A Murrey
Biographic Data
| ID | 21592 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Murrey |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Murrey |
| SIGNATURE | MURREY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8252-8308 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 30 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 171 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 30 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Agricultural gaslighting
In Malawi, smallholder farmers are repeatedly positioned as central to food security and transformation, yet the knowledge through which they manage crops, labor, risk, soil, and markets is treated as insufficient to the futures policy imagines for them. We read that contradiction as one trace of agricultural gaslighting: a governance-scale process through which agrarian realities are invited, renamed, and narrowed. Drawing on archival and policy…
Notes from the Cameroon Geographic Society’s 2024 annual conference
‘Prendre notre destin en main’
Ibrahim Traoré frequently invokes Thomas Sankara’s memory and, in social media and the press, he has been likened to him. Through an analysis of public speeches and addresses by Traoré, this debate piece considers the influences of Sankara’s articulation of anti-imperial sovereignty for Burkina Faso. The two leaders align in their rejection of patronage to la Françafrique , the rejections of debt and international development dependency, and insi…
Anti‐Imperial Autoethnographies of Family Separation
Anti‐imperial autoethnography is an important practice for critiquing and reflecting upon encounters with imperial bordering and its junctions with the neoliberal‐corporate university. In this article, we analyse our children's visa rejections to the UK, where we work and study as immigrant academics. We argue that the Home Office's policy of what constitutes a child's “welfare” produces racialised, gendered, and classist processes through which …
Humorous methodologies for African geographies
An experimental workshop brought together 20 stand-up comedians, environmental advocates, artists, researchers, and professors in Yaoundé, Cameroon on 27 and 28 March 2023. Building upon historical traditions of les griots and the popularity of contemporary comedic oration in Cameroon, our collaborative and interactive workshop centered efforts to move beyond dominant and colonial formulas to think creatively about the potentials, limitations, an…
On ‘necrolocutors’ in political ecology
I consider Gibson's notion of the ‘necrolocutor’: a racialised, gendered subject mediating institutional engagements with power, knowledge, and death, who reveals and embodies the neoliberal academy's reliance on co-opted ‘local’ voices for legitimacy. I argue that these extractive dynamics of research collaboration echo historical colonial, corporate, and militarised formations, wherein participation functioned as consent, and the ‘native inform…
Slow Dissent and Worldmaking beyond Imperial Relations in “Kamer-amère” (Bitter Cameroon)
Working in the subfields of postcolonial geographies of responsibility and Black and African Geographies, my analysis centers on Cameroonian political resistance and practices of worldmaking. From January 2016 to August 2023, political activists experienced a set of difficulties: A wariness and oftentimes hostility to France’s continued support for the authoritarian state, dismissals by state representatives that dissenters were “externally suppo…
Gesturing towards decolonial teaching praxis and unlearning colonial methods
In this article, we reflect on our experiences teaching and learning in a digital course for PhD students, Oxford-UNISA Decolonising Research Methodologies. The aim of the course was to ‘gesture’ beyond the coloniality of knowledge by thinking ‘otherwise’ about research methodologies. As a decolonial teaching praxis, gesturing embraces experimentation, humility and becoming as we pursue decolonial being/thinking and seek/create coexistence, well-…
Extraction is not a metaphor
We are witnessing a proliferation of new critical scholarship on the manifold forms of extractivism. Yet, there are risks associated with extraction being rendered a broad metaphor for innumerable forms of removal and value‐making through exploitation and misappropriation. Theorising within decolonial Black feminisms, we respond to the metaphorization of extraction by (re)asserting the need for persistent analysis on the material and embodied eff…
Social Licence to Operate
In this intervention article, we cultivate an anti-colonial critique of the ideational genealogy and conceptual materialisation of the social licence to operate (SLO) in the extractive industries in order to open a conversation about the racialised and colonial logics underlying its enactment and discursive practices. SLO functions to restrict the emergence of imaginary political potentials within communities impacted by extractive projects. We f…
Response to commentaries on Patricia Daley and Amber Murrey's ‘Defiant scholarship
A decolonial political geography of resistance and digital infrastructural harm in Cameroon and Ethiopia
