 Thank you, everybody, for coming, and before I introduce Mira Salvaradnam, I would just have a few things. Thanks to the Political Science Department for hosting this event. Thanks to the Mead family who has funded this talk, and many other opportunities for political science students, for political science faculty. I would like to thank Mary Bethe White, who's our administrative assistant, who, especially this week, as we're also navigating to on campus searches, has gone above and beyond. I don't know if you know this, but she is a centrifugal force that holds the Political Science Department together. She was not here. There would be no need. There would not be a Political Science Department. There would be a series of lost cats trolling. The cat is trying to figure out what's up and what's not. So, Mary Bethe, this and many other things that happened in the department would not take place without Mary Bethe. Lizzie Lee, the poster, I would like to thank the folks who set up the technology, as well as the custodial staff, administrative staff, and the finance, crew security, and the housekeeping staff, that make talks like this possible and whose work is essential for the functioning of the university and whose work is often overlooked. I'd also like to thank my partner who's currently doing childcare, which allows me to be here, which is no small amount of labor, as well. So, without further ado, it is my great pleasure to invite Mira Saderatman to Trinity. Mira is a senior lecturer of international institutions and departments of politics at International Studies at the School of Corporal Oriental and Asian Studies, SOAS, in London, and also Chair of the Decolonizing SOAS, a working group whose work we're going to learn about today. I've been a great admirer of Mira's work for many years, and have taught her new book, Colonizing Intervention, International State Building in Bokunjumbo, Zambi, last semester in my African anti-colonial theory class. The students loved it. It's a fantastic book. I loved it. It's also available for free PDF of open source at a Roman and Little Field. I think it does a fantastic, just amazing breathtaking job, kind of re-conceptualizing the very terms in which we think about intervention, kind of from the perspective of those who are interving with the school. It's an important and timely book. Mira is also the co-editor of a liberal piece. The problems are practiced in the piece building, the Zed books, and also author of numerous journal articles and book chapters. Also, it's important to recognize Mira's really amazing work that she does in transforming the field of IR, not only through her scholarship and teaching, but also in the type of institutional service that she does as a journal editor, as the editor of the Colonial Book Series, which generously published my edited book, but also as co-founder of the Colonial, Post-Colonial, De-Colonial Working Group at the British International Studies Association, which was one of the early kind of subgroups at ESA that really put decolonial, anti-colonial thought, or kind of created an organizational network that brought a lot of people together. A lot of my experiences at conferences are possible because of working groups like the one that Mira has organized. And she also served as last year's section of the Global Development Studies at ESA, the International Studies Association. Another example of how her institutional service is both a practice of decolonial scholarship, creating, doing double work in order to create kinds of networks and openings in which we can talk about politics beyond colonials. I would like to read this book Decolonizing Intervention. Mira makes a brilliant statement about the need to decolonize the discipline of international relations. In the talk today, Mira is going to be decolonizing the university, but I think that in her thinking about what it means to decolonize an academic discipline of what we can get a sense of the power of her party, how do you decolonize a discipline once characterized by one of its founders as a study of the best way to run the world from the decision of strength. Indeed, the primary assumption of contemporary IR, that we live in a world of more or less independent states, in one sense fundamentally presupposes the already existing success of decolonization. What it means to say this, or what does it mean to say that this assumption is wrong, is that one proceed to study of the world of world politics after that. The decolonizing element of this question calls for more, however. Specifically, it calls for scholars to engage, examine, retrieve and cultivate other ways of thinking about and being in the world that can learn from alternative points of departure to the hegemonic knowledge of empire. The central aim must be to reject the assumed ways in which global humanity has intellectually ordered into a hierarchy of advanced and backward groups along lines produced by historic systems of colonial exploitation and corruption. This means rethinking world politics in terms of its histories, geographies, economies, ecologies, conceptions of the human, the social, the sacred, and the mundane and so on. This requires thinking about the kinds of researching methods and models that we use and the kinds of constituencies for with whom the research might be produced. Well, it is difficult, luckily we as scholars do not have to start from scratch once we accept the need to think otherwise the world is full of already existing possibilities and so I think you're up for bringing that to our attention and I look forward to hearing your talk about the university. Thank you. Hi everybody, so I'm going to go back to my office and readjust this because I'm going to be late. Okay, thank you very much for coming along and for giving up your beautiful Wednesday evening. I wanted to start with a couple of, well, three thank yous really. First, a thank you to Isaac and an echo of all of the thank yous that he gave to the colleagues here that made this possible into the mean family as well. Second, I actually wanted to read a land acknowledgement statement which is not very common practice I think here in the United States. It's much more common in Australia and Canada when thinking about the geographies of separate colonialism and so I took the opportunity to educate myself a little bit about the Connecticut area which actually word Connecticut comes from a Mohegan word, Connecticut, I'm not saying that correctly obviously, but that gave its name to the local area and too many of the features here. So I would like to begin by acknowledging the land on which we gather is the territory of Mohegan, the Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Saskia Cove, Golden Hill Pogacit and Nifmont Peoples who have stewarded this land throughout the generations. We thank them for their strength and resilience in protecting this land and aspire to uphold our responsibilities according to their example. Now, the actual reading of land acknowledgement not only helps to start straight back those layers that we take for granted, it's a very beautiful, you know, New England campus and the pool and all these classic things, but beneath all of those buildings and all of this very nice landscaping. There is another history there, right? There were peoples here, there were histories of what the land was used previously and part of decolonizing is recovering that memory as well as the present kind of environment. The third little thing I want to say is just that it's my late father's birthday today and so it's a very nice day to give this talk and to dedicate it to him. Right, so now we've got the preliminaries out of the way let's get to business. So, decolonizing the university. Over the last couple of years I've been involved as increasingly a sort of activist as well as scholar around this particular struggle. Not exactly by design but sort of by accident and so what I want to talk to you about today is something about what I think is going on in the world what the global movement is to decolonize the university what is meant by that, what's happening now who's doing things, what are they doing and what this might mean for the broader kind of systems in which we live. I'll also say a few words about social movements and how they work and how this particular movement is working within those parameters and finally look out to some of the broader implications of society. But let's start with that first question. Let's start with that first question. What is going on? So I want to start us in South Africa. So this is the University of Cape Town. In 2015 there was a massive student protest focused around the statue of Cecil Rhodes. Does anyone know