Accompaniment
A form of research that happens alongside individuals and communities rather than through a strict researcher/participant divide. These relationships are often mutually beneficial and create learning opportunities for both researchers and participants.
Voice: Dutta

Collectivism
A social structure in which the needs of a group are prioritized over individual needs. This term is often contrasted with individualism.
Voice: Comas-Diaz

Colonial feminism
Sometimes referred to as imperial feminism, colonial feminism describes the use of women’s rights to justify or legitimize colonialism and imperialism.
Voice: Dutta

Coloniality of being
A term Segalo draws from Walter Mignolo to describe how colonialism dehumanizes people and shapes lived experience, especially for Black women who are pushed into what Frantz Fanon called the “zone of non-being.”
Voice: Segalo

Counternarratives
Stories that challenge dominant or official accounts by offering alternative perspectives that highlight the complexity and agency of marginalized groups. Counter-narratives are central to decolonial feminist work because they make lived realities visible through visual, oral, written, and community-based forms.
Voice: Segalo

Counterstorytelling
A storytelling practice that disrupts dominant narratives about a group of people, especially narratives used to dehumanize them.
Voice: Dutta

Critical Consciousness
An understanding of how systemic oppression shapes people’s lives, paired with a motivation to act against oppressive systems.
Voice: Comas-Diaz

Decolonial feminism
A framework that challenges the ongoing legacies of colonialism in knowledge production, social structures, and gender relations. Decolonial feminism centers the experiences, voices, and epistemologies of those marginalized by colonial and patriarchal systems, especially women of color in the Global South.
Voice: Segalo

Epicolonial
The continuation of colonial relations of power through subtle, often unnoticeable ways that cannot always be directly traced back to colonization, but nevertheless reproduce its effects. For example, university policies that privilege western knowledge traditions can exclude racialized students without naming race explicitly, reproducing racial hierarchies.
Voice: Kessi

Epistemic violence
Harm caused when dominant groups define their knowledge as universal, erasing other ways of knowing. For example, psychometric testing has historically framed western norms and culture as the standard (e.g., intelligence testing), dismissing non-western knowledge systems as inferior.
Voice: Kessi