Decolonizing Social Sciences Curriculum

The paper evaluates the reach and viability of the call to “decolonize academia” and assesses what can be done in academic institutions by way of decolonizing practices. By distinguishing colonialism from
coloniality, it stresses the material and structural dimensions of the latter as an on-going reality, and thus argues for the impossibility of “decolonizing” the academy as we know it.

Decolonisation has become an academic buzzword in the western academy, particularly among scholars keen to think with and illuminate living worlds of Indigenous peoples who ‘go on’ even though they continue to be wounded or scarred by the brutality of colonialism.

Chapter Six: Decolonzing and Decommodifying the University

The construction and performance of gender and gender relations has been paramount to the process of Decolonization. Gender has permeated the discourses and enactments of colonization and is an inseparable part of the casting of subjectivity through the coloniality of power. The notions of femininity and masculinity are themselves colonial constructs that have pressed more complex notions of gender, sexuality, and desire into a binary

After Ferguson, Standing Rock, the Black Lives Matter protests, and the crisis of refugees at the US southern border, there have been renewed calls for a racial reckoning in US anthropology. Dissatisfaction on the domestic front runs parallel to an unease over US anthropology's failure to adequately address militarism, imperialism, and predatory capitalism abroad. Finally, there is the fraught question of US anthropology's oversized influence within world anthropologies.

Calls continue for the decolonisation of higher education (HE). Based on internationalisation debates, a research team from Africa, Europe and Latin America reviewed published decolonisation voices. Using bibliometric analysis and a conceptual review of abstracts, the authors examined the drivers framing decolonisation in HE and identified the voices in those debates which involved the historically oppressed and those wishing to elicit change in these debates. The paper recognises the importance for decolonisation in education as the tensions explored by the authors often intersect through HE into other domains of the political, social, economic and culturally important areas for replication and change in society.

The call to decolonise universities across the global North has gained particular traction in recent years, from Rhodes Must Fall Oxford’s (RMFO) campaign for a public reckoning with its colonial legacies, to recent attempts by Georgetown University, Washington DC, to atone for its past ties with slavery. 1 The UK’s National Union of Students (NUS) has been running ‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ and #LiberateMyDegree as two of their flagship campaigns since 2015. Both campaigns seek to challenge ‘Eurocentric domination and lack of diversity’ in curricula across UK universities.

I read this book as a human geographer familiar with its co-authors' work and in broad sympathy with its critical approach to colonial modern relations of power. In their introduction, Mignolo and Walsh present On Decoloniality as an introductory reader for those unfamiliar with discussions around colonial modern power and decoloniality.

Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh's co-authored book On Decoloniality introduces the project of decoloniality to readers not yet familiar with the concept and is also ‘an update for readers already familiar, to the specific vision and practice within the frame modernity/coloniality/decoloniality’.Footnote1 Having authored the book Sinologism: An Alternative to Orientalism and Postcolonialism,Footnote2 I was eager to learn about the latest developments in the theory and praxis of decolonisation and postcolonialism. I was not disappointed, for the central theme of ‘decoloniality’ is extensively explored, both conceptually and practically.