Introduction to De-centre: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies

Abstract

De-centre: Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (DJIS) is launched at a critical juncture in global scholarship. For much of its history, the publishing ecosystem functioned on the assumption that legitimate knowledge is defined and validated primarily in Euro-Western, Anglophone, and Global North contexts. Alonso-Yanez et al. (2019) describe this phenomenon as a "monoculture of rigour" that privileges some epistemologies while ignoring others. As a result, scholarship from the Global South has been systemically marginalised, creating what Collyer (2016) describes as "global patterns of exclusion" in knowledge dissemination. Against this backdrop, De-centre's mission of improving contextual relevance, challenging dominant narratives, and promoting inclusion is more than a publishing initiative; it constitutes an intervention into deeply entrenched structures of knowledge production to reconfigure who gets to be heard, whose voices are amplified, and what constitutes legitimate scholarship. Academic publishing continues to reproduce inequalities because of metrics-obsessed evaluation systems, prestige-driven hierarchies, and profit-driven models. As a result of these mechanisms, not only do publishers place more weight on "impact factors" than on social impact, but they also consolidate the power of elite publishing houses located in the North (Köbli et al., 2024; Ampofo, 2024). Dutta (2016) argues persuasively that such structures "prioritise the global over the local," eclipsing indigenous, situated, and community-based knowledge. Furthermore, English-language scholarship remains disproportionately visible and rewarded, leaving non-Anglophone intellectual labour structurally disadvantaged (Alonso-Yanez et al., 2019; Pang and Li, 2017). The persistence of these inequities demonstrates the inadequacy of simply "inviting" marginalised voices to participate in existing systems. As Piller (2024) warns, if we do not fundamentally reimagine publishing itself, we will perpetuate a "textocalypse," a deluge of articles that multiply in quantity without pluralising knowledge.