 Okay, greetings everyone. Welcome and good morning. My name is Amina Yakin. I am the director of the inaugural Soas Festival of Ideas. I'm aware we have attendees from different parts of the world. So greetings to you all in different time zones and languages. I will be your host and moderator for our opening welcoming event. I'd like to begin by thanking the supremely talented and incredible musician Abbas Najir, who's a professional Senegalese artist, singer, songwriter, composer, author and performer based in Berlin. He is going to sing in the Wall of Language and his genre is Afropop. So I will hand over to him. He will be, thank you Abbas. Thank you so much. That was Abbas. It's a big pleasure to participate today to this event. So I will play two more songs. Thank you so much for the invitation. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you Abbas for, you've been a real treat to listen to and set the mood for the festival. It's a pleasure and we are very grateful to you for joining us today and performing live in these difficult times. Thank you for the invitation. Thank you. So the music and the artist marks the significance of Africa to how we are positioning ourselves globally in this first ever festival on decolonizing knowledge and the important relationship of the arts and languages to the social sciences at SOAS. The festival is about a world of interconnected knowledges and disciplines. It looks beyond disciplinary silos to establish truly transformative and global conversations. The SOAS Festival of Ideas has a principal aim of fostering research synergies and enabling interdisciplinary indeed transdisciplinary conversations. We live in difficult and post-normal or new normal times globally and locally, hosting a research led virtual festival on decolonizing knowledge at a time of crisis in the pandemic second wave is a reminder of a festival that was meant to take place in May in live format. The virtual festival is a celebration of what we can achieve even in the most constrained circumstances. The resilience of colleagues, students, our guest speakers says volumes about the passion for knowledge and the determination to share ideas in a rapidly changing world and the university as we know it. The festival owes a debt of gratitude to the decolonizing working group, to the research director, Professor Andrea Cornwall, the many colleagues who are taking part and who volunteered and SOAS centers and institutes, thank you. Behind the scenes, Stephanie Guiran has been a driving force with Angelica, Kumi Sunil and many others across the school. Thank you all for being amazing. We have a week long exciting and packed program including research led panel discussions, masterclasses, a multilingual Moshira, a debate, a play, book talks and much more. There is still time to register and the link will go up on the chat shortly as I speak so that you can register. The format for this morning's session will be a quick introduction by myself before I hand over to our keynote speaker, Professor Adam Habib. He will speak for approximately 30 to 40 minutes followed by Professor Andrea Cornwall who will offer comments as discussant. Then we will have two short presentations from the student editor of the SOAS spirit, Malia Shoaib and Dr. Mira Sabranatham of the decolonizing working group followed by Q&A. You can put your questions in the Q&A feature due to time constraints. I will be reading out the questions at the end for response. To begin, the question that is on everyone's mind no doubt is what is decolonizing? What does it mean? I've been asked that many times and in an attempt to answer it, I've turned to the work of scholars such as Achille Mbembe, Paolo Freer, Catherine Walsh, Walter McNullo and activists such as Renny Addo Lodge, Akala, Robin D'Angelo, Johnny Pitts and more. That link between activism and scholarship has informed my work as a post-colonialist, including influences from Edward Zaid to Chandramohanthi, Stuart Hall to Gertry Spivak and I continue to learn across post-colonial studies, decoloniality and global studies. Politically, decolonizing is about freedom from colonial rule in Africa and Asia. It is also about the unfinished business of colonialism in Kashmir and Palestine and the ownership of land. Structurally, it is about understanding how white privilege works. Mbembe talks about demythologizing whiteness and why South African society cannot lay a claim to its own history under the shadow of the statue of Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes must fall has ignited many debates, disagreements and exposed the hierarchies embedded within both the production of knowledge and the guardians of knowledge. Is it merely polemic, as some say, or is it about deep-rooted injustices that allow for preferential treatment, oxbridge connections, canonicity and exclusions in society? Decolonizing movements have been about creating a dialogue that responds to the trauma of slavery through an activist lens symbolized through the roads must fall and fees must fall campaigns. Mbembe talks about the democratization of access so that higher education is not for the chosen few but open to all. The question that emerges is, can we decolonize the university? Should we? What kind of knowledges are we producing and who do they serve? To quote one of our many excellent panels in the festival, whose knowledge matters? Where are the centers of our knowledges located when we research? Who do we write for? Who funds us? And who disseminates our information? What are the circuits of production? Does open access work? Colleagues and guest speakers will be responding to these questions throughout the festival in intensive panel discussions. The writer, broadcaster, Kenan Malik, published an investigative feature in