who Cecil Rhodes was? Yeah, okay, good. A number of you do. He's a major figure in the British colonial apparatus particularly pioneering land appropriation for mining things like gold and diamonds invested in the company to beers and so on but involved as well in a lot of cruelties and exploitations towards African people was quite indifferent to their murder and killing as part of this process. And so until 2015, 20 years after the fall of apartheid a statue commemorating Cecil Rhodes remained in the University of Cape Town and a number of his legacies kind of dot the landscape. So the students in South Africa started agitating around the statue but this led to a much bigger deconstruction of what they thought was wrong with the universities that they were working and living in. Now South Africa is obviously a majority black African country but of course the universities remained bastions of whiteness particularly in terms of the staffing profile but also in terms of the orientation of the subjects that were being taught and the ways in which the education was unfolding. So there's been a huge upheaval within South African higher education in terms of demands for more diverse and more African oriented curriculum more African staff of black African origin environments crucially in which students of all backgrounds can have access so the Roads Must Fall campaign quickly became a Fees Must Fall campaign and became about pre-access to education. So that's one snapshot and that's in some ways the spark for the most recent kind of uprisings. Of course in Latin America you won't be able to read this text and that's not really necessary. In Latin America the idea of decolonizing the university and decolonizing institutions has been around maybe a little bit longer and kind of gathering momentum over the last 20 years especially as part of the decolonial critique within the academy. So you have people like Colombian scholar Santiago Lucasio Gomez writing about decolonizing the university as a way of deconstructing the coloniality of knowledge specifically the ways of thinking that organize the world around categories and ideas that have been inherited from colonial times. Over in London this is a student society it became incredibly popular around the same time in 2015-16 started at my institution SOAS which really opened up a massive wave of activism and debates around what it meant to argue that the university was a sort of colonial entity and it was accompanied by groups in UCL called things like Why Isn't My Professor Black or Why Is My Curriculum White More recently we've had activism of Goldsmiths students have launched a sort of 130 day occupation that eventually ended up with the institution agreeing to a set of demands around having more diverse curricula insourcing staff race awareness training these kinds of measures It's not just in the smaller institutions larger institutions are now starting to think and act along the language of reparations and this is a huge kind of step compared to say about five years ago. Particularly institutions that have legacies associated with prophets from slavery have had to look at their own endowments, their own legacies and ask who those legacies are profiting and whether reparations are an appropriate response. That's not just a conversation being had in the UK but also in the US and some of you have heard about what's been happening in Georgetown and this has just gathered a lot of wide ranging political interest. I'm putting up this headline the Duchess of Sussex wants to decolonize the curriculum of political intervention not because she does this story kind of generated out of I'll explain that when I come to it later there was a meeting, she's the new patron of the Association of Commonwealth Universities at a meeting we presented some of these ideas to her and she was heard making baby approving noises which then exploded in the press into this massive story in such that places such as Huff as bizarre forms and so on colonizing the curriculum movement she's received a lot of stick so these give you just a snapshot of the kind of waves that is kind of happening around the world and some of the interest in it I never thought that something like this would be covered in Huff as bizarre and yet this has happened so we're in a strange place before I progress into thinking about the sort of social movement though I wanted to clarify what I think the movement means by decolonizing the university and certainly where some of our discussions have been in SARS so I wanted to take us back to some of the common assumptions or principles now because in the nature of this exposition I'm going to have to go through some of these without explaining them at full length but I'd be very happy to expand on some of these in the Q&A so the assumption number one is that universities like many modern institutions developed principally in a era of western colonial expansion and supremacist thinking right so the golden age for when universities organized themselves became massively expanded institutions we're looking at essentially the 19th and early 20th centuries and at this time particular kinds of thinking, particular kinds of attitudes were very dominant now in the meantime of course these practices and beliefs have been supposedly discredited so we consider the present day to be one in which anti-racism or non-racism is the norm and anti-imperialism at least at the level of international law is very much part of the lexicon nations have the right to self-determination people should treat it equally etc so even though the broad scale and the historical scale we can say these practices and beliefs have been supposedly discredited the argument at least within the universities is that there are structural continuities embedded in contemporary institutions right and so the things that people think to sorry let's try to spin into this microphone too much look at the colonial relations embedded in a wide range of things that we do so they include curriculum in terms of whose perspectives are included what ideas are included and what kind of knowledge comes from teaching practices in terms of how students are expected to learn what the model student looks like how we treat students from minoritised backgrounds there is a lot of research on this research practices in terms of consent in terms of engagement with the so-called subjects of research academic hierarchies and faculty profiles who is protected, who is vulnerable and precarious the treatment of minoritised groups of students that institutions deal with for example campus racism when it is experienced by their members profit from exploitation and appropriation where do universities invest where does their money go where do the profits circulate so one of the final kind of pillars of the argument is really that the diversity policies that we have had so far have not been effective at producing the kind of transformation that people desire even though of course there are several steps in this country in terms of desegregating public spaces and in terms of affirmative action which we don't have in my country by the way nonetheless these have not been effective at producing the kinds of transformation which an anti-racist or a decolonised society might want to see so from this set of principles comes two outcomes, right, two conclusions the first one is that actually there are serious intellectual and academic limitations that come from this that is to say that prioritising a particular set of knowers and knowledge that we don't actually see all of the things that they're allowed to see we have these kind of blinkers on because of the way they've been taught and second that these continue to produce some kind of profound injustices within institutions particularly for minoritised students and staff, Indigenous students and staff students who cannot access universities for various reasons so with those assumptions and those conclusions what decolonising the university then will does is attempt to transform institutions, right, so it's saying we need to rethink how the institutions work and to make them made to the measure of humanity that's a phrase called by César when he's talking about colonialism and he's saying European colonialism has talked about its own humanism for a long time but its humanism is very exclusionary and hierarchical if you make the world made to the measure of humanity or humanity then the world will look different so what does this mean now here are some of the demands of principles that movements have put forward first they've demanded that universities act the knowledge of historical injustices of various kinds whether it is a particular role in say slavery