de la hegemonía (Chamorro, 2019; González et al., 2022; Quijano, 2000).

En consecuencia, durante los últimos años se han levantado diferentes apuestas y banderas de luchas académicas al interior de la comunidad contable, a partir de las discusiones hegemónicas de las investigaciones sobre los enfoques epistemológicos y ontológicos en contabilidad, el papel del profesional contable en la actual sociedad del conocimiento y su individualidad. y responsabilidad colectiva ante los incesantes cambios en la estructura y superestructura económica y organizacional (Camarena et al., 2018), hasta la relación inherente con el desarrollo humano y su diversidad pluricultural, social, política, étnica y de género.

Es por eso que, el espacio Gender, Work & Organization celebrado en Colombia (2022), es sin duda alguna, un espacio macro que permitió repensar las realidades colectivas y menos las individuales, y en términos contraculturales, permitió repensar a esa élite minimizada por los patrones culturales hegemónicos y dominantes, así pues, este tipo de espacio, permite que desde el papel del ejercicio contable y una mirada hacia las organizaciones, se generen distintas cosmovisiones desde el punto de vista organizacional y contable, pero sobre todo realiza una invitación muy especial, que en términos textuales recaería sobre las siguientes cuestionamientos: ¿Cómo desde la formación del futuro profesional contable se puede coadyuvar a repensar las distintas problemáticas género, clase social, raza, entre otros?, ¿Cómo comenzar a consolidar espacios de brinden este tipo de discusiones? ¿Cómo desde las realidades de cada territorio y centros de educación superior para la formación en contabilidad se brinda espacios curriculares y extracurriculares de formación en género y diversidad? ¿Qué prácticas o elementos didácticos se utilizarían para enseñar género en contabilidad?, sin lugar a dudas son estos cuestionamientos que pueden abrir otros escenarios de discusión académica en la comunidad contable en Colombia.

Unfreezing for decolonial reflection, writing, and relating (English)

Freezing GUILT

Frozen like an ice cube, I am sitting in this lecture room at the University of Santo Tomás. Chilly breezes from the mountains are blowing through the open windows and the overwhelming task of jointly writing about how to decolonize our research makes me freeze up. I notice how my pen has been floating above my notebook for some time before I manage to start writing. Still, while writing these words, I feel frozen not only by the breeze but also by a sense of inadequacy to fulfill the task.

I do not know enough about our collective histories.

And about ways to decolonize.

Why don’t I know?

The painful truth is that I could afford not to know.

Because I had not been the one experiencing the pain.

I feel ashamed for not having questioned enough.

Unlike most other people in this room, I am one of the white Western scholars who flew around the globe to attend this conference thanks to the travel budget granted me by my wealthy European university. I feel like a complicit pretender. As if I was mainly doing this for myself to reconcile my feelings of guilt and buy myself out in a cheap way.

I can feel how my concerns keep me inactive.

Far from changing anything.

I realize that part of the process might be to accept the uncomfortableness.

Accept to stay with the uncomfortable that comes with awareness.

About how strongly white Western perspectives shaped what I have known and believed.

About the unjust world we live in.

Warmer TOGETHER

I want to change things and feel connection as I look up and let my gaze wander around the room. The other people are immersed in their own reflections and writing.

Reflecting and writing together as a group.

Uniting forces in finding ways to deconstruct, unlearn, and heal together.

Decolonize the ways we come together, relate to each other, and produce knowledge.

Looking for and listening actively to non-Western perspectives.

Making visible how the silent dynamics of colonialism mark our doing.

Continuously making ourselves and others uncomfortable.

I am used to staying with the uncomfortable. I know this feeling from my own position as a queer feminist activist scholar, doing research on power inequalities and harm caused by heterosexist patriarchal violence.

We have not experienced the same pain.

But most feminist writers in this room have experienced harms caused by oppression.

Most of us relate to some form of violence that is all encompassing and life shaping.

It is impossible to fight patriarchy, heterosexism, colonialism and white supremacy alone. We need this community to speak up for each other when our voices crumble. To push each other when we feel paralyzed and hold each other when our legs shake.

How can we build a feminism that unites intersectional alliances for decolonization?

