Discussing Decolonisation Reading Group 2024/25

Here you will find information about the Discussing Decolonisation Reading Group (DDRG) – a new, cross-disciplinary reading and discussion group that will run alongside YSJ’s Discussing Decolonisation event series for 2024/25.

About: 

The task of decolonising higher education requires us to engage in sustained thinking, reading and discussion about the history and politics of imperialism, colonialism and ongoing anti-colonial resistance, as well as with ongoing decolonisation efforts and critical thinking in and across the sector. 

With this reading group, we will first return to the key anti-colonial thinkers and texts of the twentieth-century before considering some more recent interventions from scholars asking what it means ‘to decolonise’ the contemporary metropolitan university, and whether and how we might go about doing so.

The sessions will all take place online via MS Teams, over lunchtime, but the day will vary week to week to hopefully enable more colleagues to join us. Although it would be beneficial to attend all sessions, colleagues are more than welcome to join the reading group at any time and/or to dip in and out over the course of the year.

Further details and links to the readings will be added below in early October. Until then, please save the dates in your diaries and email Lucy Potter and/or Laura Key if you would like any more information OR to be added to our Discussing Decolonisation mailing list.

Schedule:

Session 1: Monday 21st October, 12-1pm 

• Extracts from Frantz Fanon, ‘On Violence’ (1961), and Aimé Césaire, ‘Discourse on Colonialism’ (1955)

Session 2: Tuesday 12th November, 12-1pm 

• Extracts from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986)

Session 3, Monday 9th December, 12-1pm

• Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’ (2012), plus extract from Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1971)

Session 4, Wednesday 15th January, 12-1pm 

• Extracts from Walter Mignolo on ‘decoloniality’, and critiques thereof

Session 5, Wednesday 26th February, 12-1pm 

• Priyamvada Gopal, ‘Decolonisation and the University’ (2021)

Session 6, Friday 28th March, 12-1pm 

• On ‘decolonising the curriculum’ and the politics of reading lists (readings TBC) 

Session 7, Wednesday 30th April, 12-1pm 

• On critical, radical and liberatory pedagogies, or ‘pedagogies of solidarity’ (readings TBC)