In the decisive responses to protest movements in Ethiopia and Cameroon between 2015 and 2018, state control and repression were facilitated by colonial-corporate digital infrastructures and neo-imperial techno-political configurations. In both cases, resistance was met with pervasive state-initiated and corporate-sanctioned internet shutdowns and disruptions. I situate these techno-political practices within the longue durée of coloniality to ar…
Defiant scholarship
Colonial epistemes persist in studies of African geographies. We argue that colonial continuities are revealed in (a) the status of human geography within African higher education; (b) the marginalization of Africa (particularly beyond Southern Africa) within the discipline of human geography; and (c) erasures of the functions of racialization in African societies. These are compounded by the relative marginalization of African knowledge within d…
Interventions in the political geographies of resistance
n Contains fulltext :\n 252619.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Toyin Falola@65 Conference
The Toyin Falola @65 Conference brought together scholars from across the African continent and the world from 29 to 31 January 2018 under the theme, ‘African Knowledge and Alternative Futures.’ Our focus reflected on the long struggle for epistemic justice on the continent while centering and recognizing Falola’s important role in the project. This was a unique conference in terms of its structure, content, as well as the diversity of intellectu…
Descolonizando la historia oral
The English version of this article can be found here
Colonialism
Confronting the deafening silence on race in geography education in England
School geography in England has been largely silent on issues around race, which stands in contrast to important strands of thought in the discipline. In this intervention, we explore two influential approaches in education – cultural literacy and powerful knowledge – to argue that we urgently need to address the silence on race by making substantive anti-racist changes in the curriculum. Within cultural literacy, we argue that anti-racist geogra…
A Decolonial Critique of the Racialized "Localwashing" of Extraction in Central Africa
Responding to calls for increased attention to actions and reactions “from above” within the extractive industry, we offer a decolonial critique of the ways in which corporate entities and multinational institutions propagate racialized rhetoric of “local” suffering, “local” consultation, and “local” fault for failure in extractive zones. Such rhetoric functions to legitimize extractive intervention within a set of practices that we call localwas…
‘When spider webs unite they can tie up a lion’
This chapter focuses on two discrete but interrelated intellectual projects: Southern theory and decolonial options. With a focus on race-aware and anti-racist critiques of Southern theories, Murrey argues that assertions of the need to focus more centrally on Southern theory are not equivalent with assertions of the need to end, unequivocally, the coloniality of knowledge. Some of the critical and celebrated scholarship critiquing the (ongoing) …
Conversations from Jimma on the Geographies and Politics of Knowledge
Drawing from decolonizing scholarships that call for a reorientation of knowledge-making that is more inclusive and reflective of oral modes of communication, this article takes the form of a performance autoethnography between two friends. This approach allows a rich complexity of subjects to emerge—from “decolonizing” pedagogies and curricula to university administration and the geopolitics of knowledge globally—at the same time that we retain …
Connections 2
Creating alliances, making
What kind of witchcraft is this?' Development, magic and spiritual ontologies
This collection represents a significant intervention in the space cohabited by witchcraft, spirit worlds, and development – a realm frequently marginalised by development practice. Through a diverse set of scholarly and methodological orientations, the contributions draw on contrasting case studies (spanning the local, national, and borderlands) to explore the current and possible future co-productions of development through various forms of spi…
Decolonising the imagined geographies of 'witchcraft
Turning my frame of inquiry toward academia, I analyse academic presentations on topics of 'witchcraft' conveyed to majority-geographer, majority-white and majority-Northern audiences. I argue that (a) the imagined geographies of 'witchcraft' have been central to colonial Othering; (b) 'witchcraft' is often relegated to the academic periphery; (c) 'witchcraft' ontologies are plural, fluid and ambiguous and (d) 'witchcraft' is often defiant of aca…
Slow dissent and the emotional geographies of resistance
Anger, grief, regret and shame are some of the myriad ways that people narrate a decade of life along the Chad‐Cameroon Oil Pipeline. These stories reveal a perceptive and collective socio‐political awareness situated within multifaceted emotional geographies of resistance. In spite of resistance narratives, explicit and collective resistance practices remain uncommon. As people struggle and live within composite landscapes of structural violence…
Defiant scholarship
Colonial epistemes persist in studies of African geographies. We argue that colonial continuities are revealed in (a) the status of human geography within African higher education; (b) the marginalization of Africa (particularly beyond Southern Africa) within the discipline of human geography; and (c) erasures of the functions of racialization in African societies. These are compounded by the relative marginalization of African knowledge within d…