The Guardian in 2017, asking the question, asked so as students right to decolonize their minds from Western philosophers. Malik drew on some interesting responses from so as staff and students pointing out that the internal conversation was not a polemic replacing one binary with another, but a delicate negotiation that reflected intelligent thinking and a cosmopolitan understanding of European thought. The subject of curriculum change is fraught and divisive, one within universities and how decolonizing is understood within that is influenced by disciplinary biases, silos and hierarchies of knowledge. The question of the flow of knowledge is at the heart of our first keynote lecture today and it will set the tone for the festival. I am deeply honored to introduce our opening speaker for the inaugural festival of ideas, Professor Adam Habib, Vice Chancellor and Principal of Wetz University and so as is incoming director from January, 2021. Professor Habib has a vast and distinguished career as a researcher, an activist, a public intellectual and an administrator. His disciplinary specialism is that of a political scientist, transformation, democracy and inclusive development are fundamental themes of his research. His excellent book, South Africa's Suspended Revolution, hopes and prospects has informed debates around the country's transition into democracy as well as its prospects for inclusive development. His latest book, Rebels and Rage, reflecting on hashtag fees must fall provides an insight into the recent student protests in South Africa from the position of a Vice Chancellor and a social scientist. His contributions resulted in his election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In addition to serving fellow of the African Academy of Science and the Academy of Science of South Africa, he also currently serves on the Council of the United Nations University. Professor Habib's local and global professional involvement in the institutions he has served has always, he says, been defined by three distinct engagements, the contest of ideas, their translation into actionable initiatives and the building of institutions. His keynote talk today is on decolonizing knowledge, the flow of knowledge in regards to the positioning of the global South. Professor Adam Habib, a warm welcome and thank you for joining us. So thank you very much, Amina. It's a real pleasure to be here. And thank you for that very, very generous introduction. I also want to kick off by thanking a boss for that wonderful presentation. It was incredible and he's going to be a truly hard act to follow. But what an introduction to SOAS and inaugural SOAS Festival of Ideas. So let me thank the organizers, Amina and others, for providing me with the opportunity to share my thoughts on the theme of decolonization. I look forward to engaging each one of you in face-to-face deliberations in the coming months, in the coming year around the issue of decolonization, but also on much of the other issues that will impact on the collective deliberations at SOAS. I want to start by with an apology. And I really want to start with this apology because in a sense, I'm going to speak frankly in the coming half an hour, 30 to 40 minutes. And I think I'm going to give up, I'm not going to focus on diplomatic speak. I think that part of the problem with diplomatic speak is it creates intellectual ambiguity. And I'm not so sure that we need that kind of ambiguity in the kind of historical, socially and politically polarized historical moment we're in. So for the purposes of clarity of thought, clarity of ideas, I'm going to fake frankly and boldly. The risk, however, is that I might offend the political and intellectual sensibilities of some colleagues. If I do so, I want to apologize in advance. My only excuse is that I do so in order to enable an honest deliberation of the ideas that we hope to talk about. Let me also openly declare that I'm an ardent supporter of decolonization. For much of my life, I've written about it and I've also been an activist advancing this agenda. Of course, I did it under alternative labels, anti-racism, non-racialism, anti-capitalism and even transformation. This agenda of radical reform has not simply been directed at the political level or at the national level. I have also focused it on the university arena. My involvement in thinking through this agenda goes back that years in an earlier part of my life. The rethinking of the university was imagined under the label transformation. I know today many student leaders, many academic activists reject the term. They do not like the term because and they prefer to use the term decolonization. They do so on the assumption that decolonization is distinct, more radical, more anti-status code than transformation was. But I recall that the term transformation when it was introduced by academic unions in the university discourse in South Africa over 30 years ago, it was about reimagining the institution in the African context and using the university as an instrument of social justice. In many ways, transformation as a discourse contained all of the elements that activists today see as comprising decolonization. In a lot of ways, this is why I cheekily entitled the chapter on decolonization in my book, Fees Must Fall. In my book, entitled Rebels and Rage on Fees Must Fall as what's in a name, transformation or decolonization. I also want to reflect a little on the term decolonization. And I want to do so through the writings of Memud Mamdani, a Ugandan scholar who teaches in Columbia and Macarena University. Mamdali's reflections are about trying to understand why our countries have not been able to build the inclusive economically successful democracies that we had hoped to build at the dawn of decolonization. And