Abstract
Within the literature on decolonizing the curriculum, a clear distinction is frequently made between diversity and decolonization. While decolonization entails dismantling colonial forms of knowledge, including practices that racialize and categorize, diversity is a policy discourse that advocates for adding different sorts of people to reading lists and the staff and student body. As a team of staff and students, we are committed to decolonization, but we are also aware that within our discipline of political science, calls for diversity are more likely to be understood and accepted. We therefore bid for, and obtained, funding to conduct a quantitative review of our department’s reading lists in order to assess the range not only of authors, but also of topics and ideas. We found that male White authors wrote the majority of the readings, with women of colour authoring just 2.5 per cent of works on our curriculum. Our reading lists also featured disappointingly little theoretical diversity, with very little coverage of feminist, critical race or queer theory approaches, for example. We therefore used the standard methodologies and approaches of our discipline in order to point towards the silences and gaps that a decolonizing approach would seek to remedy. In this article, we explain our approach and findings. The project has been educational in the best sense and has disrupted hierarchical relationships between staff and students. It has helped us think more deeply about how data and research inform, and sometimes limit, change, as well as how the process of learning about how knowledge, including reading lists, is generated can support decolonization in itself.
Highlights
Lecturer GenderVariable type open open Select one open Select one Lecturer EthnicitySelect one Reading BackgroundWeek Title Type integer open Select one Author(s)Journal Year of Publication Number of Authors Author Name Author Gender open integer integer open Select one Author EthnicityInput e.g. Public Policy e.g. POLS10011
Decolonizing the university will be a multifaceted process going beyond reading lists, and the process of working in a collaborative and diverse environment empowered us as legitimate knowledge producers
Most of the modules we looked at could have included a more diverse set of examples without entirely changing focus and scope, with just one (Politics of Economic Policy in Post-Industrial Democracies) plausibly constrained to Global North examples in its scope. (The question of whether or not it is ever very useful to think about the post-industrial democracies in isolation from their colonial pasts and their ongoing relationships with other countries is not something we agree on as a group, but is worth considering.) It is important to note that studying the colonial peripheries from a Eurocentric perspective was central to colonial power, and adding more diverse case studies in and of itself does not necessarily decolonize the curriculum
Summary
Lecturer GenderVariable type open open Select one open Select one Lecturer EthnicitySelect one Reading BackgroundWeek Title Type integer open Select one Author(s)Journal Year of Publication Number of Authors Author Name (repeat for each author) Author Gender (repeat for each author) open integer integer open Select one Author EthnicityInput e.g. Public Policy e.g. POLS10011. Variable type open open Select one open Select one Lecturer Ethnicity. Week Title Type integer open Select one Author(s). Journal Year of Publication Number of Authors Author Name (repeat for each author) Author Gender (repeat for each author) open integer integer open Select one Author Ethnicity.
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