Decolonising the Curriculum? Which Curriculum? How? and by Whom?
Ora
Public event by the Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster
The epistemological underpinnings of knowledge in today’s world were shaped during colonial times for purposes of social control. For the majority of people in the world, particularly those in the global South, what is learnt, understood, and how the world is viewed have been structured by coloniality emanating from the global North – itself a construction. Education was mobilised to sustain colonial empires.
Many efforts to reform have not gone far enough. De-colonising the University Curriculum is a recent radical student movement, which started in South Africa (2011), and challenged this status quo. The Black Lives Matter protests are also a key challenge to white-centric voices and academic coloniality, which have so far silenced and marginalised other epistemological perspectives. The call for equity, and the removal of structural imbalances, both in and outside the academy, is now a global concern, including concern across UK universities. The movement has, in fact, been so important, that it has now become part of the newspeak that is readily regurgitated by university managers, educational strategists, and policy makers in the UK education sector and beyond.
What started as a radical and well-intentioned movement is now, unless we intervene, in danger of being semantically stabilised by the very institution it is aimed at: The University. To quote from Keele University’s manifesto: “The University curriculum will not decolonise itself. This will not happen through the bureaucratised curriculum design reviews. Major curriculum reform cannot be achieved without greater democratisation of the university as an institution, and its relation to wider society. It is not something that happens overnight, it requires a sustained and serious [intellectual] commitment”.
Notwithstanding the importance of this movement, there’s been little engagement, at the level of theory and academic research, with the complex epistemological manoeuvres and knowledge production critique that is necessary in order to sustain a critical and systematic project of de-colonisation. There is a need to recognise that global North academic approaches are incomplete, imperfect and in need of overhaul. Similarly, approaches in the global South were constructed in the colonial era for purposes that are now outdated.
This CAMRI Webinar, and its speakers, use a double critique to unsettle: on the one hand, the university’s attempts at stabilising semantics around de-colonisation and, on the other, the taken-for-granted and quiet certainties that are inherent to the de-colonisation movement, which also have to be disturbed lest they unwittingly re-orientalise the other (black, ethnic, minority, global; South) and thus reproduce theoretically old and obsolete binaries.
Moving beyond facile articulations of ‘curriculum decolonisation’, this CAMRI Webinar enunciates a double theoretical manoeuvre, championing a decolonising task process that is ready to subvert and unsettle both the ‘westernising’ and ‘de-westernising’ processes of knowledge production.