Mamdali argues that the essential crime of colonialism was that it allocated different sets of rights to distinct groups on the basis of what he turned citizens and subjects. He suggests that the mistakes of the nationalist leadership in the post-colonial moment was to leave the colonial spatial, political, and socioeconomic system intact and subvert the allocations of rights within it. So those who were previously allocated rights are our settlers. We're no longer given a monopoly off this. And in some cases, we're even denied those rights. As a result, what Mamdali suggests, we enable the continuous struggle of indigeneity around who is the authentic citizen. And many countries are in the developing world. And this has become the basis for continued conflict in the African context. Mamdali further argues that the answer to this conundrum is not simply to be focused on a divided past, but rather to be directed towards a more inclusive future, incorporating all of those who wish to be part of a new nation. What Mamdali was saying is we too focused, if you like, on the divides of our past, on who is the authentic citizen, who belongs to a particular piece of land in a particular part of the planet. And what that goes against is the kind of integrative impulse of the human condition. The fact that human beings have been mobile and moving across the world since the dawn of civilization. And what he says is instead of focusing on a divided past, we need to focus on a more inclusive future, who wants to be part of the spatial formation and try and think through a more inclusive future, a future that is more socially just for all of those citizens in that social formation. It is a lesson I believe that we need to heed in the deliberation around decolonization. Whatever the label we use, the colonial university must never be the frame of reference to reimagine the institution of today. If we are to use the term decolonization, we must ensure that it does not prevent a comprehensive re-imagination of the university so that it speaks not only to our local, but also to our global, not only to our past but also to our future, as Amina so eloquently put it in her introductory remarks. On the basis of this conceptual clarification, I want to identify four elements that I see as the core to the decolonization agenda. I'm going to reflect on this, not simply in conceptual terms, as somebody who has written about this, but also in experiential terms, as somebody who has grappled with its application in real-life institutional experiences. I've also grappled with this experiential learning from a variety of positions within the university, as a secretary general of an academic union that he years ago, as an academic and head of a school applying this within a department, perhaps 20 years ago, as a student activist intent on changing the world 40 years ago. And if you like, as a university executive, grappling with transforming and managing the university over the last 10 years, I therefore will not only identify what I see as the elements of the decolonization agenda, but I also want to problematize it in the context of our experiential application and learning in universities in South Africa for the last 25 years, the era of South Africa's decolonization. The first of these elements that I want to speak about is the representivity, which involves enabling the presence in the university and within the academy of students and scholars of all those who have been denied access to the system in the past. Representivity is important, not only because it creates a sense of belonging for all of us, but also because it enables the surfacing of multiple knowledges, thought processes and frames of understanding within the university's teaching and research. Representivity is not manifested simply in the presence of black scholars and those who have been marginalized, but also in the symbolic representations of the institution through its naming traditions and memorials that are often reflected in the university space. But I do want to say a representivity cannot be advanced without qualification. It has to be taken in a manner consistent with the meritocratic tradition. Now, as soon as I say this, I want to immediately say that I'm aware that there are scholars and activists who correctly argue that much of the meritocratic discourses are racially and culturally encoded. Yet, the answer to this racialized or culturally loaded meritocratic narrative is not to deny meritocracy. What is required is the deracialization of the meritocratic debate and ensuring that beyonds representivity and meritocracy in our appointments and our admissions processes. Representivity and meritocracy are not mutually exclusive goals. They can be brought into alignment and it is something that we all need to be expressly committed to. The second element of this decolonization agenda has to be about surfacing all streams of humanity's knowledge in our curriculum. Our curriculum has to tell all of our stories. It has to identify all of our challenges and it has to surface all of the innovations to address those challenges. See, there is knowledge in all of our communities and all of this knowledge needs to be surfaced in our curriculum. I also want to say the global corpus of scientific knowledge is not simply the product of Western intellectuals, Western universities, the Western Academy. It is the product of the collective knowledge of all of our academies, both formal and informal, across continental and across national boundaries. And we do a disservice to the great intellectuals of the developing world when some of us actually claim that there is such a thing as Western knowledge and that the existence corpus of scientific knowledge is simply a product of Western institutions, Western