Trust, courage and silence: carving out decolonial spaces in higher education through student–staff partnerships

Abstract

ABSTRACT On 20 March 2019, the Decolonise UoK, formerly Decolonise UKC conference took place at the University of Kent (W Ahmed and others, Decolonising the Curriculum Project Manifesto: Through the Kaleidoscope (2019) <https://decoloniseukc.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/decolonising-the-curriculum-manifesto-final-2.pdf). Out of this came its manifesto to the university with recommendations in three key areas (ibid). The end goal of this student–staff collaboration was not intended to be a strategic intervention to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) work within universities although the body of knowledge (the manifesto and the Decolonise UoK Collective book, Towards Decolonising the University: A Kaleidoscope for Empowered Action (Counterpress 2020)) is open access for everyone to read and implement. We explore this process of self-empowerment through the concepts of (re-)existence/resistance from decolonial studies in combination with the black feminist critical race theory (CRT) methods of counter-narrating. We discuss the detail of racialised life both as part of surviving and through resisting institutional racism and its affective impact upon us. We argue that the necessary conditions that made it possible to do the work of self-empowerment from our intersectional and multiple positionalities across the student–staff continuum within the neoliberal university have been trust, courage and silence.