A feminism that fights Western capitalism, racism, colonialism and imperialism.

A feminism that is queer and owns up to our different marginalized identities.

How can we unite sensitively and use our respective powers to support each other?

The connections I felt touched me. They motivate me to carry out the work necessary to build collective solidarity. Make me realize how important it is to acknowledge our differences and learn from each other. I can feel how I unfroze throughout this experience. Heated with new ideas and eager to dive into our discussions.

Yli rajojen: Moving beyond borders in academia and in the global LGBTI-community ⁷ (Finnish and English)

These texts do not tell my story.

There are certain key texts that I own only partially, and this applies to me both as homosexual and as academic. I know the right key texts and cite them correctly to justify my existence. Yet, these key texts are not written in my mother tongue and do not in fact tell my story.

Liikumme rajojen yli, varsinkin ajatuksissamme ja juuri nyt taas fyysisestikin. Uskon, että kuulun globaaliin LHBTI-yhteisöön. Se ajatus on auttanut säilyttämään itsetuntoni joskus nuorena. En ole vain kummajainen jossain Suomen maaseudulla, Euroopan laidalla, vaan kuulun yhteisöön, joka ylittää rajat, jolla on historia ja oikeus elää. Myös kolumbialaiset kokevat kuuluvansa samaan yhteisöön – ainakin sellaisen mielikuvan sain eilisen LHBTI-museokäynnin perusteella. Eilen karkasimme konferenssisalista muutaman kollegan kanssa piipahtaaksemme kyseisessä museossa! Museo oli fantastinen, sokkeloinen ja iso, seinillä kuvia Stone Wallin tapahtumista ja Harvey Milkistä, eri maissa murhatuista transnaisista, kolumbialaista taidetta.

Mutta. Vaikka ajatus globaalista sateenkaariyhteisöstä on ihana, on sekin täynnä hierarkioita. Amerikka nousee helposti keskiöön, tunnemme Stone Wallin tarinan niin Suomen maaseudulla kuin Bogotan miljoonakaupungissa. Niin kuin meillä ei olisi ollut omia taisteluitamme! Lisäksi historia kertoo lähinnä miehistä, jonkin verran transnaisista. Lesboista se ei kerro, eikä muunsukupuolisista, ei juuri transmiehistäkään. Jo sanasto on näiden muiden kohdalla vähemmän kansainvälistä. Ehkä tarvitsemme Stone Wallin ja Harvey Milkin, jotta voimme puhua itsestämme yhdessä, yli rajojen. Meillä on yhteiset tarinat, vaikka ne sitten ovatkin keskittyneet vain tiettyyn historiaan, vaikka normiksi asettuukin amerikkalainen homomies.

Pidimme tauon, kauniissa mutta kylmässä luokkahuoneessamme, yliopistolla, jonka ikkunoista näkyvät vuoret. Keskustelimme siitä, mitä akateemista kirjallisuutta käytämme, ketä siteeraamme. Akateemisissa avainteksteissä on juuri se sama ongelma, jonka minä ja nähtävästi myös kolumbialaiset kokevat etsiessään oikeutusta homoidentiteetilleen. Opimme tietyt samat tekstit, osaamme viitata niihin ja osaamme puhua samaa kieltä. Se tuo lämpimän yhteenkuuluvuuden tunteen. Rakennamme yhteisömme ja kommunikoimme yli rajojen.

Ja sitten on se toinen puoli, niin akatemiassa kuin globaalissa sateenkaariyhteisössäkin. Akatemian kieli ei ole oma kieleni eivätkä avaintekstit kerro minun kulttuuristani. Tekstien osaaminen tuo minulle tyydytystä, tunteen joukkoon kuulumisesta. Samalla juuri nuo samat tekstit toiseuttavat.

Avaintarinat Stone Wallista ja Harvey Milkistä toiseuttavat. Ne ovat oman yhteisöni historia, ja toisaalta eivät. Sillä eivät ne kerro suomalaisen homoyhteisön tarinaa. Ja silloin kun kertovat on esillä Tom of Finlandin piirustuksia. Lihaksikkaita miehiä rikkomassa hyväksyttävän maskuliinisen käytöksen rajoja. Tuomassa Suomen homoyhteisön tietoon, kalifornialaisten miesten idoliksi, ihanteeksi jota kopioidaan SM-klubeilla ja yksityisillä huviloilla. Omistanko minä tämän avaintekstin?