intellectuals and Western academics. There is a knowledge in all of our communities and that knowledge has always contributed and surfaced in a variety of ways into what is now known as the corpus of scientific knowledge. It's not been reflected fairly in the existing curriculums. It's not been fairly acknowledged in the curriculum discourses, but it has influenced that curriculum in multiple ways. So there is an importance to surface multiple knowledges and to acknowledge the contribution of all parts of the world in informing our curriculum. But again, it is important to qualify this. All of this knowledge needs to be subjected to critical reflection and scrutiny. Too often activists of decolonization imagine the surfacing of knowledge with an uncritical gaze. Now, I'm sure there are some who will take offense that I say this, but it's important bearing in mind how often people articulate or scholars and activists articulate a decolonization agenda with an uncritical gaze. You cannot imagine how many times I have had student leaders walk into my office and say, I would not because I am a Marxist, I do not want to learn neoclassical economics. What I always and only want to learn is Marxist economics, as if one can teach Marxist economics without an understanding of neoclassical economics. I want to say openly that we are not in the business of simply engaging with ideas that we are comfortable with. The core purpose of a university is to introduce our students, our academics, our scholars to multiple ways of understanding contemporary challenges. The university is meant to enable intellectual discomfort and force one to think and rethink before responding. It is not a political school. It is not a religious school and nothing in our curriculum should not be subject to critical scrutiny. The third element of the decolonization agenda has to involve the reimagination of the curriculum in relation to the challenges of our time. Too much of the university curriculum is organized on the intellectual and conceptual foundations established more than a century ago. But is this a legitimate frame of reference for the university curriculum in the 21st century? And not all of our challenges far more complex to be understood simply from the frame of a single disciplinary perspective. Let me reflect on a recent example. In 2015, the world was confronted with an Ebola pandemic in West Africa. The management of this outbreak was compromised by the lack of local understanding and by applying a unit disciplinary approach to addressing it. The pandemic was simply seen from the perspective of a public health crisis. But the challenge of addressing Ebola in West Africa was a cultural one. The outbreak was exacerbated by burial practices of predominantly Muslim communities in West Africa. It was only when this was addressed ironically through engagement with religious leaders and through the propagation of new religious injunctions that the pandemic was brought under control. The solution to the pandemic required a multidisciplinary approach. This applies to challenge after challenge of our time. And it poses the question of should our curriculum be based less on a disciplinary foundation and more on the conceptual framing of our contemporary challenges. Let me use another example. The pandemic that we currently live with and look at the challenge of this pandemic and its management in the UK at this very moment. Is the management of the pandemic an issue of not knowing what are the public health measures to be put in place in arresting this pandemic? Or is it a social question? How do young people congregate? Why do they congregate? How do we manage their congregation? That has as much to do with issues of anthropology. Of sociality and of the social sciences in the humanities as much as how to do the public health challenge. Again, I say it poses the question should our curriculum be based less on a disciplinary foundation and more on the conceptual framing of our contemporary challenges? Should our curriculum and academic programs be organized on, for instance, the sustainable development goals rather than the disciplines formulated more than a century ago? Yet again, there's a qualification. Multidisciplinary cannot be pursued without some disciplinary capacity and expertise. Too much of the frames of reference emerge by bringing a disciplinary lens to the conundrum that is under focus. How to achieve the appropriate balance between multidisciplinary and disciplinarity should be at the heart of re-drinking the curriculum in the decolonization agenda. As of now, too much of multidisciplinary plays itself out at the postgraduate level, at the graduate level, and that much of the undergraduate curriculum is constructed at the disciplinary foundation. Should we reimagine that and how do we create an appropriate balance between disciplinarity and multidisciplinary so that we do create the professionals, the thinkers, the problem solvers of the contemporary challenges of our time? The fourth and final element that should be considered in the decolonization agenda is the modern basis of learning in the contemporary world. As I have said before, all of our challenges in the contemporary historical moment are transnational in character. Whether we speak of climate change, public health, inequality, social or political polarization, clean water provision, sanitation, all of these challenges exist on a transnational plane and require an element of global solutions. But as much as they require global solutions and world-class technologies and knowledge, they also require local understanding. That's the lesson from the Ebola pandemic. In 2015, that's the lesson from the COVID, from the manifestation of COVID infections around the world. It is the complex mix