for example or a particular role in discrimination against students that's something that they want specifically at knowledge and to pair that with the commitment to anti-racism and reparative action however that's understood in this wider debate about reparations on the intellectual side there's exposing and interrogating the limitations of what we've studied or learned as the so-called universal if we study political theory just as kind of the grand story of humanity whose political theory are we studying what is that tradition it's about rethinking pedagogical practice around student empowerment so it's all very well to study very kind of critical global silversons but if you're not actually teaching students in a way that makes them feel empowered easily the material and the classroom then you're kind of in some way reproducing some of those hierarchies within universities there's been calls for real accountability particularly around student complaints complaints of racism that only seem to go anywhere and for representation in terms of diversity and senior leadership there's a call for relating universities to their sound surrounding publics and communities in the university not just as an island kind of sealed off from the communities that it works in but actually kind of accountable to them and participating with them in the local area and finally there's a set of demands around access to education and what that means and there are all kinds of disputes within the movement about what any of these things might concrete the entail which one should be the priority and so on this section about what is going on I wanted to point to a couple of underlying issues that are also there as part of the discussion in the movement I'll talk about this one briefly some of you will be familiar with the work in the Latin American school on modernity and coloniality and this is a sort of deep structural trans-historical argument that modernity itself is kind of a colonial construction and as a colonial construction it produces these hierarchical binaries between the west and the other and it gives them different roles and entitlements and obligations and properties and so on so that's a sort of underpinning issue or problem that we might want to think about in the context of the modern university one might argue that those binaries define what we call global excellence in the contemporary age where universities are all involved in social sizes they're all involved in competition how do we know which universities it tends to be which universities best approximate a particular model of what a university should do or what it should look like and I think this is in some sense the sort of the deep issue in all of this is the problem of what we might think of as an epistemological standpoint now those of you that have been subjected and I use that word advisedly to the book to people but it's a simple proposition that leads to a big problem the simple proposition is that your socio-political location is critical to how you encounter reality so if you're embodied as a man you'll go into the world in a certain kind of way you'll experience other kinds of things so things like let's say the everyday sexism movement or the Me Too movement have sort of exposed what the everyday realities are of gender and sexualization in that seems pretty obvious as a point the problem is that when this is connected with power or privilege it means that many of the problems that less powerful people encounter are generally invisible to more powerful people because if you don't encounter them as part of your day in reality you may be inclined to think that they don't exist we don't perceive them in the same way and we see this throughout all kinds of conflicts in society where one group says that this thing is a problem another group thinks it's not a problem or in yours they wouldn't see what's going on but when we talk about decolonizing the university if only certain groups have been historically represented in the university what is it that they're not seeing what is it that they're not analyzing what is it that's in this the problem is we don't know what we don't know there are all kinds of cultures all kinds of histories all kinds of ways of thinking an expert in Chinese philosophy to think about suppressed knowledge which we are only now starting to have the capacity to unpack and to bring into dialogue with the common kind of a syllabus or the common ways of thinking now these limits are understanding and itself can be understood as a source of what we might call epistemic injustice so the exclusion of people via the exclusion of their knowledge okay so that's kind of the heavier theory stuff and what is some of the issues underlying the decolonizing movement I want to shift now to thinking about the movement itself and thinking about this moment why is this happening now what's going on in the world that means this kind of thing is happening so the first set of things is that it's a generational shift right so my parents' generation certainly were not up to much of this kind of stuff some people were and there were movements for racial equality in this kind of thing which were very important but the generation that you've got now let's say in South Africa they're called the born three generations most of them were born after apartheid are demanding more from the system than their parents were right and they're asking for more did tell in the UK you have a huge number of these a huge expansion in student numbers particularly from minoritized communities who are looking at their own heritages critically in the US the generation now are the sort of children maybe the grandchildren of the struggles from the civil rights era and that has hugely increased particularly African-American presence in universities from the 1960s on so you've got a generational shift that's happened and your generation specifically that are looking at things differently just questions of race the question of the environment second we've had a few decades of where liberal policy I use this term in inverted promise has failed to reduce inequalities now what we see is a lot of data that shows that even if you know affirmative admissions standards are produced or even if there are public commitments to equality and diversity but the outcomes for students the outcomes are different depending on your background factor as to why this is all happening now is the renewed strength of social movements outside the university just to name a few let's say things like the two kinds of life-life protests indigenous protests around land and excessive pollution you've got campaigns like Black Lives Matter putting these things very much front and centre in the agenda and there is a growing connectivity between and an assertiveness of these movements so these movements are literally feeding off each other in Missouri telling people or people in Gaza telling people in Missouri how to deal with tear gas so there are these movements that are all going to connect however it's not just kind of lefty progressive social movements that are growing it's also right wing movements so there is a reemergence or emergence of alt-right racist nativist movements around the world that seek to move away from the liberal consensus around inclusion or cultural tolerance and so on as you can see in the UK even and I think in the US as well in terms to rehabilitate eugenics or supremacists I've been following a Twitter spam online today where a prominent academic is retweeting some fairly eugenicist things about black people and a few of the science instead of blowing up and there's a wider loss of momentum for what we might call centrist campaigns and this is a political moment which I think I'm familiar with from the news the idea that the centre is in many political context that's not just in the UK and the US but also if you look at places such as India, if you look at places such as Turkey you've got increasingly divided populations a little bit further there's two more practice that I wanted to highlight first is what we might think of as the geopolitical and philosophical weakening of the west relative to the rest of the world so this is something which has been a trend maybe for a couple of decades obviously we think about the rise of countries in the global south rise of China, rise of Brazil and so on concretely this means that lots of countries have more power and more choices about what they do and they may not that they do in practice to live the economic life but they offer the possibility of some kind of alternative you get critiques within the west particularly around theories about racial, cultural superiority which have been very