Onko mikään suomalainen akateeminen teksti saanut yhtä paljon huomiota kuin Tom of Finlandin tekemät kuvat? Ei tule mieleen. Ei ainakaan omalta tutkimusalaltani. Ja toisaalta Tom of Finlandinkin kuvien tapauksessa, vaikka ne kiistämättä ovat avainteksti, ne myös typistävät todellisuutta. Ja suomalaista tarinaa nyt varsinkin. Eihän hänen nimensä edes ollut Tom vaan Touko. Tom of Finland kuvaa kansainvälisen yhteisön ainoalle tunnetulle suomalaiselle annettua nimeä.

En omista avaintekstejä. En akateemisessa maailmassa enkä homona. Marginaalin voi toki joskus kääntää edukseen, kertoa jotain uudesta näkökulmasta. Mutta kuulluksi tullut tarina väkisinkin typistää kertomuksen. Haluaisinko olla Inkeri from Finland? Tai Ingrid from Finland, miten se nyt sitten kääntyisikään.

Reflecting back to my own research and writing (Hadjisolomou, 2021) presenting the story of Kathrine, a transgender woman who works in food retail in the UK, I question whether her experiences are similar or different from a transgender man or woman, or non-binary individual, in other national, cultural, and societal contexts, whilst reflecting on how the story is presented and whether it could be presented in a different way.

Un/learning – Re/learning (English)

Attending the Gender, Work and Organisation Conference I have experienced scholars with different attitudes to the idea of writing. Scholars who not just use writing as a tool to deliver information and facts, but rather to convey substance, emotion and situational knowledge.

Multidisciplinarity brings the opportunity not to be jealous of others, but to get inspired and motivated. I found myself asking ‘How can I bring that joy back into writing’ – not just for myself, but for my students. The elitist notion that some thoughts are worth more if expressed in a certain way. It is frightening how original thoughts not fitting the mould, are not worthy of being expressed and even less so heard. The value of our thoughts are colonized. Instead of assessing language qua writing from the outside as a system or formal framework of some sort; better, I believe, to explore and investigate writing from the inside. So think not of the vessel but of the content.

To illustrate, we can ask ‘is the quality of the cup of coffee I drink with my friend to be assessed by way of the cup from which I drink it or from the taste of the liquid and the experience? I would suggest that to decide what we really think of the coffee we need to take it in and taste it and then perhaps describe the flavour. We do not, or at least we ought not to, make judgments based on whether it is in a coffee rather than a teacup or if the cup is made from bone china, glass or cardboard. Similarly, we should not judge writing by its structure or type or style but instead by its content. To do this we must immerse ourselves in the writing and go beyond the borders that are imposed by tradition, orthodoxy and academic or other disciplining mechanisms. Only then can we assess ideas and propositions and arguments on and in their own terms and not according to some exclusionary and arbitrary set of ‘standards’ which serve only to perpetuate an exclusive and limited/limiting group of journals and publishing enterprises. That sort of elitism works only within pre-scribed limits instead of liberating themselves and others to expand current borders and explore new bridges to new realms of discovery.

Coda

Are borders to be patrolled and policed or rather be moved, crossed, and expanded? Are borders separations or can they also be used as bridges?

We don’t talk about breaking borders, we speak of going beyond borders and pushing boundaries.

Will we be always pushing, always trying to go further than these borders?

Can this empower us, strengthen us?

Some borders define us and stay with us forever,

But I realise not all of them I can wholly understand.

What are my own borders, and what are those of my neighbours and friends who gather around me?

As I look to find my place, I look to find my borders – not out of fear but to find strength and determination.

This way, together we find new ways to push beyond our collective borders, to define ourselves as a group.

Different, but here we are united.

