Discussing Decolonisation 2024/25: Online PGR Panel Discussion #2

Decolonisation and Academic Futures: Postgraduate Research Panel #2

Calls to ‘decolonise’ the university are far from new. For decades, 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: how much has really changed? Are we any closer to meeting students’ decolonial demands? What does the future hold for those entering the academy today?

Following on from our first PGR panel event on 28th March, this second online panel discussion aims to make space for postgraduate researchers to grapple with the promises and pitfalls of recent efforts to ‘decolonise’ the “neoliberal-imperial-institutionally racist” university (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly, 2021), and to thereby help resist, reclaim and perhaps even reimagine the academy in view of what Priyamvada Gopal terms the “horizon of decolonisation” (2021, 889).

The Call for Proposals has now closed, but more information about the confirmed panellists and their papers can be found in the Eventbrite (link below). 

More info and bookings:

If you would like to join the discussion as an attendee, please book your place via Eventbrite.

To receive updates about events in the YSJ Discussing Decolonisation series, you can 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).