of global and local that will allow us to address the transnational challenges of our time. Yet our higher education system does not enable us to do this. Our modern mode of global partnerships also undermines this. Currently, our global partnerships involve identifying talented students in the developing world, into London, New York region and training them in the full hope that they will return home to utilize their knowledge in their local context. Yet many of us know that this is not the case. The vast majority of those who come to study in these cities and these countries never return. Life happens. People fall in love, get married, have children and settle down. This is what the research on global student mobility demonstrates. However, in the cases of Singapore and China post-2006, the vast majority of those who go study elsewhere never return. Consequence of this is it weakens institutions and human capabilities in the developing world, thus undermining the ability to address national challenges. This remains under threat in Burundi or the DRC or the Philippines or in Egypt. So long, all of us will remain vulnerable. If we are really keen on addressing these challenges across all of our spatial contexts, then it is imperative to reimagine high education partnerships. It is absolutely necessary that we focus our global partnerships in an institutional rather than an individual sense. We need to think of the curriculum and we need to think across teaching across institutional and national boundaries. The curriculum should be reconfigured across spatial contexts and scholarships need to be organized in a split-side format. In a sense what we require is a complete reimagination of high education and partnerships for the contemporary world. Yet too often this is not even part of the discourse of decolonization itself. Ironically, this historical moment enables it far better than any other moment in our history. The disruption of technology, the emergence of disruptive technologies has created the possibility of learning beyond institutional, beyond national and beyond continental boundaries in a manner that has never existed before. And what this pandemic has forced us to reimagine the pedagogy of learning in a blended format. In a format that requires face-to-face learning. Obviously it requires that. Those who pronounce that the face-to-face learning is now at an end are deluded because learning in a university is so much more than learning in the classroom. It's about the interactions that happen between students. It's about learning to navigate local contexts. The real power of a Harvard or an Oxford or a Cambridge. It's not simply what they teach in the classroom. It's the networks that get built outside the classroom. The relationships that gets built in the cafeteria, in the sports grounds, in the museums and in the interactions that occur. And so face-to-face learning will exist. But what the disruptive technologies have enabled is a form of blended learning. The movement between online learning and face-to-face interactions. The ability to learn across national and continental boundaries and yet the ability to learn from each other in face-to-face interactions. But none of this global learning, none of this multidisciplinary development of a curriculum, none of the learning that's enabling co-curriculum and representivity is going to happen without the reimagination of the financing of higher education. Currently, our higher education systems in the UK, in the US and Australia are organized to attract international students, many from the developing world. I want to be honest, so as we in so as we at VITS in some senses are as much complicit in this as everybody else's. Basically, we attract international students from the developing world. Yet our fees for those students from the developing world is often three to four times those of our domestic students. Think about this. In essence, we are cross subsidizing the education of domestic students in the developed world with the fees of students from the developing world. And we do this in the name of social justice. We do this in the name of human solidarity. We do this in the name of global partnerships to assist to lend a helping hand to the developing world. How can we not be cynical about this? And should our decolonization agenda not explicitly put this at the core at the center of our deliberations? Should we not consider fundamentally the refinancing of high education within and across national and continental boundaries? So I am coming to the end. So let me conclude by suggesting that decolonization is, of course, important. And yes, it must be urgently addressed. Yet I want to stipulate two qualifications in this decolonization agenda. First, decolonization needs to be advanced less by politicians and more by scholars, less by political activists and more by scholar activists. Second, decolonization cannot be advanced in a nativist manner, in an ethno-nationalist manner. It has to be framed, as Amina suggested, within the cosmopolitan tradition that incorporates social justice at its core. I mean, too much of us, too many of us imagine cosmopolitanism as drinking café lattes and cappuccinos in international airports around the world. But if you read a wonderful book by Anthony Appia on the cosmopolitan tradition in the developing world, he writes about the cosmopolitan ethos of the Ghanaian courts, you will realize that we need to take cosmopolitan seriously in our world. Not an abstract cosmopolitanism, but a cosmopolitanism that has at its heart at its very core the principle of social justice. Because if we do not build the bridges of human solidarity, we truly will not survive as a human species in the coming two centuries. And so I want to say again, decolonization