Slow dissent and the emotional geographies of resistance
Anger, grief, regret and shame are some of the myriad ways that people narrate a decade of life along the Chad‐Cameroon Oil Pipeline. These stories reveal a perceptive and collective socio‐political awareness situated within multifaceted emotional geographies of resistance. In spite of resistance narratives, explicit and collective resistance practices remain uncommon. As people struggle and live within composite landscapes of structural violence…
Extraction is not a metaphor
We are witnessing a proliferation of new critical scholarship on the manifold forms of extractivism. Yet, there are risks associated with extraction being rendered a broad metaphor for innumerable forms of removal and value‐making through exploitation and misappropriation. Theorising within decolonial Black feminisms, we respond to the metaphorization of extraction by (re)asserting the need for persistent analysis on the material and embodied eff…
Narratives of Life and Violence along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline
This article further develops a critical geographical theory of structural violence. It does so by considering the ways people in Nanga-Eboko and Kribi, two communities in Cameroon, report feeling and experiencing structural violence along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. For people living within spaces (re)produced through structurally violent processes, projects, and extractions, a triad of intersecting experiences emerge: structural violence is…
A Decolonial Critique of the Racialized "Localwashing" of Extraction in Central Africa
Responding to calls for increased attention to actions and reactions “from above” within the extractive industry, we offer a decolonial critique of the ways in which corporate entities and multinational institutions propagate racialized rhetoric of “local” suffering, “local” consultation, and “local” fault for failure in extractive zones. Such rhetoric functions to legitimize extractive intervention within a set of practices that we call localwas…
Invisible power, visible dispossession
Interventions in the political geographies of resistance
n Contains fulltext :\n 252619.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Decolonising the imagined geographies of 'witchcraft
Turning my frame of inquiry toward academia, I analyse academic presentations on topics of 'witchcraft' conveyed to majority-geographer, majority-white and majority-Northern audiences. I argue that (a) the imagined geographies of 'witchcraft' have been central to colonial Othering; (b) 'witchcraft' is often relegated to the academic periphery; (c) 'witchcraft' ontologies are plural, fluid and ambiguous and (d) 'witchcraft' is often defiant of aca…
Connections 2
Creating alliances, making
A decolonial political geography of resistance and digital infrastructural harm in Cameroon and Ethiopia
In the decisive responses to protest movements in Ethiopia and Cameroon between 2015 and 2018, state control and repression were facilitated by colonial-corporate digital infrastructures and neo-imperial techno-political configurations. In both cases, resistance was met with pervasive state-initiated and corporate-sanctioned internet shutdowns and disruptions. I situate these techno-political practices within the longue durée of coloniality to ar…
What kind of witchcraft is this?' Development, magic and spiritual ontologies
This collection represents a significant intervention in the space cohabited by witchcraft, spirit worlds, and development – a realm frequently marginalised by development practice. Through a diverse set of scholarly and methodological orientations, the contributions draw on contrasting case studies (spanning the local, national, and borderlands) to explore the current and possible future co-productions of development through various forms of spi…
Culture-centric pre-emptive counterinsurgency and US Africa Command
The twenty-first century has seen a continued evolution of the US military’s strategic interest in socio-cultural knowledge of (potential) adversaries for counterinsurgency strategies. This paper explores the implications of the reinvigorated and expanding (post-9/11) relationship between social science research and US military strategy, assessing the implications of US Africa Command strategies for preventive counterinsurgency. Preventative coun…
Slow Dissent and Worldmaking beyond Imperial Relations in “Kamer-amère” (Bitter Cameroon)
Working in the subfields of postcolonial geographies of responsibility and Black and African Geographies, my analysis centers on Cameroonian political resistance and practices of worldmaking. From January 2016 to August 2023, political activists experienced a set of difficulties: A wariness and oftentimes hostility to France’s continued support for the authoritarian state, dismissals by state representatives that dissenters were “externally suppo…
Anti‐Imperial Autoethnographies of Family Separation
Anti‐imperial autoethnography is an important practice for critiquing and reflecting upon encounters with imperial bordering and its junctions with the neoliberal‐corporate university. In this article, we analyse our children's visa rejections to the UK, where we work and study as immigrant academics. We argue that the Home Office's policy of what constitutes a child's “welfare” produces racialised, gendered, and classist processes through which …
