01/07/2026 16:10 - 19:30

HALL: Pola - A107

Contact: Muslim C.

Chair: Cargnelutti F.

The panel foregrounds how epistemological hierarchies, rooted in colonial histories, racialised knowledge systems, gendered exclusions, and Eurocentric academic canons, continue to shape whose religions, spiritualities, and ways of knowing are recognised as legitimate within higher education. Bringing together African (focus on South Africa) and European perspectives, this panel examines how educators attempt to teach religion in ways that resist epistemic injustice while operating within institutions still structured by colonial and neoliberal logics.
We engage critically with questions of epistemological privilege: Who gets to define what counts as religion, spirituality, theory, and evidence? How are race, gender, and religious identity entangled in the production of academic authority? And how might pedagogies rooted in relationality, lived experience, spirituality, and plural ways of being disrupt dominant hierarchies of knowledge? Rather than offering a celebratory narrative of "decolonisation," the panel situates decolonial pedagogy as an ongoing, fragile, and contested practice, one that exposes both the possibilities and the limits of teaching religion within unequal worlds.