cannot be advanced in a nativist manner, but must be framed within the cosmopolitan tradition that incorporates social justice at its core. This is the real line of inquiry that I believe the decolonization agenda must follow in the coming years. It needs to recognize that we are both local and global. We are both British, African, Asian and human. Only then can decolonization not only be about our past but also our future. Only then can it be part of building a new human community, one that is socially just and inclusive, but perfectly in line with the needs of the 21st century. Thank you very, very much. Thank you, Professor Habib, for an enriching talk and taking us from nativism to cosmopolitanism and disciplinarity to multidisciplinary. We don't have the applause sound in sort of this virtual format, so I think we would have that both at the end of the music at the start and after your talk. I will, without further ado, introduce our discussant, Professor Andrea Cornwall, who is Professor of Global Development and Anthropology and currently Pro-Director of Research and Enterprise at SOAS. Her publications include Spaces for Change, the Politics of Citizen, Participations, Democracy, Engagement, what the UK can learn from international experience and many more. Andrea, welcome and we look forward to your thoughts on Adam's conversation. Thank you. I was just thinking, Adam, during this speech at SOAS, you would have had a standing ovation because I think what you were saying resonates so strongly with so many of us. You said at the beginning you'd be provocative and you might offend some people and I was thinking it's going to be quite a challenge for me then to be your discussant in any case, this is a very, very hard act to follow. But I found myself just nodding in total agreement with everything you said. I'm going to do some kind of comment on what you said were and why they're so important for us. And also just to note again, I'm somebody who applied my SOAS training in linguistic anthropology to the language of buzzwords in development policy and international policy and there are buzzwords that you've used or words that you've used that I feel that we've let go, words like solidarity and the word of social justice reclaiming the content of that word and when you come to Britain you'll see how that word has been taken up and the words are very, very distant to how people might have conceived of the term from those who are involved in struggles for social justice elsewhere. So I'll reflect a bit on some of those words and their significance. And just to start with my own process of how I come into this, I came to SOAS as a mature student having been working in rural Zimbabwe where I found that women were being given the contraceptive pill without any information about what it did or any concerns about it, they were dismissed and there was no real attempt to try and engage them in making any kind of informed choice. When I I began to inquire into it I was laughed at how could these women, how could these ignorant African women have any idea of what was going on in their bodies and there started for me a lifelong passion which was about trying to contest dominant forms of knowledge that exclude other people's versions of their own bodies, their own worlds and also the significance of tapping into those knowledges. So part of what you're debating with this Adam or raising with us is the whole question about whose knowledge counts and the complexities of surfacing other forms of knowledge, bringing them into dialogue, expanding our understanding of what knowledge is and who has the right to claim, to produce certain knowledge but also whose knowledges are getting obscured and are getting re-labeled or reclaimed by people in the name of Western knowledge and I think the points you made there were very, very vital and this question about the flows of knowledge and contesting those flows of knowledge I also thought the points that you made connecting it back to the idea of the university and what's the function of the university as a site for contesting and for expanding people's sense of what knowledge is as well as bringing knowledge into dialogue was tremendously important and we see in the UK at the moment a real need for a more dynamic and more visionary version of what a university is we've had over the last few years with our education policy a narrowing of the sense of what a university is there for, it's there to produce people who become employable rather than as a site for the contestation of ideas for the transformation agenda as you put it and the idea of decolonisation is feeding into an agenda which is fundamentally about a more inclusive, more wide-ranging view of what our knowledge is about and for, but also as an instrument for social justice and I was very struck by your account from Mandani of the integrative impulse of us as human beings and this idea of focusing on an integrative inclusive future one that's more socially just for all rather than looking at the divisions of the past and falling into a kind of nativism and your idea of cosmopolitanism seen from up here and from a sense of being about fundamentally about that process of social justice I'd like to echo also the comments you made about representivity both about those who've been denied access and knowledges that have been elided or even excluded, but also that the task of decolonisation goes well beyond just setting readings on reading lists and it's fundamentally about the way the university itself works, what the university comes to represent and I think you'll focus on rituals, on the ways in which the university functions and what the ideas of the university is about, it's fundamental for us to challenge and to work with in order to make our