much discredited and unpicked from within, they've been deconstructed by the politics within the west and then there's a wider context of the war on terror and what that has done to weaken the west globally in terms of discrediting its liberal credentials in terms of reframing the west as a much more kind of militaristic entity and the final factor I wanted to point to is what we might call a neoliberal turn in education and this is really about the kinds of pressures that universities are under so universities now in this world of rankings and this world of competition and this world of marketization are becoming very risk-averse and publicity conscious so they're much more sensitive to public opinion than they used to be they're very keen to celebrate diversity as a means to attract more students and then for more fee income so it's important for universities to present themselves as being open at least to the challenges that are being raised by these movements and in some contexts you have regulation or even target setting around things like racial inequality so one thing which has been emerging in the UK for example is something called a teaching excellence framework which is an incredibly bureaucratic thing but one of the things that they may measure is the difference between the numbers of black students and white students who emerge with either a 2-1 or a first class degree and what we know from the data this is data produced by the UK's own government is that even when students go into universities with the same grades they're coming out with different outcomes right so this is the same qualification on leaving school the blue line at the top represents white students the categories are kind of interesting the red line is mixed slash other the green line is Asian students and the yellow line is black students and in the UK they collect this demographic information as part of the university registration so we can very finely track at my institution you can even track in principle at the modular level who's getting better grades I saw one graph at my institution which suggested that white students were receiving a sort of statistical bump over the past mark which other students were not receiving so white students were more likely to get the benefit of the doubt of non-white students but this is a national trend so even if you come into universities with very high grades as a black student like 3A's you're actually less likely to get a first class for a 2-1 degree then a white student is done pretty well much less well they've got the three beats that's a huge gap but it's a massive pattern so statistics like this pressures like this not just from internal movements but from externally in terms of the government are also contributing to this moment okay so I think then about what how we can analyse this movement so what I've tried to do is think through a sort of conceptual framework that we can use to think about what's happening within universities and I speak to somebody who's been trained in a very different, you know the environment in which I was trained through a graduate student in my high school is very different to the environment in which I'm now working there are conversations that we have now that we would not have had 20 years ago and I think what is happening is that there are different forces that work within higher education and they're all present within all universities and I would say even within academics as individuals and collectives these four forces kind of work themselves out in different ways and this is really about what vision of education they have and what vision of education thrives in so what are these four forces what which I would say is relatively well understood might be a conservative force within education so a vision of education as reproducing societal knowledge and values in new generations so education is this kind of transmission belt for society's cultural values and in this in this kind of vision of education the educators themselves are the intellectual authorities they're the gurus they pass on their information to the students in their knowledge and that's one vision of education which has helped sway at various times and places around the world still holds sway I would argue to to some extent within the contemporary university now this is slightly at odds with what I would call a visual view of education a liberal tradition of education which sees it very much as education being about creating a free space for debate, a free space for debate and contestation and if you look at how universities represent what they do often they refer to this kind of activity we're here to debate freely we are here to challenge ideas the best ideas are going to win because that's how science works and so in this view of education a liberal view of education educators may be neutral facilitators right they introduce the students to competing points of view and the students themselves decide or you know the intellectual argument proceeds and somebody wins and this is again something which is very much embedded in how we think about teaching and doing things within university I'm not criticising these ways of thinking about education I'm just distinguishing them from each other within universities globally and it may be different points different places and certainly in the UK this is a big one is what we might call a neoliberal understanding of education and the major feature of this is that education is seen as something which is upscaling people for the knowledge economy this is all about feeding employers and producing skilled graduates and producing a kind of workforce it's also about commodification and marketisation of education so your educators are your service providers right students are consumers they get to choose they get to choose their institutions based on consumer preferences and fees entail a kind of service relationship right okay might be so you must do that or even I deserve this kind of break again this might carry to your but this is one thing which university management in particular are very subject to in terms of external impressions the fourth force that I would say is also within the university in their sort of all along associated particularly with the critical pedagogy movements of the 60s and 70s is the idea that education is a tool for liberation social change humanisation for improving people or liberating them somehow to run their situation so this is associated with the work of people like Paolo Brerri Bell Hooks and so on so in this vision of education educators are kind of co-producers with students it's a mutual learning experience and that it should be guided by some kind of democratic principles now I want to say two things about these four forces first they all exist in every university right they all exist in every university and second that the critical kind of edge is driving a lot of the decolonising movement however it's also interacting with all of these other elements so sometimes student demands and the decolonising movement are articulated as consumer demands so they're like well I am paying my fees so therefore I should not be subject to discrimination it's not made as a claim for justice but as like an adequate service there's a lot of overlap that's there between the liberal and critical positions in which students are saying we want to be free to explore ideas we want to be free to define the terms of debate and also that this will somehow be liberating it may or may not be liberating but these things are on the link and there are elements I won't go into each relationship with each other but what does this mean for thinking about decolonising the university I would argue that this means it can be understood as a struggle for a specific vision of education right maybe a critical vision maybe an emancipatory vision but it has to both compete and collaborate with the other forces and visions that are going on in the university it needs to navigate that terrain it needs to in some sense respect that terrain and understand that this is also how universities are constituted now some of the thinkers who have been thinking about these problems essentially the problem of how to change a system from the inside have looked at these problems from the point of view decolonising I just wanted to read you this quote from a writer under the name of Eileen Paterson who is also known as Wayne Yang some of you may have read the piece Decolonisation is not a metaphor one or two it's quite a famous piece which you can look at if you want and it's about this relationship I think that I just described within the colonising university also exists a decolonising education the bits of