The collective writing exercise and the production of this text illustrate the potential of un/learning that we hold collectively as academic allies (Bell, 2020; Dar et al., 2020) across borders and diverse positionalities. Holding our joint experiences in Bogotá as the location of/for knowledge production created opportunities for dialogue that reflect embodied histories, linguistic and cultural differences and contextually situated truths. Revealing the knowledge of our different bodies, bodies often sitting in the margins of normative discourses, we seek to enable meaningful possibilities for constructing conditions for more inclusive knowledge (Ribeiro, 2018), learning and unlearning. Collins (2000) reminds us that those with positions outside the dominant centre provide the vantage point of the ‘outsider-within’, one that sees both inwards and outwards across margins and centre, offering visceral access to the palpable intersections of race, gender, sexuality and place (among others) in the development of subjectivity (Guschke, 2023). Collective writing becomes an effort to learn from and rethink the potential of traditionally disadvantaged epistemic identities to participate in collective dialogue (Dotson, 2014) and to democratize academic research through acknowledging multiple linguistic and cultural perspectives (Ghio, 2024).

In reading each other’s texts, we have participated in a practice of reading and listening that resists cooptation and erasure by recognizing our differences, which are often lost in translation or representation. Instead of seeking to explain the embodied texts of the authors, we recognize that we are situated in ethically complex spaces of relations and remain open to the discomfort of not fully understanding and knowing and to the possibility of learning and being transformed by this. In this way, we are able to rethink our epistemes, fuelled by relational learning (Doucet and Merla, 2007; see also Kaasila-Pakanen et al., 2024), thinking otherwise (Mignolo, 2013; Rojas, 2007; Spivak, 2012) and reflecting relationally (Doucet and Merla, 2007; see also Kaasila-Pakanen et al., 2024). Through thinking and imagining otherwise, spaces are created where, in the words of Cristina Rojas (2007: 585), different narratives come into contact with each other, allowing marginalized perspectives to reveal their own interpretations. In this way, spaces are created for the ongoing pursuit of accommodation, contradiction and resistance for the construction and reclamation of diverse feminist subjectivities and relationalities outside of dominant norms and marginalizing conventions.

During the workshop and the writing process, emerging themes flourished in relation to critical decolonial positions and the relationship between intersectional perspectives, including gender, race and social class, among other social markers, both within and outside organizations, including academia. Similarly, the various conference streams focused their discussions on how to find different paths and actions that can address or mitigate the various gender and broader issues faced globally by intersectional bodies, such as the multiple conditions of inequality, hierarchization, labour segmentation and segregation of subaltern groups, women, queers and intersectional bodies not abiding by heteronormative ableist standards. This text offers situated perspectives on many of these issues. It houses the performative praxis of decolonizing writing, seeking to make space for diverse embodied realities to coexist. This performative decolonial praxis extends emergent literature debates, part of the decolonial turn in MOS (Alcadipani et al., 2012; Jack et al., 2011; see also Mignolo, 2009; Santos, 2018), actively standing against mainstream Western epistemological approaches, which ‘(re)introduce and (re)produce colonial beliefs . . . as a set of tools’ used by privileged actors to dominate marginal bodies (Chowdhury, 2023 [2022]: 2; Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Mandalaki et al., 2022). Based on Santos, imagining a ‘decolonial turn’ is a way to reflect on the decolonial struggle as a broader process of epistemic insurgency and disobedience in modern institutions, such as universities, arts and politics (Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel, 2007); as openness and freedom of thought and other forms of life in opposition to colonial forms of being and knowing (Santos, 2018: 4). This goes against the obsession with making theoretical contributions (Prasad, 2023), where we seek to use reflexively the spaces we occupy as academic researchers, writers and activists (Zanoni et al., 2024).

