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Decolonising the Curriculum Guest Panel: Why and How to Shake the System
18 November 2019, 5:15 pm–7:30 pm
Join us as we come together and discuss the importance of finding new ways of seeing the canon. The event will be followed by a drinks reception.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Dr Caroline Garaway – Joint Faculty of Arts & Humanities and Social & Historical Sciences
Location
-
Lecture Theatre G6Institute of Archeology31-34 Gordon SquareLondonWC1H 9JGUnited Kingdom
As debates surrounding decolonising the curriculum have raged in the media over the last couple of years, student interest in these campaigns across the Joint Faculties is extremely high. There have been local departmental initiatives speaking to this agenda, and for some people in the Joint Faculties, this is an area they have been working in for years – long before the term was popularised/jargonised in the media.
That said, there is still uncertainty amongst many (staff and students) about what it means exactly, why, and when it is important, and how it can be achieved. This panel event provides an opportunity to investigate these questions with people who have been involved in and/or vocal about decolonised curricula in Higher Education over the last few years. Join us as we come together and discuss the importance of finding new ways of seeing the canon. The event will be followed by a drinks reception at the Anthropology Foyer and Student Common Room.
The event will be chaired by Professor Anson McKay, Vice Dean Equality, Diversity and Inclusion SHS.
About the Speakers
Paul Gilroy
Professor of the Humanities at Centre for the Study of Race & Racism, UCL
Paul Gilroy is one of the foremost theorists of race and racism working and teaching in the world today. Author of foundational and highly influential books such as There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), Against Race (2000), Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) and Darker Than Blue (2010) alongside numerous key articles, essays and critical interventions, Gilroy’s is a unique voice that speaks to the centrality and tenacity of racialized thought and representational practices in the modern world. He has transformed thinking across disciplines, from Ethnic Studies, British and American Literature, African American Studies, Black British Studies, Trans-Atlantic History and Critical Race Theory to Post-Colonial theory. He has contributed to and shaped thinking on Afro-Modernity, aesthetic practices, diasporic poetics and practices, sound and image worlds.
More about Paul GilroySandy Ogundele
Black and Minority Ethnic student's officer at UCL Students
Lola Olufemi
Writer
Lola Olufemi is a black feminist writer and organiser from London. She is the co-author of A FLY Girl’s Guide to University: Being a Woman of Colour at Cambridge and Other Institutions of Power and Elitism (Verve Poetry Press, 2019) and the forthcoming book Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power set to be published by Pluto Press in March 2020.
Meera Sabaratnam
Senior Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS
Meera Sabaratnam is Senior Lecturer in International Relations. Her research interests are in the colonial and postcolonial dimensions of international relations, in both theory and practice. She has worked on questions of decolonisation, Eurocentrism, race and methodology in IR. She has applied these concepts to the analysis of international development aid, peacebuilding and statebuilding, most recently in her book Decolonising Intervention (2017). Her regional interests are in Southern Africa and the Indian Ocean region. Currently she is working on questions of race in IR theory and a postcolonial historiography of the First World War. Meera is also the Chair of the Decolonising SOAS Working Group.
More about Meera Sabaratnam