Mbembe links Jean-Luc Nancy’s notions of dis-enclosure to the decolonisation process and advocates for the “complexity and plurality of reality”, an alternative ontology and way of understanding and being in the world. His view involves the coloniser and colonised taking responsibility for creating a new understanding. Achille Mbembe conceives of decolonization in terms of opening up the world and reclaiming one’s humanity and place in this world.

In The Bricolage of health and healing in South Africa, Burns explored the absence of an institutionalised, interdisciplinary relationship between the humanities and medicine, and between indigenous health cultures and biomedicine. This is despite the layered and heavily politicised history of South African Health systems throughout the 20th Century, a legacy that continues in various forms in the present.