On ‘necrolocutors’ in political ecology
I consider Gibson's notion of the ‘necrolocutor’: a racialised, gendered subject mediating institutional engagements with power, knowledge, and death, who reveals and embodies the neoliberal academy's reliance on co-opted ‘local’ voices for legitimacy. I argue that these extractive dynamics of research collaboration echo historical colonial, corporate, and militarised formations, wherein participation functioned as consent, and the ‘native inform…
Social Licence to Operate
In this intervention article, we cultivate an anti-colonial critique of the ideational genealogy and conceptual materialisation of the social licence to operate (SLO) in the extractive industries in order to open a conversation about the racialised and colonial logics underlying its enactment and discursive practices. SLO functions to restrict the emergence of imaginary political potentials within communities impacted by extractive projects. We f…
Labour and resistance across global spaces
What are the patterns of labour, organisation and resistance six years after the start of a global financial crisis that throated the basis of worldwide capital accumulation? National governments o
Culture-centric pre-emptive counterinsurgency and US Africa Command
The twenty-first century has seen a continued evolution of the US military’s strategic interest in socio-cultural knowledge of (potential) adversaries for counterinsurgency strategies. This paper explores the implications of the reinvigorated and expanding (post-9/11) relationship between social science research and US military strategy, assessing the implications of US Africa Command strategies for preventive counterinsurgency. Preventative coun…
Learning from the African awakenings of 2011
Narratives of Life and Violence along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline
This article further develops a critical geographical theory of structural violence. It does so by considering the ways people in Nanga-Eboko and Kribi, two communities in Cameroon, report feeling and experiencing structural violence along the Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline. For people living within spaces (re)produced through structurally violent processes, projects, and extractions, a triad of intersecting experiences emerge: structural violence is…
Invisible power, visible dispossession
Slow dissent and the emotional geographies of resistance
Anger, grief, regret and shame are some of the myriad ways that people narrate a decade of life along the Chad‐Cameroon Oil Pipeline. These stories reveal a perceptive and collective socio‐political awareness situated within multifaceted emotional geographies of resistance. In spite of resistance narratives, explicit and collective resistance practices remain uncommon. As people struggle and live within composite landscapes of structural violence…
What kind of witchcraft is this?' Development, magic and spiritual ontologies
This collection represents a significant intervention in the space cohabited by witchcraft, spirit worlds, and development – a realm frequently marginalised by development practice. Through a diverse set of scholarly and methodological orientations, the contributions draw on contrasting case studies (spanning the local, national, and borderlands) to explore the current and possible future co-productions of development through various forms of spi…
Decolonising the imagined geographies of 'witchcraft
Turning my frame of inquiry toward academia, I analyse academic presentations on topics of 'witchcraft' conveyed to majority-geographer, majority-white and majority-Northern audiences. I argue that (a) the imagined geographies of 'witchcraft' have been central to colonial Othering; (b) 'witchcraft' is often relegated to the academic periphery; (c) 'witchcraft' ontologies are plural, fluid and ambiguous and (d) 'witchcraft' is often defiant of aca…
‘When spider webs unite they can tie up a lion’
This chapter focuses on two discrete but interrelated intellectual projects: Southern theory and decolonial options. With a focus on race-aware and anti-racist critiques of Southern theories, Murrey argues that assertions of the need to focus more centrally on Southern theory are not equivalent with assertions of the need to end, unequivocally, the coloniality of knowledge. Some of the critical and celebrated scholarship critiquing the (ongoing) …
Conversations from Jimma on the Geographies and Politics of Knowledge
Drawing from decolonizing scholarships that call for a reorientation of knowledge-making that is more inclusive and reflective of oral modes of communication, this article takes the form of a performance autoethnography between two friends. This approach allows a rich complexity of subjects to emerge—from “decolonizing” pedagogies and curricula to university administration and the geopolitics of knowledge globally—at the same time that we retain …
Connections 2
Creating alliances, making
Colonialism
Confronting the deafening silence on race in geography education in England
