Decolonization of knowledge  Decolonization of knowledge (also epistemic or epistemological decolonization) is primarily an intellectual project that challenges the hegemonic Western knowledge system with its claim of universality. The project seeks to legitimize other knowledge systems and establish justice for hitherto disregarded epistemologies. These debates originated in the west with the counter culture, prominent in universities in the 1970s, which supported similar debates in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. Because of this project modern academic scholarship tends to give more weight to indigenous belief systems, as well as identities around race, gender, and sexuality. Critics would argue however that it has failed in many ways to challenge the dominant aspects of neoliberal ideology and the dominance of free market capitalism.. Epistemological decolonization reflects into the historical mechanisms of knowledge production and its colonial and ethnocentric foundations. It has been argued that knowledge and the standards that determine the validity of knowledge have been disproportionately informed by Western system of thought and ways of thinking about the universe. The western knowledge system that had been developed in Europe during renaissance and Enlightenment was deployed to legitimise Europe’s colonial endeavour that eventually became a part of colonial rule and forms of civilization that the colonizers carried with them. The knowledge produced in Western system has been attributed a universal character and claimed to be superior over other systems of knowledge. Decolonial scholars concur that the western system of knowledge still continues to determine as to what should be considered as scientific knowledge and continues to "exclude, marginalise and dehumanise" those with different systems of knowledge, expertise and worldviews. Anibal Quijano observed:   In effect, all of the experiences, histories, resources, and cultural products ended up in one global cultural order revolving around European or Western hegemony. Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony. During that process, the colonizers...repressed as much as possible the colonized forms of knowledge production, the models of the production of meaning, their symbolic universe, the model of expression and of objectification and subjectivity. In community groups and social movements in the Americas, decolonization of knowledge traces its roots back to resistance against colonialism from its very beginning in 1492. Its emergence as an academic concern is rather a recent phenomenon. Enrique Dussel argues that the theme of epistemological decolonization has originated from a group of Latin American thinkers.