YSJ, Academic Development Programme
Professional Development for Learning, Teaching and Research
Friday 28th March 2025, 2-4pm
Calls to ‘decolonise’ the university are far from new. For decades now, students and staff have been pressing their institutions to diversify and decolonise curricula, to decentre whiteness within academic research and practice, to acknowledge historical and financial complicities, and to divest from accelerating climate crisis, escalating militarisation and intensified imperial extractivism. In response, universities have issued statements, updated websites, released training packages and outwardly committed to new strategies, policies and charters that, ostensibly, prioritise decolonisation and anti-racism at an institutional level. However, five years on from the ‘Black Lives Matter’ mobilisations of summer 2020, and ten years since the transnational ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement, we might reasonably ask the questions: how much has really changed? Are we any closer to meeting staff and students’ decolonial demands? And, what does the future hold for those entering the academy today?
This online panel discussion aims to make space to address and debate such questions within the context of postgraduate research and teaching in the UK. Occupying various different spaces and often multiple roles within the university at once, postgraduate researchers (PGRs) are uniquely placed to interrogate the compromises and contradictions of what Remi Joseph-Salisbury and Laura Connelly (2021) term the “neoliberal-imperial-institutionally racist” university. In so doing, PGRs might carve out and forge new paths for research and pedagogy that seek to disrupt, reclaim and reimagine the academy, and perhaps move us closer towards what Priyamvada Gopal calls the “horizon of decolonisation” (2021, 889).
Proposals are invited for 10-15-minute presentations from PGRs whose research, teaching and/or activism pertain to any aspect of decolonisation in the context of higher education, knowledge production, or society and culture more broadly. Topics are not limited to but may include:
The presentations will be followed by a facilitated panel discussion and questions from the audience.
References:
If you are interested in joining the panel as a presenter, please submit a proposal by Friday 28th February, including a short bio and abstract of 250-300 words.
If you would like to join the event as an attendee, please book a place via Eventbrite.
This online event is hosted by York St John University as part of the 2024/25 Discussing Decolonisation series.
To receive updates about the series, please sign up to our mailing list and/or get in touch with series co-conveners, Lucy Potter (l.potter@yorksj.ac.uk) and Laura Key (l.key@yorksj.ac.uk).