The colonial machinery of research
A photo of a mummy in their coffin being put through a CT scan. This photo was taken by Morgan Clark for Chicago’s Field Museum in 2024. I felt it encapsulates the many layers of colonial approaches to research - including cultural theft, disconnected “observation” (scrutiny), othering, and exploitation.
Written by: Sabrina Meherally
I’ve chosen to publish this article because I believe that knowledge sharing is a responsibility. What you’re reading is my articulation and synthesis of perspectives that have been shaped and made clearer by the current context and the knowledge we’ve cultivated through Pause and Effect.
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Take a look at the cover photo of this article. What feelings does it elicit? This photo was taken by Morgan Clark for Chicago’s Field Museum, where 26 mummified bodies were scanned through a CT machine “without needing to disturb their delicate wrapping”. While the approach is being highlighted as a more sensitive and dignified research practice, we must ask ourselves, by what standard is this considered dignity? And whose worldview defines that standard?
Even in death, these ancestors are not free from scrutiny. Their bodies remain objects of inquiry, entangled in institutional displays and examined for scientific curiosity - without ever having consented. Dignity, in this context, is being measured through the lens of preservation and non-invasiveness, rather than relational ethics, spiritual sovereignty, or the ongoing politics of how bodies (especially racialized, colonized ones) are rendered knowable under the western gaze.
While it’s nice to imagine research as the innocent pursuit for knowledge, the reality is that much of what we label “research” today didn’t just grow out of humble curiosity. It grew from violent systems that saw research as a tool to justify and legitimize supremacy, subjugation, and control… and we are still living and “producing” knowledge within this architecture.
Modern research was born from war, slavery and imperial expansion
You’re right to ask: Hasn’t research been happening forever?
And the answer is yes. Humans (and more than human beings on this planet) have always engaged in some form of sensing, experimentation, and knowledge sharing. Inquiry is ancestral.
But at Pause and Effect, we find it useful to distinguish between research as a practice and research as an institution. Research as a practice is timeless. It’s how beings have always made sense of the world and their place within it. Research as an institution, however, is relatively recent, and has been deeply shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and militarization.
Mainstream research practices have largely been:
Built upon European conceptions of science, evidence and “human” reasoning
Carried out under and in service of institutions (like universities, governments, corporations, and other organizations)
Legitimized through peer-reviewed publication and professional credentials
Structured under the illusion of neutrality and separation - that researchers can be objective and removed from what they study
Rooted in extractive power relations that position some as knowers and others as sources of data, objects of study, or sites of intervention
Governed by logics like objectivity, control, replicability, and human supremacy
Since the 18th century, western empires have poured massive resources into knowledge systems to advance their goals of conquest, domination, and control. Research became one of empire’s most effective tools to categorize, dehumanize and subjugate populations, and to manufacture consent.
It’s worth mentioning how institutions in the US like RAND (Research and Development) Corporation (a so called “non-profit”) and DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) used research not to understand the world, but to dominate it. Whole disciplines, like behavioural science were shaped to support psychological warfare and develop technologies of destruction and control.
Ethnography as a tool of dehumanization and exploitation
Ethnography is often described as a method for studying cultures and communities. Through deep observation and immersion, researchers go “into the field,” spend time with people, take notes, and try to understand how a group of people lives, believes, and relates to the world.
But what’s often ignored is how the practice of ethnography is tied to colonialism.
Early ethnographers were often white European men - sometimes missionaries, soldiers, or “administrators” - who studied colonized peoples under the guise of documenting their “primitive” cultures. From British-occupied India to various regions across Africa and the Americas, ethnography distorted cultures under the western gaze and white supremacy. It became a tool used to categorize, control, and exploit communities - leading to land dispossession, forced labor and enslavement.
The field has contributed to epistemic violence and cultural theft, whilst stripping communities of their own voice, stories, contexts and dignity.
The colonial logics that still shape research
If we keep feeding our practice with the same shit, it will continue to bear the same fruit.
Objectivity over natural bias and entanglement: Researchers are taught to observe from a distance - to be neutral, detached, and “unbiased.” But this distance is a fiction. It was built within systems that positioned white, male, Western thinkers as default knowers - able to study others while remaining unseen themselves. The idea of objectivity masks the inherent entanglement between bodies engaged in inquiry. It erases emotion, relationship, history, and power. It protects those conducting research from recognizing how deeply they are implicated in the conditions, questions, and consequences of their work. And it sustains the illusion that knowledge can somehow exist as separate from the land, bodies, and contexts it emerges from.
Extraction and transaction over reciprocity: Colonial research was never about mutual learning - it was about taking and manipulating so called “information” about a community, species, or phenomenon. And that logic lives on. Knowledge is still harvested (not co-created) often with the thinnest layer of consent or compensation. Stories are gathered, translated, and published behind paywalls. Communities are thanked in the acknowledgments but left out of the benefits. This extractive logic mirrors the colonial project: take resources, stake your flag, and move on.
Control over complexity: Colonizers need categories to manage and control people. Modern research inherited this practice by building methods designed to isolate variables, reduce uncertainty, and produce neat conclusions - no matter how entangled or complex the reality is. As we know, life can not be understood through linear and reductive thinking. The desire for control flattens context and turns living systems into fixed data.
Surveillance over sovereignty: Research is still being used to monitor, police, and assault marginalized and Indigenous people around the world. Whether through monitoring socio-political movements, social media targeting, or environmental monitoring for corporate extraction - rather than research being used to support life, it is used to govern and control it.
So, what’s the way out?
In research we speak of “subjects,” “data capture,” “target populations”. These words, amongst many others, are deliberately drawn from military vocabularies. My colleague mayed wrote a fantastic post about it.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And it is precisely this awareness that begins to open portals of possibility.
We can begin by asking:
Who gets to define what counts as evidence? As truth? As knowledge?
Who does my research serve to benefit? How might it be used or misused in the future?
In what ways does my understanding and practice of research mirror the systems I claim to resist?
The way out isn’t a single method or framework. It’s both a practice of re-memberance and a practice of refusal.
If the roots of modern research were planted in war, conquest, and control, then the way out isn’t just to prune the branches - it’s to compost the soil. It’s to imagine research as a relational practice - one that helps us make sense of the world without disappearing complexity and difference, and imposing universal truths.
This is what we’re practicing inside Reimagining Research - a five-week program that we’ve designed for researchers, educators, artists, and changemakers to deconstruct modern conceptions of research and co-create something radically different.
If you’re curious to learn more about the work we do at Pause and Effect, and how we engage in research beyond the institution, please reach out to us :)