A main consideration that emerged through our shared process is related to the dominance of the English language in organization research and education. ‘English is the imperial language of the business school’ and not just symbolically but materially; this epistemological universe produces tangible oppressive effects by limiting our thinking (Abdallah, 2024: 5), and we add feeling, being and relating. Such dominance leads many of us, also from within this authorial team, to navigate processes of double translation in developing academic arguments (Wanderley et al., 2021). Notwithstanding the usefulness of finding a common linguistic denominator to communicate among geographies and backgrounds, as engaged academics with critical, queer and feminist sensibilities, we become increasingly reflexive of the risks of using a dominant language in MOS research. Namely, given the difficulty for nonnative speakers to master English at a publishable level (which is also why many of us chose to write in different languages), our collective writing process makes us wonder who can access mainstream MOS journals and who is left outside. It also encourages us to reflect on all the pieces of contextual information and truths that are rendered invisible and unspeakable as untranslatable (Chowdhury, 2023 [2022]; Mandalaki, 2023). These considerations surface questions such as: How can we engage with local languages (maybe in combination with English) in offering learnings from and to the field? Can we reconsider the linguistic barriers shaping organization research? And if so, what does this also mean for the kind of empirical material that we use and for the theories which we cite in conceptualizing the contextual truths that we study? Which authors are made visible, and which are not under the thick covers of Eurocentric theoretical, methodological and epistemological traditions? What is it that we may lose in translation?

As well as problematizing the dominant use of English in MOS, asking these questions pushes us to interrogate the politics of citation, which functions as one of the main gatekeeping mechanisms conditioning the knowledge we create as organizational researchers (Ahmed and Ali, 2017; Ribeiro, 2018). What debates can we be part of if we want to ‘be published’ (more as passive than active subjects), and what does this mean for the intersectional bodies we study and for all those theorists and methodologists whose names might never (or rarely at best) see the ‘light of the day’ in the current conditions of knowledge extraction and appropriation? Being aware of the dangers that this involves for undermining localized, embodied and contextual truths, we call for questioning the Whiteness and heteronormative standards shaping knowledge creation (Whiteness is not used here to denote biology but rather an institution, see Dar et al. (2020), Ahmed and Ali (2017) and Ribeiro (2018) for related discussions). We might engage with theories, epistemologies and methodologies which remain attentive to the special needs and perspectives of the contexts that we study. In this endeavour, we can turn towards epistemologies of the South, decolonial, postcolonial, transnational feminist, intersectional, queer and Indigenous perspectives which help us to visibilize voices and bodies long disregarded by MOS and education (Mandalaki, 2023; Mandalaki and Prasad, 2024; Mignolo, 2009; Santos, 2018). We shall adopt a more humble stance towards the other and towards knowledge creation itself, and become increasingly aware of the impossibility of ever claiming full knowledge of the different other (Gilson, 2011; Kaasila-Pakanen et al., 2024). Such an approach might reframe the absolutism, certainty and elitist wording we often adopt in making knowledge claims. It can make us (more) reflexive of the diverse ‘places of speech’ (Ribeiro, 2018), or ‘spaces of enunciation’ (Bhabha, 2007), involved in research; these are important to state and acknowledge if we are to unearth the social conditions shaping power relations between different social groups (Collins, 1997).

Reflecting on our process also leads us to consider and valorize the grounds upon which we stand in developing feminist knowledge with relevance for the study of organization, work and gender. Which spaces, locals, theorists and institutions give us the means and possibilities to reflect on our topics and research questions in ways that pay attention to the context and the diverse voice/s therein? How might being in touch with otherness while in the ‘here and now’ reconfigure the knowledge we create and our attitude towards this knowledge? For us, engaging in this free writing exercise in the historical building of Santo Tomás University was a humbling experience, deeply formative and educational, making us reflect on the colonial history of the grounds that were hosting this exchange. A year later, when some of us met at the 13th GWO 2023 conference in Stellenbosch University, South Africa, and reflected on this collective experience of writing, the environment in which our conversation continued was (again) marked by a(nother) history of racism, colonization, apartheid, gendered and social class divisions. When looking back and while convening a conference stream in this region of the world and immersing ourselves in the local culture, we were reminded of our (often unquestioned) privilege of being able to cross borders, coming from regions where the mainstream academic language is widely diffused. We are also aware that the international conference, as a neoliberal form, is not exempt from the colonial logics we seek to contest (Osgood et al., 2020) even though these conferences make possible the attendance of local academics. Benozzo et al. (2019) suggest that neoliberal conferences constitute material-discursive spaces of recognition. Drawing on Butler’s (1997) notion of inaugurative power, Benozzo et al. suggest that such spaces confer status, acceptance and belonging for academics at all career stages, functioning and can act as gatekeeping mechanisms for who counts as a legitimate scholar. In this sense, the conference reproduces the very economies of visibility and legitimacy that decolonial work seeks to unsettle. Gathering in Bogotá at a conference organized by multiple academics across universities (the three-day conference was held at a different university each day) embodied the local team’s commitment to work across institutional borders. And while there was much joy gathering in Colombia for a conference known historically as an English conference, the unequal conditions of mobility, language, and institutional funding were present. We do not raise this as a reason for paralysis, but as an invitation to think differently about how conferences could be organized and accessed, so as to broaden rather than further restrict the conditions of collective knowledge-making from and within the margins. Standing on Colombian soil made us aware of how context, power relations and geographies might shape our reflections, leading us to ask how we might continue to build upon the bridges we sought to create in these fleeting, unique moments, four years ago.

