Prihandita, Anselma Widha. Navigating Global Colonialities: Epistemic Translation and Transcoloniality in Knowledge Production Across Borders. 2025. University of Washington, PhD dissertation.
Adviser
This dissertation looks into how writing and knowledge-making practices are embroiled in colonial structures that are transnational in nature. To probe the workings of global knowledge networks, it presents ethnographic case studies on the research and writing processes of transnational Indonesian graduate students at an R1 U.S. university. Of particular interest was how these non-Western student-scholars engaged with feedback given on their research and writing, as they were often positioned as “incomprehensible” by the readers and audiences of their work. Seeing how such feedback sometimes was given despite their fluency in standard academic English and disciplinary discourse, this dissertation problematizes this construction of “incomprehensibility” and views such kind of feedback as a mechanism of Othering that draws geopolitical power relations and epistemic inequality into sharp relief, putting a disproportionate burden of translation—both linguistic and epistemic translations—onto multilingual non-Western scholars. The ethnographic case studies presented in the chapters show the consequences of this disproportionate burden of translation. One case study highlights the double bind that transnational scholars face in communicating knowledge from a less privileged context: the strategies used to render these knowledges comprehensible are also ones that negate such attempts at comprehensibility. In order to make themselves comprehensible, the scholar must transmute their Indonesian knowledge into the terms of the English language and Western-centric academic communication, which may require them to minimize or leave out elements particular to their Indonesian research context. Another case study shows how a scholar’s epistemic translation efforts were hindered by both American and Indonesian discourse conventions, each of which acting as a distinct configuration of epistemic colonial structures that then work together and compound each other, showing how transnational composition is ultimately also transcolonial composition: it involves movements across not only geographical borders, but also colonial structures. This calls for literacy practices, writing pedagogies, and graduate mentorship that are both transnational and decolonial, as well as a rethinking of what it means to be “comprehensible.”