machinery that make up a decolonising university are driven by decolonial decolonising dreamers who are subversively part of the machinery and part of the machine themselves what he's speaking to in this quotation is about that ambivalent position of people within the institutions who are also part of those institutions in some ways part of the problem trying to fix the problem or to think differently within them which leads us to the last kind of part of the lecture about how can it be done and can it be done there's a lot of pessimism out there which says that this thing the machine is too big, the structures are too powerful change can't really happen or it's only going to be stupid I'm not so pessimistic but I think we need to think through the theories of how change has ever been made in the human society how big things happen how did women get the vote how did civil rights movement how did countries throw off which is that we know actually quite a lot of what makes social movements successful and these are pretty consistent patterns when you look at which have been the successful social movements over time first grassroots organizing very key, you have to have a massive ground game, you have to have a good ground game you have to have numbers and people who are actually engaged rather than just passively there needs to be leadership not just invested in one person but historically on single individuals actually the strength of women's is through collective and dispersed leadership there have to be clear and specific goals defined by the wider movement this is quite important and one thing which will prove challenging some of the university situations but you need to know what you want you can't just say I want women's equality you have to say I want women to be able to own property you have to have a positive alternative vision of the future you have to have something with promise you have to have the ability to change minds in wider society all social change all profound social change that isn't just people fighting their way over has to win over the public, has to win over majority of people has to come part of the common sense unity challenge of social movements and the ability to build broad alliances around shared goals large scale social change does not happen when it's only a small group of people who are invested in a particular outcome this means in particular developing connections with sympathetic elite parties shorter huge revolutions which get rid of all the elites most large scale social change identifies elites that it can work with and has an ability to take advantage of political opportunities when they present themselves now a classic example of a successful social movement is the Indian independence movement and I would argue that it worked in part because it did lots of those things that we were talking about Gandhi I actually don't have much trouble with his political philosophy although he's much celebrated for that these days however he was a genius at organizing so things like the Salt March were great so the Salt March was about rejecting the British imperial monopoly of the salt trade so Indians were fulfilling from making their own salt they had to report it from a British salt manufacturer and so the Salt March was about defying that law and going to the sea to make your own salt ticks lots of boxes right it's a mass action so lots of people can be involved lots of people can do it everyone knows how to make salt it's a clear single demand to abolish the salt tax or to abolish the import crime it unifies lots of people you've got a very broad line of people who are up for this right because salt is more expensive of course and so on and so forth so Gandhi actually his skill as a political organizer is to get a few of these big headline things that lots of people agree on and to really use them to expose the wider structural situation I would say in terms of the present movement for decolonizing the university we're not quite there these are some of the issues that I think we're facing first there's a range of different demands across institutions right there's not necessary a clear focus as to what people want to do and there's different constituencies with different priorities and objectives so you can have more conservative goals saying okay I just want a few more black professors or I want to change a couple of readings too much more radical goals like we want this university to give up this land back to the indigenous people very different kinds of goals people have been really focused on problems I think rather than alternatives and this is a big kind of tenor of the debate I would say and that's an issue because you can talk about problems quite a lot but unless you can say hey here's a way of doing this differently or here's an alternative it's not going to be very useful it's not necessarily been great at changing people's minds in part because a lot of the debate has been about shaming and confrontation rather than kind of calling people in I would say and so this tends to trigger a lot of emotions like guilt and resentment and so on and can shut people down rather than invite them in because of the nature of the issues and maybe people in older generations repeated sense that these things have gone on and on and not much has happened so there's a sort of pessimism in the movement the corollary, the weird corollary of that is that there's also sometimes a theory of success or co-optation I've certainly seen this in a number of student movements in which the institutions have gone okay yeah we agree to your demands and then they say well you co-opted us right so there's some kind of weird theory of actually winning the art movement and finally there's a whole set of questions about whether we can even talk about decolonising the university alright so I'm just going to how much time have we got I don't know there might be a right okay I'm actually going to skip over actually I'm going to talk about the last couple of things so I can't leave some of the fact that questions for me I think there are some strengths which the movement can build on and which represent some promise to share action and the first thing is I think that there is increasingly a shared framing and analysis as a basis for action and the connectivity of the movement in terms of social media, in terms of Twitter and so on helps with that right, helps people identify things and share ideas to back top I think by largely academic or what we might call a scientific consensus around many of these key phenomena so if you look at the studies around student performance if you look at studies around racism, if you look at studies around curriculum there is a clear consensus around who's included in who's excluded, who's disadvantaged and why and so on right, so this is kind of back top there's now of course better data depending on which context you're in about exclusion and discrimination which is data collected by official sources which again we didn't necessarily have before there's possibilities for learning trans-nationally certainly our group has been in touch with groups in Australia and South Africa in Canada looking at the kinds of work that we're doing together and sharing ideas about what that is and there are sources from strong grassroots movement so it's not been totally I think co-opted into the elite part of the strength of these last movements has been the creation of alternative spaces for learning so it's not just about what you can do in your own modules but actually what you can do for yourselves where are your reading groups, who are you learning from what are you setting up and these can be connected to the universities and the resources they offer but it can also be separate from that and some universities are taking action or be in limited areas I just wanted to share with you some of the stuff that we've been doing since the student mobilisation started say three or four years ago and this is some of the work that I've been involved with so the first thing we've got is a working group which doesn't sound very fancy but it's quite good it's funded centrally by the university's administration some of my work time is funded to do this work and it reports to different academic committees including the sort of powerful ones the board, the senate, the board of trustees which is the governors that oversee the university and so on so we've gone from being a sort of outside shouting any type of group to now being part of the institutional infrastructure this has come alongside an official institutional commitment to the broad aims of decolonisation and that statement which we've gone on our website includes questions of research teaching, public