YOU BELONG HERE. 3 - Who gets to theorise?: decolonial pedagogies in academic writing
Theory can often appear as something intimidating, abstract, and overwhelming in academic writing, especially as certain voices, geographies, and citation practices are more likely to make it as ‘theory’ over the others. This session seeks to demystify the processes that come embedded in theory and theorisation. It invites participants to engage with critical questions such as: Who gets to theorise? What qualifies as theory? And do theories only flow from Global North to South? Reflecting on editorial experiences at FR, this session hopes to dwell on the possibilities of writing and publishing outside and alongside the opaque frames of theory.
Facilitator: Dr Madhulika Sonkar, Professor of Sociology at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, Editor + Collective Member of Feminist Review
Free to attend, but registration is required.
Please email the team at [email protected] if you have questions about access.
YOU BELONG HERE. 30 Apr - 14 May
This session is part of the YOU BELONG HERE. online workshop series facilitated by the Feminist Review Collective and taking place at 12-1pm GMT on the following Thursdays:
30 April ‘Academic publishing as radical praxis’ with Dr Kyoung Kim
14 May 'Who gets to theorise?: decolonial pedagogies in academic writing’ with Dr Madhulika Sonkar
YOU BELONG HERE. is part of BREAKING THROUGH: Support for global majority researchers and creative practitioners navigating the journey to scholarly publication, a programme co-organised by the Feminist Review Collective and the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute (DeAI) hosting weekly online workshops from 30 April to 5 June 2026. All events are free to attend, but registration is required.
Click here for the full programme and links to register.
CONTRIBUTORS
Dr Madhulika Sonkar is a sociologist and editorial member of the Feminist Review Collective. She is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. With a decade of teaching experience across public universities in India, her work engages feminist thought, critical pedagogy, and future-making processes among youth in contemporary India. Madhulika’s publications in the Kohl, Feminist Review, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, and The Indian Express, among others, have interrogated the play of educational processes and practices among children and youth across diverse sociopolitical contexts.
The Feminist Review Collective edits and publishes Feminist Review, a pioneering interdisciplinary journal that explores gender in its multiple forms and interrelationships with other social categories and systems of power, publishing accessible knowledge and timely interventions that build on the work of Black, Indigenous, decolonial, and transnational feminist struggles. Publishing since 1979, Feminist Review has a global editorial board and readership, and currently prints and distributes in partnership with Sage Publications Ltd. The Feminist Review Collective is committed to inspiring exchanges of ideas and explorations of praxis that address, disrupt, and break through structural violence to make and nurture communities, connections, and ways of sharing knowledge founded on mutual respect, kindness, and care. We are committed to building, living, and extending a space of radical feminist practice that places care at its heart.
The UAL Decolonising Arts Institute (DeAI) seeks to challenge imperial legacies, ongoing colonial violence, and disrupting ways of seeing, listening, thinking, and making to drive cultural, social and institutional change. We imagine the Institute as a decentred, disruptive, evolving and porous space. As the Institute evolves, we aim to amplify local and global movements to decolonise and address the complex genealogies and geographies of postcolonial, decolonial and intersectional thinking and practice.
Image credit: Obentō no Jikan, Otomi Larcher, 2022 MA Graphic Communication Design, Central Saint Martins, UAL