School geography in England has been largely silent on issues around race, which stands in contrast to important strands of thought in the discipline. In this intervention, we explore two influential approaches in education – cultural literacy and powerful knowledge – to argue that we urgently need to address the silence on race by making substantive anti-racist changes in the curriculum. Within cultural literacy, we argue that anti-racist geogra…
A Decolonial Critique of the Racialized "Localwashing" of Extraction in Central Africa
Responding to calls for increased attention to actions and reactions “from above” within the extractive industry, we offer a decolonial critique of the ways in which corporate entities and multinational institutions propagate racialized rhetoric of “local” suffering, “local” consultation, and “local” fault for failure in extractive zones. Such rhetoric functions to legitimize extractive intervention within a set of practices that we call localwas…
Toyin Falola@65 Conference
The Toyin Falola @65 Conference brought together scholars from across the African continent and the world from 29 to 31 January 2018 under the theme, ‘African Knowledge and Alternative Futures.’ Our focus reflected on the long struggle for epistemic justice on the continent while centering and recognizing Falola’s important role in the project. This was a unique conference in terms of its structure, content, as well as the diversity of intellectu…
Descolonizando la historia oral
The English version of this article can be found here
Response to commentaries on Patricia Daley and Amber Murrey's ‘Defiant scholarship
A decolonial political geography of resistance and digital infrastructural harm in Cameroon and Ethiopia
In the decisive responses to protest movements in Ethiopia and Cameroon between 2015 and 2018, state control and repression were facilitated by colonial-corporate digital infrastructures and neo-imperial techno-political configurations. In both cases, resistance was met with pervasive state-initiated and corporate-sanctioned internet shutdowns and disruptions. I situate these techno-political practices within the longue durée of coloniality to ar…
Defiant scholarship
Colonial epistemes persist in studies of African geographies. We argue that colonial continuities are revealed in (a) the status of human geography within African higher education; (b) the marginalization of Africa (particularly beyond Southern Africa) within the discipline of human geography; and (c) erasures of the functions of racialization in African societies. These are compounded by the relative marginalization of African knowledge within d…
Interventions in the political geographies of resistance
n Contains fulltext :\n 252619.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access)\n
Gesturing towards decolonial teaching praxis and unlearning colonial methods
In this article, we reflect on our experiences teaching and learning in a digital course for PhD students, Oxford-UNISA Decolonising Research Methodologies. The aim of the course was to ‘gesture’ beyond the coloniality of knowledge by thinking ‘otherwise’ about research methodologies. As a decolonial teaching praxis, gesturing embraces experimentation, humility and becoming as we pursue decolonial being/thinking and seek/create coexistence, well-…
Extraction is not a metaphor
We are witnessing a proliferation of new critical scholarship on the manifold forms of extractivism. Yet, there are risks associated with extraction being rendered a broad metaphor for innumerable forms of removal and value‐making through exploitation and misappropriation. Theorising within decolonial Black feminisms, we respond to the metaphorization of extraction by (re)asserting the need for persistent analysis on the material and embodied eff…
Social Licence to Operate
In this intervention article, we cultivate an anti-colonial critique of the ideational genealogy and conceptual materialisation of the social licence to operate (SLO) in the extractive industries in order to open a conversation about the racialised and colonial logics underlying its enactment and discursive practices. SLO functions to restrict the emergence of imaginary political potentials within communities impacted by extractive projects. We f…
Slow Dissent and Worldmaking beyond Imperial Relations in “Kamer-amère” (Bitter Cameroon)
Working in the subfields of postcolonial geographies of responsibility and Black and African Geographies, my analysis centers on Cameroonian political resistance and practices of worldmaking. From January 2016 to August 2023, political activists experienced a set of difficulties: A wariness and oftentimes hostility to France’s continued support for the authoritarian state, dismissals by state representatives that dissenters were “externally suppo…
Humorous methodologies for African geographies
An experimental workshop brought together 20 stand-up comedians, environmental advocates, artists, researchers, and professors in Yaoundé, Cameroon on 27 and 28 March 2023. Building upon historical traditions of les griots and the popularity of contemporary comedic oration in Cameroon, our collaborative and interactive workshop centered efforts to move beyond dominant and colonial formulas to think creatively about the potentials, limitations, an…
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (21 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (16 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Anthropology (6 works) · Colonialism (6 works) · Epistemology (6 works)