universities fully decolonised, so rather just putting readings on the reading list or putting certain courses on, it's about us really questioning the ways that we run the university, the way that we teach who's involved and where and in what in terms of making that university and I think also what's another really important point that you raised was in your second point about whose knowledge is about the need for the variety of forms of knowledge in our curricula in order for there to be many stories and also a recognition of the contributions and innovations that come from across the global south and the significance of the university in enabling a sense of discomfort with this multiple questioning of the knowledges and the things that we take for granted and I see a so as education as being because I had one and I had a critical so as education that made me question everything and I also had a training as an anthropologist which also has that effect and once you've had that you can't unlearn it, it's something you take everywhere with you, it's something that you take into every single kind of job and every single kind of encounter that you have and it's fundamentally what education, transformative education is all about. So the idea of creating a plurality in Walter Mignolo's terms a space of contestation where this plurality of versions and visions becomes possible to think together and to really grapple with in such a way that people are not comfortable with it and carry on with those discomforts but as a result of that are able to engage in a much more meaningful way in social change. I thought it was really significant too and it's something which I very much share is this importance of interdisciplinarity of bringing disciplines into dialogue into working across disciplines at the borders of disciplines reaching across interdisciplines for concepts and that balance between the disciplinary and the interdisciplinary and thinking beyond it all together in the ways in which we're able to prepare people to deal with complex global problems and that's also about teaching people new ways of collaborating new ways of engaging being creative together rather than the old image of the scholar hermit the person who goes out for their career publishes in paywall journals and whose knowledge becomes some kind of property of their own rather than as something that's a contribution to solving global problems. I thought it was really interesting that you also emphasized in the role of scholar activists in decolonization rather than just as an activist project it's an activist project inhabited by scholars who push us to think differently about the things that we take for granted and the importance of building the bridges of human solidarity in that and taking social justice as a principle as its core. And I think the other thing which really struck me from your talk was the value at the moment of the extraordinary disruptive effect of having to work online so to see that as something that we can use to bring other voices into our classrooms to bring other voices into our debates this brokering and facilitating and convening of a plurality of versions that the use of zoom and other technologies now allows us to do so that rather than speak about somewhere we can speak with people from somewhere and have these debates in global classrooms that reach beyond the kind of spatial boundaries that we might formally have set for ourselves by teaching in person. So the very practices that we want to bring into our classrooms are ones that we can be facilitated in by reaching out and opening up our spaces just as we're opening up this space in the festival of ideas to engage with people and again to echo and to end with your comments at the end about the very insidious effects of the neoliberal marketized model of higher education which not only makes international students pay for the education of domestic students but requires a transfer from those international student profits into supporting research and that's something I feel very keenly as pro director of research and enterprise because those transfers are not only unsustainable they're also unethical and I think disrupting this and finding new ways of thinking about the financing of the university and what we think of as the university education is one of the greatest challenges of our age. We're facing a situation at the moment with the pandemic in the higher education sector where there's a really urgent need for us to rethink what universities are for and what they're doing for individuals, for communities for the country but also across those national boundaries. Those kinds of flows of ideas globally and I think it couldn't be a better time to welcome you to SOAS to help us with that so I'd like to end there. Thank you. Thank you Andrea for such an eloquent summarization of what was on offer and perhaps people like to respond later on after the other presentations as a former international student who came from Pakistan and works and lives here. I feel my life is being talked about here and lots of decisions and all those things that are so not just mine but affect students over the spectrum and those conversations are hugely necessary and important now more than ever as both of you have said. I think that is the perfect moment to bring in our student on the panel. I would like to invite Maliha Shoaib to speak. She is in her final year studying BA English and World Philosophies at SOAS. She has worked with the Spirit newspaper at SOAS for all three years of her degree in first year writing a fashion column in second year serving as co-editor in chief and in third year being promoted to managing editor. Along with her professional copywriting experience in her own writing she specializes in fashion, pop