By Riyad A. Shahjahan
When graduate students and early career faculty struggle to clarify an argument, I always give the same advice: find a model to follow. Look for an article, proposal, or dissertation that resonates to help articulate and organize your own ideas. Study how it builds its case, what kinds of evidence it uses, and how it structures its ideas.
This is exactly what helped me develop a concept I call decolonial chronopolitics.
In this post, I share the journey of how that idea came to be. It was a slow, iterative process of reading, reflecting, and learning from others. The concept emerged from two converging forces that shaped how I came to write about it.
Questioning what existed in the literature
First, I’ve been serving on the editorial board of the Journal of Transformative Education, reviewing many submissions over time. A number of them engaged in questions of social transformation, but very few stood out. One paper, however, did. It challenged transformative learning theory (TL) through the lens of Indigenous pedagogy, in a way that felt urgent and important. Yet afterward, I rarely encountered similar works.
That moment planted a seed. I knew I wanted to leave my own imprint in this debate about TL. My interest centered on the possibilities and constraints of TL in the context of decolonizing work. But I didn’t yet know how to frame the argument, so the idea remained dormant for years.
Meanwhile, my scholarship increasingly began to focus on time. I started to feel that time needed to be foregrounded in any discussion about the convergence of decolonization and transformative learning. Still, I didn’t yet know how to write this paper.
Finding the right article to teach you
The second point of convergence came from finding an article I could emulate. One day, while reading a paper for my research, I came across my colleague Michalinos Zembylas’ piece—Time-as-Affect—everything clicked. I read his work often, but this piece struck me differently. The way he framed his analysis and structured his argument offered a blueprint I could follow.
The fact that he generously cited one of my previous papers motivated me to pay attention to how he engaged with others’ works. I already had some of the foundations to move forward with this dormant idea about time, decolonization, and transformative learning. His paper showed how an argument could be built by engaging existing literature critically and creatively, especially in theorizing time within the neoliberal academy.
That moment of clarity gave me direction. I began to think inductively. I re-read literature that explored the intersections of decolonization and transformative learning, and noticed two key themes: higher education and sustainability education. These fields often touched on the convergence of the two, but rarely engaged with time as a central concept. Even less often was time explicitly theorized.
That absence became my entry point—and the temporal dimensions became the object of my analysis.
Why introduce a new concept?
As I deepened my research, I realized I wasn’t satisfied with the available temporal frameworks. I wanted a concept that could foreground time in relation to decolonial work. Inspired by Zembylas’ notion of “time-as-affect,” I realized I needed to coin my own term. That’s when the idea of decolonial chronopolitics emerged.
I searched widely and couldn’t find the term in existing scholarship, though it felt like something others must have used. I started piecing together theoretical strands that helped me articulate this framing, drawing from both decolonial and temporal theory. Gradually, the paper began to take shape.
I also had to locate my argument within earlier debates in transformative learning literature. This meant understanding not just how decolonial ideas entered that space, but also how questions of time had (or hadn’t) been addressed. That context helped me see where my work could intervene meaningfully.
With those building blocks in place, I finally wrote the full draft. After some thoughtful feedback from colleagues, I submitted it.
Learning from peer reviewers
I was fortunate to receive fantastic feedback when I submitted my paper to the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory. The reviewers asked for only minor revisions — but that outcome was shaped by the earlier feedback I had sought before submitting. That early guidance made a big difference.
The feedback boiled down to two key points:
Where were the decolonial aspects?
I needed to reconnect my argument more explicitly to decolonial literature. That meant acknowledging how decoloniality stems from critiques of modern Western thinking — its limits, its exclusions. It also meant recognizing that decoloniality resists the erasure and hierarchization of knowledge, especially the marginalization of non-Western ways of knowing.
What made my concept different?
My reviewers pushed me to explain how my approach stood apart from existing critiques of temporality in decolonial or Indigenous ontologies. What was I adding? What made this concept necessary?
Armed with those questions, I revised the paper to strengthen both of these aspects. And honestly, without those comments, it wouldn’t have reached the next level. That feedback didn’t just improve the piece — it clarified the heart of the argument.
3 lessons I learned
Here are three lessons from this process that might help others developing their own ideas:
- Good writing begins with good reading.
Look for models, not just ideas. Finding an article that resonates can show you how arguments are built, how literature is engaged, and where conceptual gaps lie. - Innovative ideas often come from spotting what’s not being said—and asking why it matters.
Our concepts don’t emerge out of nowhere. They come from identifying a persistent absence. That gap becomes your entry point. - The right feedback doesn’t just improve our writing—it helps define what we’re really trying to say.
Both informal and peer-review feedback weren’t just helpful for revision. They sharpened my argument and clarified my contribution. Use feedback to elevate your work.
I hope these reflections inspire you to not only find your conceptual voice, but to boldly contribute it to the world of ideas.
Photo taken by Kimine Mayuzumi