engagement and so on and so on one of the things that the working group has done is produce a short document which we call a learning and teaching toolkit which talks about what it actually means concretely to decolonise one's curriculum or one's both module or programme and also what it means to try and adopt a decolonial approach in teaching this may be old hat in the US but it's not necessarily in the UK a mandatory inclusive teaching training for all permanent faculties so that is operating anti-racist pedagogies it's incorporating stuff around disability, it's incorporating stuff around assessment and so on right so faculty have historically received very little training in how to actually teach you guys I don't want to shock you it's been virtually zero it's increasing a little bit these days so the idea that you would have to mandatory learn let's say how to teach disabled students in line with their needs has actually a huge kind of difficulty not that I'm being ageist but in terms of cultural expectations around permanent faculties we're doing more work on empowering and equitable research partnerships we had a sort of event with the funders where we talked about the issues based particularly by partners in the Royal South in accessing research funding and how the structures of funding themselves meant that the relationships that someone had earlier as hierarchies who sets the agenda are all part of research projects and that the institution kind of maintained that autonomous student movement so it's not we haven't done everything by any means we're still struggling with lots of elements of what it means to decolonize an institution and whether our own institution particularly because it was founded to support the British Empire where it's a school of oriental and African studies to train people in the languages and cultures of Asia and Africa as part of the British imperial takeover whether an institution like this could ever be a liberated force yet the ways of thinking sort of anti-colonial kind of drift of thinking has been part of the institution for a long time so we have quite a supportive academic community right I am going to skip forward I think a little bit to give time for questions because I don't want to I've also got a full sound clip to play you but I'll save that okay let's just get through some of these things I've to talk to you about the fact that you would alright let's get to the conclusions and I can talk about some of the other stuff despite all of the challenges that I think the decolonizing movement has which are moral and intellectual and political and resource and structural and all the rest of it I'm quite optimistic right because if you look at history things change right they do change and they change because people sort of make change right and so institutions and collectives and groups always have the power to make change and in smaller institutions sometimes these kinds of things are easier and my institution is also kind of a smaller institution change does need to ally both intellectual power and organisational power having one without the other is pretty useless and will quickly lead to disunity or sort of a failure to identify goals or contrary nothing happens right so in a lot of universities there's a lot of intellectual power behind these things but they're not very well being thought is that some things are irresolvable but some conflicts require people to take position that they may not want to confront and the particular example that keeps coming up again and again is around racist speech on campus and whether it's protected by academic reading whether it constitutes legitimate form of articulation or whether it constitutes hate speech and therefore should be banned this is an ongoing debate and that Twitter storm I was talking about earlier involves some academic saying it's not racist to say that but the fact that it's not obviously racist to them is the important part of the picture they're claiming it's part of the normal academic inquiry whereas others are saying that's clearly racist like all the movements before it I do think this is a really interesting movement it's a challenging movement and it's asking us to rethink some basic categories like what we mean by freedom what we mean by justice even what we mean by democracy in societies which are which have this legacy what does it mean for them to be truly democratic what does it mean for people to all be part of the single community and I am I will always be sort of optimistic about our capacity to do better than we have done in the past and I will stop there do you want to chair the I'll start with you so Trinity is very white and very wealthy and we sit in the middle of Hartford which is dominated by people of color and it has a lot of wealth and quality so I'm just wondering how do we start breaking down these barriers and breaking out of this bubble that we sit in up here and getting more engaged in our community okay good question do we want to take several questions at a time okay alright so I'm going to write that question down so I don't get it for a school like Trinity what exactly would a colonized political science curriculum look like and why would that be a benefit okay so you mentioned that sort of the propelling force of deconizing academics is this idea that we don't know what we don't know but we also need specific goals to set to achieve if we're going to keep decolonizing I'm wondering how you balance our knowledge of where we should be going or like knowledge of where we should be going with those specific goals alright well there's three really hot questions which I think we'll do but I'll remember you guys for the next round first how to connect with the local community so I think there's different ways into this problem so one is actually the local community is already to extend part of the college community that is to say that the people who work on campus in catering and security and so on are presumably drawn from the surrounding communities and are part of are already part of the school so one step is to engage with them ask them what they're doing a big part of our decolonizing campaign has also been linked to in-sourcing workers so they were all working for this multinational company before but they're now employees of the institution with the same rights and benefits structures so that's one angle we can go with another one might be to be in contact with the indigenous peoples of the area and to talk about land and the other issues you know what is the history of this particular land how well is it visible or how commemorated is it how could we make that more visible those are two ways a third way to be thinking about access to the local community are there for example scholarships which are for people of half of it these kinds of things is that a way of connecting could you use these spaces in the universities to also help community organizing right could you lease out your halls or your nice facilities to enable community events to take place so there are all kinds of ways the question about the political sites curriculum what would a decolonized one so I tend to use the word decolonizing rather than decolonized because I think it's really about the ethos and the journey rather than the destination but that said there's a few different things that we talk about in the toolkit so one is about things which are already internal slightly to the discipline so what are the origins of the discipline and what are the connections with colonial imperial structures right which is great with white world politics which very carefully unpicks for example the field of international relations and there are some similar pieces of political science so that's one thing another thing is to try and look at writing from around the world on politics maybe not narrowly but on politics that gives you different perspectives on the world and there are traditions certainly in African political thought writing about politics in the Middle East you can have a sort of greater geographical spread and then you can also think about political theory as occurring in different spaces and places so you're not just having this very kind of narrow cannon defined by relationship with the so-called enlightenment but you're looking at influential thinkers from around the world and if we think about who the influential thinkers are we start to see some historically influential people right you know who is more influential in contemporary thought is it nature or is it Mao right I mean who are the people that have really made an impact on the world so those are some of the directions that you could go in I think decolonising it has to be a contextual