Decentering Disruption: Toward a Framework for Intercultural Conceptual Disruption

Abstract Conceptual disruption is typically theorised as a consequence of technological innovation: a new artefact or practice unsettles an entrenched category, and a conceptual gap, overlap, or misalignment results. This paper argues that disruption also occurs when conceptual schemes collide, that is, when concepts travel across geopolitical boundaries and moral frameworks. It introduces Intercultural Conceptual Disruption (ICD) to theorise this second source of disruption. By using the example of the concept of PRIVACY in the African relational ontology of Ubuntu, the paper illustrates that conceptual disruption is not uniform across contexts. What counts as severe in one conceptual scheme may be mild or unremarkable in another, depending on the flexibility of that scheme and its ontological commitments, and the movement of concepts is shaped by asymmetries of epistemic and political power rather than by conceptual need alone. ICD is articulated as three interlinked processes: (1) identifying the type, level, and severity of disruption within a given conceptual scheme; (2) decentering dominant frameworks by addressing the epistemic injustices that privilege some conceptual resources over others; and (3) decolonising concepts that carry undue colonial influence in postcolonial contexts.