On decolonising our thinking and cultural exchange

![CDATA[We need to acknowledge that the world we inhabit and try to explain is largely a stolen place. This is certainly true for settler colonial states like Australia, USA, Canada and New Zealand, but processes of cultural, spatial and material dispossession have also enabled the emergence of hegemonic states in other parts of the world. Colonialism is global, there is no place on this earth that is not, in one way or another, colonial. And it has also shaped our understanding of the world. To address the need to challenge that colonial bias, we want to open this book with a reflection on the decolonisation of knowledge. This reflection is based on Australian examples but has universal jurisdiction and speaks to many of the chapters in this book.]]