Acknowledging the contextualities of this writing and the varied positionalities of its writers is probably one small step towards decolonizing MOS and education, which is important. We suggest that where/how we meet and socialize, as academics, as well as the kind of spaces we as academics open for (or close off from) collective dialogue matter. If it were not for the very truth of being in Colombia and South Africa, hosted by the historically, racially and colonially marked grounds of these locals and academic institutions as well as for the open and embracing space of the GWO conference itself, we might never have reflected on the need to engage in an active collective endeavour towards decolonizing MOS and education. Stepping out of elite business school spaces, classrooms and conference rooms matters (Zulfiqar, 2025). Beyond raising the need to problematize vested practices of organizing and processes of researching and writing organizations, we could also work to promote the diffusion of different views and approaches in the classroom. This might involve revisiting the very curricula that we use to present to our audiences, as well as reconsidering our motivation and reflexivity in becoming teachers who can foster alternative understandings of diversity, intersectionality and gender in the learning of management and organizations (Patiño Jacinto et al., 2022; Rodelo and Castro, 2016). Problematizing the hegemonic system of minimization of diverse and multicultural practices in organizations and beyond can allow making the classroom a place of possibility (hooks, 2009; Woods et al., 2022) to train professionals sensitive to transforming meaningfully the structural grounds that shape problematic sociopolitical realities in this world (Mandalaki et al., 2022):

Como señala Freire (1984), debemos leer el texto en un contexto, es decir comprender dónde se presentan los fenómenos, esa diversidad de contextos y su conocimiento hace que avancemos y tomemos postura en el estudio de temas como el género en las organizaciones.

As Freire (1984, see also Barros et al., 2024) points out, we must read the text in a context, that is, understand where the phenomena are presented; this diversity of contexts and their knowledge makes us advance and take a position in the study of topics such as gender in organizations.

Reflecting on this, as a collective of bodies marked by different histories, we contend that where and how we meet, write and socialize matters. We shall commit to and call for academic spaces that think otherwise – spaces promoting multilingual, multivocal dialogue, collective reflection and experimentation, where intersectional voices and contextual truths long silenced by MOS research can find space to emerge. In this way, we might creatively unsettle the White-Western colonial standards of academic oppression, which exclude different others from collective dialogue by assigning to them epistemically disadvantaged identities (Dotson, 2014). Instead, we shall embrace a plurality of theoretical, methodological and epistemological perspectives and adopt an open attitude towards ourselves and the other, which considers our embodied potential to affect and be affected by each other through the knowledge we create (Bozalek, 2020; Gherardi, 2019).

With the above in mind, this text offers an invitation to reconsider the conditions of knowledge creation; especially what counts or does not count as a ‘meaningful contribution’ in MOS; what kind of knowledge development patterns we sustain in MOS research and academic institutions shaped by heteronormative colonial ideologies; with what kind of colonial grounds, and tangible lands, do we dialogue in/through the knowledge we engage with and reproduce; how does colonial knowledge lead to ‘epistemicide’ (i.e. disqualification of the knowledge potential of marginalized people, Carneiro, 2005) and who actually benefits from this; whom does this knowledge make visible and whom does it exclude?

