The colonial origins and structures of U.S. academia persist mostly uncontested, while epistemological, pedagogical, and institutional decolonization are urgently necessary. University student activism is validated through scholarly literature as a site of critical knowledge production and a channel for transformation of institutions. This occurs amidst the universities themselves continuously aiding in colonialism and responding to student activism with neoliberal co-optation and/or penalties. Because universities are a key site for knowledge production, it is also an ideal site for challenging the traditional researcher-subject divide. I intend to do so by involving participants to collectively create knowledge rather than extract it from them. This thesis aims to work with a small group of U.S. university students to identify and challenge coloniality in the university’s curriculum, student organizing, physical spaces, and/or policy structures, and to foster decolonial feminist epistemologies amongst us. We will partake in eight participatory focus group sessions over the course of ~March-May 2026. My analytical model comprised of focal points (settler colonialism, whiteness, decolonization, abolition, praxis) from my theoretical and conceptual frameworks will aid in analyzing the collected data from the focus group sessions through Interpretive Content Analysis and possibly paired alongside Participatory Analysis with participants. This research cultivates opportunities for students to explore collaborative knowledge production rooted in transformative epistemologies which honors what Fanon (1963) called “decolonization in its radical-political sense” (as cited in Rai & Campion, 2022, p. 487).

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