Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement and the climate change crisis have thrown into sharp relief the vast global inequities faced by black, cultural minority and Indigenous peoples and created even greater urgency around the need to decolonise doctoral education. In this chapter, I explore how we might begin decolonising doctoral education by drawing upon Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ concept of the ‘sociologies of emergence’. The sociologies of emergences are ideas, philosophies and practices that are centred upon what de Sousa Santos calls the ‘epistemologies of the South’. These are Indigenous, Southern and transcultural knowledge systems that need to be officially recognised by universities. These sociologies of emergence are presently part of the Hidden Curriculum of doctoral education, particularly for Indigenous and transcultural doctoral scholars. Doctoral education, as a key site of knowledge production, offers an opportunity to reclaim, revive and extend these Indigenous, Southern and transcultural knowledges and make better use of these hidden reservoirs of knowledge and agency. In this chapter, I will share some practical examples from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Bolivia and other locations about how these sociologies of emergence build agency and researcher independence, especially among First Nations and transcultural doctoral scholars.