Turning our critical gaze towards ourselves, as researchers and writers of organizations and processes of organizing, to problematize the very epistemic boundaries we face and often unconsciously (and unreflexively) reproduce in creating and disseminating academic knowledge, we start to acknowledge our complicity in reproducing difference, otherness, and inequalities (Ashcraft, 2018; Spivak, 1985). Reflexively considering our potential to engage with decolonizing practices from our privileged positionalities to invigorate management education (Allen and Girei, 2024; Chatrakul Na Ayudhya et al., 2023) is required. Such consideration involves the choice of the theories, methodologies and writing styles that we engage with, as well as the languages (academic and national languages) that we choose to discuss the embodied and contextual truths that we study, among other related considerations.

Our  collective and multilingual writing experiment contributes to Management Learning by unsettling dominant assumptions about what it means to learn, teach, and write within business schools. By engaging with embodied, situated and affective epistemologies, we respond to calls to ‘write differently’ (Helin, 2021), learn from the margins (Pullen et al., 2020), and politicize education echoing a Freirean critical pedagogy (Barros et al., 2024). In particular, we propose that decolonial learning needs to go beyond curriculum change to include disruptions in form, voice and language, thereby reimagining not only the content of management education but also its conditions of possibility. Our experiment demonstrates that multilingual collective writing can be a powerful pedagogical and epistemological act, one that opens space for marginalized voices and affective knowledge to be heard, felt and recognized. This orientation toward relational, plurivocal, and politically engaged knowledge production aligns with ongoing debates in Management Learning about epistemic justice, alternative learning spaces, and the ethics of academic engagement (Barros, 2025; Cavalcanti and Silva, 2024). Plural ways of knowing and writing might expand the boundaries of what counts as learning in MOS.

As we reach the end of this text, we stress that writing as a group of authors does not seek to idealize the existence of a shared voice at the expense of individual voices. This collective writing involves dangers for individual positionalities not expressed or represented (enough) by the collective, despite efforts to the contrary. While we remain attentive to our different positionalities and the unique situated truths of our individual voices, we bring our voices together to enhance them (Kaasila-Pakanen et al., 2024), moving towards decolonizing MOS research and education (Jammulamadaka et al., 2021; Nimruji and Gavin, 2025). Reciting Mignolo, decolonizing might be seen as ‘a diverse horizon of liberation of colonial subjects, constructed by the colonial subjects themselves’ (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018: xiv). Thinking, feeling, being, becoming and doing from the margins of otherness is here embodied as a praxistical epistemological approach, carrying the moral, ethico-political force of the ‘excluded Other’ (Dussel, 2013; Jammulamadaka et al., 2021: 728). At the same time, we acknowledge that epistemic decolonizing in business schools becomes possible in the margins; it is ‘an incomplete project whose incompleteness we should all welcome’ (Abdallah, 2024: 1). This is what we aim towards in writing this text, extending an invitation to future readers and researchers to add their own unique voices to this emerging debate.

The question remains: why are we not capturing these experiences; and if we claim that we are, what is there more to understand and how are we presenting them? Are we using the correct language? And is the correct language only the ‘academic language’?

Essa reflexividade decolonial não é tão fácil de ter. Falamos na conferência sobre posicionamento, reflexividade, ‘colonized within’. É um trabalho, uma luta de todo dia. Até que vire um reflexo, como escovar os dentes.

This decolonial reflexivity is not so easy to have. We talked at the conference about positioning, reflexivity, ‘colonized within’. It’s a job, an everyday struggle. Until it becomes a reflex, like brushing your teeth.

Es así como, a partir de las discusiones presentadas en el GWO Bogotá 2022, cabe cuestionarse: ¿Qué sigue? Y se logra identificar que hay caminos importantes y pendientes de explorar, cómo la interseccionalidad, la cual no ha sido abordada de forma directa en los estudios de organizaciones. Por otra parte, se evidencia la necesidad de estudiar las situaciones de la población LQBTIQ+ . . . hay mucho que estudiar, mucho que investigar y muchas soluciones que proponer. Por último, se resalta la importancia de construir comunidad, de conocer las personas que leemos, de conocer la persona más que el investigador, de contar con los otros, con los que hasta ahora eran ajenos, dar visibilidad e importancia a la comunidad y a los temas que estudian y preocupan la comunidad académica en los estudios de género, trabajo y organizaciones. ⁸

(Spanish)

Supplemental Material