Organised by Atwa Jaber, Nicolas Hafner, and Devarya Srivastava and co-hosted by the Centre for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism and the International History and Politics Department at the Geneva Graduate Institute, this second workshop (in a series) brought an inter-disciplinary group of scholars, artists, archivists, and educators working across geographies, disciplines, and institutions together to collectively examine the entangled relation between decolonization and its forms of knowledge. 

Taking place May 12 - 13, 2025, and divided across four panels and a concluding plenary roundtable, the workshop's recurring theme comprised the tensions between the promises that decolonization once held (and perhaps continues to hold) and the institutional structures within which these aspirations unfold, in particular asking how knowledge, memory, and heritage are produced, archived, and circulated, and the ways in which such processes either reproduce or resist colonial legacies. Speakers explored, for instance, how international organizations and state-led heritage projects institutionalize the past, often under the banner of democratization or development. Problematizing such initiatives, these interventions interrogated how seemingly progressive endeavours frequently depoliticized memory in the process—flattening lived differences in the service of a nation-led pedagogical agenda.

The workshop also foregrounded teaching, pedagogy, and the arts as fields of anti-colonial critique. The dialectic between restriction and expression recurred throughout the workshop, prompting questions about the kinds of histories and futures that existing epistemologies of decolonization simultaneously enable and foreclose. The discussions reflected an unease with simply recovering the past; instead, many participants stressed the need to interrogate the conditions under which histories are told, and who gets to tell them.

Several presentations grappled with the promise and limits of digital and artistic practices as tools of decolonial engagement. Projects like virtual and open-air museums, and co-curated school platforms were seen as both innovative and problematic. While these forms of storytelling can democratize access and amplify voices, they also risk reproducing extractive dynamics if questions of infrastructure, ownership, and audience are not carefully considered. Discussions became particularly charged when addressing how technologies mediate knowledge, with participants raising concerns about the romanticisation of “access” and the political economies that undergird digital spaces.

Throughout the two days, the role of positionality—of researchers, educators, and institutions—was a concern. Whether in discussions of feminist historiography, sociology in postcolonial Tunisia, or education in Black freedom struggles, the question was not just how to decolonise knowledge, but whether decolonisation is itself being appropriated, emptied, or domesticated by the very systems it seeks to critique. Several interventions emphasized the hybrid, situated nature of decolonial work. As the discussants repeatedly noted, the challenge lies in going beyond merely retelling suppressed histories but discerning the structures—both conceptual and material—that continue to shape what can be known and by whom.