Decolonizing the Academy – Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Abstract

I draw on my own experience facilitating a student-led “decolonizing the curriculum” project within an English university critical law school. I reflect upon how such initiatives – predicated on collaboration between staff and students in particular – can constitute “liberatory” spaces from which to resist different structural forms of coloniality and racism or racialization within the western academy. I draw on the work of scholars of colour who expose the coloniality and racialization underpinning the current trend within higher education institutions’ (HEIs) equalities initiatives that “gaze” upon bodies of colour through the phenomenon of the “BME attainment gap”. This same scholarship also facilitates scholars and students of colour to theorize the possibilities for (re-)existing within the academy by calling for a refocusing of attention and “gaze” back onto institutional racism within HEIs. The process is rife with pitfalls, navigating continued racialization or erasure on the one hand, to co-optation – in the current increasingly marketized UK HE environment – on the other. Finding oneself in this situation – between a rock and a hard place – is also particularly fraught for academics of colour who are effectively rendered complicit through their wage relation with universities reproducing knowledge systems, that emerged from and continue to be marked by coloniality and racialization. What, then, is the allure for us to engage in university decolonizing movements? I argue that doing the work of confronting these tensions is an urgent task that must be done alongside finding spaces – albeit cracks and fissures – from which to do crucial anti-racist work of “decolonizing the western academy”. This is not an end-goal in and of itself – not least, perhaps, because of its impossibility – but rather as part of a self-liberatory process facilitating the re-existence of people of colour within the Academy.