Decolonising the Arts and Humanities: Reflections from a recent gathering

On Friday 5th June 2026, members of the Social Justice, Decoloniality and Communities of Difference Research Cluster came together with the BACAH team at UCL East for a two-hour session that was organised as a space for self-reflection, sharing practice and initiating a collective effort to decolonise our places of learning.

Two pre-readings were circulated ahead of the gathering to help give colleagues a sense of what has taken place before, and what challenges or opportunities for transformation have we enacted individually or collectively. Participants were asked to read two texts: an open letter to UK Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies written six years ago by the collective Revolution or Nothing, and UCL’s Inclusive Curriculum Health Check from 2018. Prompts asked what has changed since these texts were written? What hasn’t? Where are we now?

The session opened with introductions, an icebreaker, and a set of Principled Space Guidelines which is a framework developed by Building the Anti-Racist Classroom collective and inspired by artist and activist Hanalei Ramos, who argues that “safe space” is a promise we can’t always keep, but that we can commit to a set of shared principles that make safety more possible. These included listening to people’s lived experiences without dispute, speaking up if you feel unsafe, and ensuring that what’s shared in the room stays in the room. This blog post is offered as a record of our efforts.

Drawing the Space

One of the most absorbing parts of the morning asked participants to draw the space of BACAH: its geographies and inhabitants, its diversity and its monocultures. Using a long roll of brown paper, post its and colouring pens, colleagues were invited to work together to create a visual artefact that describes the site of our intervention. The act of mapping, rather than discussing, was a way to surface what we often take for granted: who is in the room, who isn’t, what shapes the curriculum beyond the page.

This led into a wider conversation about what decolonising actually means for BACAH beyond an abstract commitment, and towards naming our practices, methods, and relations that are governed to a large degree by curriculum content, in assessment design, but also in the texture of how we teach and who we make space for.

Where Theory Meets the Classroom

The session surfaced a tension that anyone working in this space will recognise: the gap between the granular realities of what happens in a classroom and the macro structures of institutional governance in which programmes sit. Both matter, and neither can be ignored in favour of the other.

BACAH faculty left with renewed interest in creating more regular space, both within the team and between staff and students, to keep these conversations going. Decolonising, the session affirmed, isn’t a project with a solutionist drive. It’s an ongoing practice of learning, unlearning, and holding the space of the classroom as a possible site of liberation.

Looking Ahead

The gathering raised questions specific to BACAH that will shape future planning and practice. It was part of a continuing chronology of self-understanding; one that takes seriously questions of positionality, power, and agency. 

These are not easy conversations. But they are necessary ones. And sessions like this give community a chance to form, to organise and to intervene in institutional spaces.

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