endeavour as well so decolonising in the US might mean a much more integrated relationship we're thinking about set of colonialism and indigeneity and so on there's a sort of starting point actually there's a great article on why political science hates Native Americans which is published in PS or something but anyway that's the kind of thing that you could start with just kind of build up an awareness or sensibility and the question about how we need specific goals but we don't know what we don't know so yeah this is a challenge so maybe one of the goals though is to make space to learn what we don't know so a lot of let's say research projects expect you to already know how that research project will fit into an established literature before you are allowed to have the money in the time to go and do that project but could we make a case for having more exploratory research opportunities where not just you are defining the research question but maybe you're codifying it with community partners or you're codifying it with or you're learning what the research question is as you go along in some fields this is easier than others but making space to know and making space to learn I think is important again with education we often pre-set what the outcomes of course should be before you guys even show up and we're expected to do that because it's seen as good service to have all of that stuff already set up but what if we were to codifying the learning objectives together and for you guys to decide what we wanted out of the program or the course of the module how would we manage to make that work within this structure so some of it can be about learning making space to learn okay so next round of questions I heard yes you guys are technical so I'll start with you so you mentioned about the horizon power the global health and how the movement can work with them however I find it problematic to work with certain powers that are active of racial oppression in certain communities there are extensive records of racism and racial fabrication within DOSA of non-western societies and when they contribute power to the movement it helps out only for facilitating the advancement of one group not the others so how do you draw the line in that situation good next to you you mentioned that one of the deepest underlying issues is the prevalence of privilege and how we can tell the inability of many problems in the first question but overall how would you put this most effective way to have these problems become more visible whether it's on camera or in general yeah sorry yeah so in your checklist about the successful social movements you talked about engaging with power players at that moment and what do you see as the most successful ones in our world today the most accessible people who hold power to engage with higher education engagement and advocacy so I was really interested in that working with that you established in your organization and I was wondering because we get a lot of like the understanding of grassroots organization like for my first question would be can there be a coalition of grassroots advocacy and established institutions and what is the level of involvement and solidarity that these institutions can bring without co-authentic state admission or the kind of impact of these grassroots organizations okay great so let's start with the rising global south I absolutely agree with you in terms of a lot of countries in the so-called south which yes we cannot name names there are a number of countries in the global south which are practicing particularly anti-minority politics at the moment and a whole bunch of practices which involve anything from military occupation and harassment to mass surveillance discriminatory threats and so on so there are lots of countries doing this and lots of those countries also present themselves as being somehow sort of non-western alternative as well I think in terms of I think we have to be quite consistent about the kinds of violence that we are opposed to that we find problematic and if the call is for a more democratic more humane world order that has to apply everywhere and so I think building connections and solidarities with groups who are involved in these struggles in those contexts so not being an outsider kind of parachuted in but respecting that there are people on the ground already dealing with those situations and giving them support is a more useful way to think about the politics of solidarity there the point that I was making in the lecture was really about the context of let's say the weakening of the west of the country or a dream and so whilst it still holds a lot of sway in different areas it also doesn't where it stops so some things, consumers and capitalism are very popular but other things are not so celebrated the question about privilege what is the most effective way to make it visible so I think so I don't hold with the idea that only people who are part of the oppressed group can lead the education on this front I think everybody can do it there's plenty of information out there where people can educate themselves about what different kinds of oppression mean or what different kinds of injustices are there I did think that some of the Twitter campaigns were quite useful, I thought the everyday sexism campaign was particularly useful in revealing the sort of hidden hidden realities of social life one of the things that students have done in the decolonising campaign is collect testimonies and write reports about the experiences of students on campus which they've been presented to the university and council of the institutions and say look this is what is going on right under the doorstep now that's another way educating oneself but also educating the sort of institutional impact on what is taking place and yeah I think having effective kind of reporting mechanisms, having supportive structures within the student councils and so on can be useful at doing that but again it takes that time to do it bear in mind it's like 10 or 11 o'clock at my time how do we engage with power players and who is accessible so that's a good question it depends on what level you want to make a change particularly I think in our institution we were quite lucky for several reasons so one we were a small institution so people just kind of know each other I know the head of the university I know the people who lead the learning and teaching research and so on and I was also involved in academic representation of the faculty council so in that sense it was relatively easy to know who to reach out to to say will you support this will you do this and using established bodies like senates and unions and so on can be useful if you're interested in change at a higher level so actually I've found the policy arms of political parties as being more accessible than you think they are I have less knowledge of the US system than the British system but in the British system and I think this is probably due to the US system as well lots of policies written by recent college graduates who have been tasked on a very poor budget to come up with ideas and things to do if you have good ideas and if you have good data or if you have good research behind an idea be it to one of the parties be it to the party that you think might be most likely to adopt it I think various policies do come up through that route and if they prove popular then they can get on their traction and even if the party is not in power the fact that the party has a position on something which is popular can drag everybody else over to that position so that's happened around two or three of these in the UK that they were rising to actually the name of the party to stand against it and the question about the working group and how to maintain a coalition between graduates so this is something that I think about a lot because I think it's a challenge for us because we are subject to the internal fatigue or have we been co-opted or is this now just a cosmetic exercise so the principle of keeping the working group open to anybody who wanted to join student or staff is really important to us so anybody can come, anybody can make proposals anybody can bid for our funding so anybody can set the direction so that's one thing the second thing is to try and use share the institutional platform share the resources with the students movement so when they come up with a campaign we reach out and we say do you want to use this, do you want to use our platform to put this forward and to just be in touch with them and have a conversation meet and so to continue to do the work of protesting sometimes both inside and outside the institution but I think you have to straddle those