Abstract
There is increasing interest within Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) to examine curricula for legacies of colonialism or empire that might result in a preponderance of references to research from the global north. Prior attempts to study reading lists for author geographies have employed resource-intensive audit and data collection methods based on manual searching and tagging individual reading list items by characteristics such as author country or place of publication. However, these manual methods are impractical for large reading lists with hundreds of citations that change over instances the course is taught. Laborious manual methods may explain why there is a lack of quantitative evidence to inform this debate and the understanding of geographic distribution of curricula. We describe a novel computational method applied to 568 articles, representing 3166 authors from the Imperial College London Masters in Public Health programme over two time periods (2017–18 and 2019–20). Described with summary statistics, we found a marginal shift away from global north-affiliated authors on the reading lists of one Masters course over two time periods and contextualise the role and limitations of the use of quantitative data in the decolonisation discourse. The method provides opportunities for educators to examine the distribution of course readings at pace and over time, serving as a useful point of departure to engage in decolonisation debates.
Highlights
In recent years, staff and students at different Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in the UK and globally have attempted to identify colonial legacies in different interpretations of the term ‘decolonisation’
We have argued that the non-use of some frugal innovations in High-income countries (HICs), which could be associated with significant cost-savings to systems such as the NHS, amounts to a double-standard (Skopec et al, 2019; Skopec, Fyfe, et al, 2021; Skopec, Grillo, et al, 2021)
We describe the methods used to convert reading lists of the Imperial College London Masters in Public Health (MPH) programme over two time periods (2017–18 and 2019–20) into machine readable code from which bibliographic and author region data is retrieved from the WoS and country socioeconomic status is retrieved from the World Bank
Summary
Staff and students at different Higher Education institutions (HEIs) in the UK and globally have attempted to identify colonial legacies in different interpretations of the term ‘decolonisation’. Others have focused on the curriculum white?, http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/videos/curriculum-white/ (UCL 2014) (English Faculty Begins Decolonisation Discussion, 2017; Gishen & Lokugamage, 2018; University of Westminster, 2020). These movements can be understood as responses to decolonisation theories of epistemological racism in academia (Kubota, 2020), ‘asymmetric ignorance’ (western academics can afford to not cite non-western academics, without this affecting the perceived quality of their work, but non-western academics are not afforded this) (Chakrabarty, 2000) or a need for cognitive justice within the global academic community where “the norm is [a] plurality of knowledge” (Coimbra, 2007). Consumers evaluate products differently based on their COO and products from LMICs are generally rated less favourably due to the external cue of COO (Adina et al, 2015; Bilkey & Nes, 1982; Srinivasan et al, 2004; Verlegh & Steenkamp, 1999)
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