Decolonising the Curriculum in Theory and Practice: Recent Episodes
Cambridge University
The call for decolonisation is resonating in universities across the globe today. The most dramatic instance has been the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa, which inspired protests such as Rhodes Must Fall at Oxford and “Why is My Curriculum White” at UCL. These movements have found affinities with expanding struggles around race, gender, and class on North American campuses and with the upsurge of interest in decolonisation within professional academia. Our workshops and seminars will focus on one particular aspect of today’s demand to decolonise the university: the curriculum. Drawing from postcolonial, decolonial, and subaltern critiques of social science knowledge production and circulation, the research group will aim to explore the “postcolonial turn” or “Southern turn” in different domains of the humanities and social sciences. The series of activities are both inspired by and in dialogue with the increasing attention to the global plurality of particular disciplines, for example, the need to work toward “a world anthropologies framework”, “global sociology”, or non-Western international relations.
Our questions of decolonising knowledge in the academy are four-fold. First, why is the demand for decolonisation being heard so widely in universities today? Second, what place does decolonising the curriculum have in these broader demands for decolonising the university? Third, what are the experiences with decolonising the university curriculum in different parts of the world? Fourth, what would it mean to decolonise the curriculum in Cambridge?
Administrative assistant: gradfac@crassh.cam.ac.uk
Speakers
Professor Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (University of Washington, Seattle) Undefining Black Women Scientists: Past, Present and Future
Dr Arianne Shahvisi (University of Sussex)
This panel will take the debate on decolonising the curriculum to STEM subjects, asking whether the basic axioms of scientific objectivity need rethinking when they are premised on the marginalisation of subaltern people from STEM. From this premise follows the axiom that the subaltern can be a subject of research, but it cannot itself research. Can science be objective when the language embedded in it works to 'unconstruct' Black and Indigenous women (and more broadly other minoritised peoples) as physicists? How might we develop a heuristic for disrupting problematic explanations and generalisations, and thereby refuse to be complicit in them?
Abstracts
Professor Prescod-Weinstein Undefining Black Women Scientists: Past, Present and Future To constitute a concept of 'physics community', physicists assume two foundational axioms. First, the laws of physics are independent of cognitive inference/interference, and, second, that they are unchanging or only evolving according to their own rules. This leads to the axion that the subaltern can be a subject of research, but it cannot itself research. Can science be objective when the language embedded in it works to 'unconstruct' Black and Indigenous women (and more broadly other minoritided peoples) as physicists?
Dr Shahvisi Using tools from the philosophy of science to examine the nature of explanations she asks how easily they lead us towards generalisations we should instead be equipping ourselves to resist (i.e. generalisations which are racist and/or sexist).
Research Seminar & Discussion
Dr Meera Sabaratnam (International Relations, SOAS) Dr Adam Branch (POLIS)
Dr Meera Sabaratnam Decolonising International Relations: Ontologies, Epistemologies and the Trump Travel Ban Crisis
This talk examines the recent acceleration in efforts to 'decolonise' the study of IR at a theoretical and methodological level, the constraint of race taboos within this process and the opportunity for structural re-alignment in thinking posed by the intensification of racism in the West.
Decolonising the Study of Indian development: Three Approaches Considered and One Proposed
Subir Sinha (SOAS) Ananya Mishra (University of Cambridge) Mahvish Ahmed (University of Cambridge)
Antonio Sergio Guimaraes (Simon Bolivar Professor 2016-17, Department of Sociology, University of São Paulo) Rosaleen Howard (Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), Newcastle University) David Lehmann (Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge)
The novelty of Guerreiro Ramos’ sociology Antonio Sergio Guimaraes
Sociology as a science finds its objects from the social problems of the day. A decolonised sociology should derive its reflexive strength from the perspective of the subalterns. Social problems like racism, sexism, colonial domination, national formation, and social inequalities were the objects of reflection and systematic investigations of a number of intellectuals not entirely absorbed in the mainstream of the discipline. DuBois, in the United States, and Guerreiro Ramos, in Brazil, are two examples of sociologists who usually appear on the margins of the syllabus of Sociological Theory. My talk will explore the subaltern sociology proposed by Guerreiro Ramos in the mid-1950s.
Language rights in education and beyond: the view from the Andes Rosaleen Howard
In previous work, I have used the notion of ´paradigms of diversity´ to explore evolving social policy discourses and the practices with which they are associated in the Andean region (Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia). These paradigms may include but are not restricted to the concept of decolonisation in various guises. In this presentation I will first review some of that earlier work, taking the education system as an example. I will then broaden my presentation to take account of recent research on how issues of language rights are being built into state legislation, and acted upon in a wide range of practices. These go beyond education to encompass all public spheres where speakers of indigenous languages interact with Spanish-speaking agents of the state. The high profile given to the principle of language rights as a human right in Peru is interconnected with advances in education planning in that country, and bodes well at least for democratisation of language in and beyond education, while the discourse of decolonisation, unlike the case of Bolvia, is not explicitly articulated.
Interculturality for Beginners David Lehmann
During the first decade of the century the Mexican government supported the creation of a network of Intercultural Universities. For some of their supporters and staff these were universities in which a decolonial and non-Western curriculum would be offered; for others they were institutions which, being located near to areas with significant indigenous populations, would attract students from those groups and would educate them in subjects relevant for their socio-economic development with elements of cultural sensibility such as indigenous language courses; for yet a third current, the universities would be truly intercultural in that they would contribute to a society where all social groups are conversant with its many cultural strands. My research with the academic staff of a several of these universities also showed that they were strongly influenced by the dissident or contestatory educational ideas associated with 'educación liberadora' and also with the Theology of Liberation. When all this is mixed up in the treacherous waters of Mexican politics it produces an interesting case study of 'interculturalidad' in practice.
Calls for decolonisation are resonating in universities across the globe today. The most dramatic instance has been the Rhodes Must Fall movement in South Africa, which helped catalyze protests around decolonising education in that country as well as activism in the UK. Our focus is on one particular aspect of today’s demand to decolonise the university: the curriculum. This opening session will ask why the demand for decolonisation is being heard so widely in universities today, what its politics and possibilities are at present in the UK, and what place decolonising the curriculum has in these broader demands for decolonising the university. To explore these themes, we bring together three scholars who have been involved in decolonising the curriculum, knowledge production, and the university in different ways. The panel will be followed by an open discussion to help set the agenda for the series of workshops and seminars in the year ahead.