roles and those roles for both those kinds of groups definitely okay how do you push past to neoliberal tendencies institutions to want to project their justice problem without really the problem a lot of people here would say that a lot of the administration would really like to look like their very progressive administration hands on when we have a problem on campus but in reality once the headlines go so does the attention and so I was kind of wondering how you think we can press past something like that to a situation where even your institutions out there are really dedicating money and faculty attention to the situation good question what do you think are the roles for students who are from the global south but currently in the global like studying those like universities what are their roles in terms of facilitating like the like the dialogue between universities and local communities two more questions I might just take those two questions and then come back to you guys again, brain fries a little bit so how do you get past those neoliberal tendencies so this is a very difficult question and I think basically once the pressure goes less happens and I just think that that's a it's almost a lot of physical difference once the pressure goes it depends whether so I think what's happened with us is that actually a lot of the public pressure has gone and it's been converted into a working group activity so I think there is a continuity there but it can run out of steam if people are kind of continuously proactive so having the working group has institutionalised some of the pressure if you like that there doesn't have to be reorganised every time because it's a kind of standing thing but you have to be very persistent and you have to be willing to be unpopular and I think weirdly you have to as people doing work like this not be very ambitious for your faculty administration in the sense that you will be doing things which are awkward and confrontational and which won't necessarily make you part of a well-behaved person that they want to be the dean or whatever or maybe they will if they see that you're good at organizing something but yeah so you require a certain set of tactics and techniques but basically there's no substitute in terms of the roles for students from the global south this is a good question one which I thought about too extensively on its own I think certainly in terms of the knowledge that you come into the classroom with to just share that and to make that part of the education experience either in discussion with the teachers and so on if there's something that you know about that isn't being talked about or isn't being covered making suggestions like we don't know everything we're often grateful for a view or a case study that we haven't really thought about in terms of organizing I think also discussing like your experience and your perceptions of the subject area coming from where you come from so you know I taught students from Rwanda you know in the class on conflict and peace terms then being able to talk about what it's like to be in Rwanda in post conflict Rwanda is a very valuable thing that said a lot of institutional students also don't want to be pigeonholed to be that guy from China or whatever and being asked to speak for China or worse that they're not from which is also happening so yeah I think there's definitely an educational role there's definitely an informative role and there's also a kind of supported role and I think it's one of those things so I am a British person working British University and there are so many things about being an international student or an international staff member that just don't really occur to me being visas and harassing the people and the class that people face something which is an everyday reality for lots of my colleagues students which we don't even think about but then that impacts things like whether they're acting on campus and various issues telling on strike is a question that they're asking me so there are all kinds of things which are invisible to people okay I have a question I guess through the process of equalization you still see the structure and the system of the global system and its legacies in place like how can we ensure that the legacies aren't in place after through the equalization in universities yes my question was about something you said at the beginning of the lecture you mentioned that a lot of how you experience reality is based on your socio-political location in the world and I was wondering do you think that individuals have any kind of sway over that perception of reality and more importantly how does that fit into the equalizing yeah great so on the first question we would never be free of colonial legacies these are huge powerful forces that shape the entire world so the answer is not to erase or forget that history that history happens, it's shaped who we are it's shaped our identities we're married, we're connected really the question is are the values that we have today working out for people in society if one of the ways in which they're not working out is that we refer to people with negative stereotypes or we discriminate against people or people have problematic relationships with the state and their agents and how do we understand better what the colonial legacies are so the problem that I come from in the UK is not so much that people really understand what happened and they're okay with it but they don't even know what happened people are unbelievably poorly educated about what the British Empire was what it did, where it was around the commemorations of the First World War it's only now after a lot of activism that people are beginning to understand yeah, a million and a half Indian soldiers brought to it wasn't just white soldiers from the British Empire in the Second World War Africans are fighting in North Africa, they're fighting in Europe and you know, these are stories that we just haven't heard because we've literally embraced them so actually recovering an understanding of what happened and the ways in which that has entangled us and given us relations with each other I think is really important for the modernisation so I think those legacies are always there it's like how we narrigate them so the question about epistemological location and view how we say you absolutely have said and I strongly believe in the power of learning and communication in the ability to help people empathise with each other empathy is a very powerful human emotional very powerful human force and it has to underpin this entire thing I don't know what it's like to be in this refugee but I can learn I can think, I can communicate I can try and understand it's not going to be the same as living that experience but it's a lot better than just being totally ignorant and not knowing why they're there seeing the newspapers refer to people in very negative ways so this is about the difference between what we consciously, let's say, absorb from our day to day practice in our environment and what we can consciously learn and actually try to value as individuals and as a collective so we can organise our world in ways that help us learn much more about each other so there's an experiment not really an experiment, a project with the University of Hertfordshire which is teaching people compassion as part of their higher education learning so it's grading students on how well they've listened to other students and are able to reflect their points of view back to each other it's asking students to adopt positions that they themselves have experienced or don't agree with and you know kind of work them through we can organise society to reward behaviour like this much more than we do we can organise universities to reward behaviour like this much more than we do the University of Glasgow is trying to include collegiality now as a promotion criteria because it recognises that promotions were very much based on people who would successfully individually pursue their own goals that may be the expense of all of their colleagues so it's asking them to show where they've done something good for somebody else now of course that's not going to totally remove an instrumentalist approach to that but we can see there's a better step than just rewarding how much money did you win from this foundation so and if we think about magnifying that empathy principle at a global level that would be really great and that's slightly idealistic but some countries do do it and one of the things that we see when countries in the global south connect with each other is some attempts to sort of empathise with each other's positionality in ways which are sometimes expected yes great thank you