culture, criticism and social commentary after she finishes her degree Maliha hopes to further her career in journalism Maliha, welcome. Hi everyone, thank you so much for inviting me to speak on behalf of the SOAS Spirit. My message to you today is about the decolonization of the media which is a key industry involved in the dissemination of knowledge in the public sphere. I remember when I was around 15 years old in English class we'd have to come in every week with a news article and pick out the purpose, the audiences and the biases. At a time I find it so boring and all I wanted to do was write these really flowery sentences to describe simple ideas and list excessive adjectives in every sentence I wrote but now I realize why it was so important. This is one of the most practical uses of the critical thinking skills that we develop through education or at least hope to develop through education. In an age of fake news and general distrust of the media it's important that we critically evaluate the power dynamics involved in the content that we read daily. Who is writing, who is written about and who is silenced. Now this is so important because media shapes public opinion. It's essential to our understanding of the world around us and it's how most of us get our information. The media also has a long history of perpetuating stereotypes and catering to particular dominant narratives including certain bias publications who often paint themselves as neutral but I won't name any names because it might haunt me later in my career. And since education and media are two of the major ways that knowledge is produced and disseminated, the spirit applies an interesting position as a student newspaper to be discussing the decolonization of knowledge. So I'm going to be talking today about how access and inclusivity in the media are essential in order to challenge the sorts of knowledge production that we see today. But first I'll tell you a bit more about myself and about the spirit. So the SOAS spirit is SOAS's independent student run newspaper. My name is Malieha. I'm a final year BA English and World Philosophy student so clearly the news article exercise didn't put me off too much and I'm the managing editor of the spirit so I run the paper and manage a team of 15 editors. The spirit publishes four times a year and our sections include SOAS news, national news, opinion, features, culture and sports and societies. This year we're really hoping to improve our online presence since the spirit has gone digital and we hope to continue providing a platform for SOAS's diverse student body. Our first issue of the year will be published on November 2nd so keep a look out for that and we have some special content planned for Black History Month including a new recurring segment in features about our favourite Black historical figures. The spirit engages with the theme of decolonising knowledge by shifting the power of knowledge dissemination to students whose voices may otherwise be underrepresented. One of our core values is inclusivity so we want both our content and our team to be representative of the SOAS community and we hope to provide them with the valuable experience for their future careers with the hopes of closing the BME gap within the media industry in the future. Like many industries it's no secret that the media is a predominantly white male social institution. The industry is 94% white. This is actually more than average. Only 0.4% of journalists are Muslim and 0.2% are Black. Now this is particularly concerning because the majority of media companies are in London where over 40% of the population are from BME communities. So in an average size newsroom let's say 50 people. Only 3 of those people would be from a BME community. This means that the news that's often published has whiteness as default. When I was researching how to write speeches as a method of procrastination I was told that you should put numbers in context. 0.2% of 50 is a tenth of a person so if that doesn't demonstrate how truly abysmal the number of Black journalists in the UK is then I'm not sure what will. And this level of representation means that BME journalists are more likely to face self doubt and imposter syndrome and I've seen this myself in the spirit as well. They're also more likely to be paid less and not put themselves forward for promotions and they even face the conflict of feeling like a diversity hire or that they're being pigeonholed into only writing about their racial identity. When it comes to the media industry competitive is an understatement taken from me who's trying to break into it. It's notoriously elitist and difficult to enter. Journalist students are likely to find jobs if they're after graduating. If they are white, able-bodied, male and privately educated although this comes as no surprise as it's kind of the case across the board. But my point is clearly access is an issue and by access I mean both who enters the industry and also the kind of information that the industry puts out. What stories are newsworthy? Who gets commissioned and why? How does the white gaze play a role in research and epistemologies? What narratives are told and who's are silenced? Colonial thought creates and sustains these hierarchies. This year in the spirit we're actually trying to write more accessible content about global issues that are kind of brushed over in the UK. So in this issue we have some news made easy articles explaining the Armenian-Azerbaijan conflict, the Crescent in Lebanon and the controversy over the grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam just to name a few. So where does this leave us? Along with structural change that comes from, you know, relations and educational access that my fellow panelists have talked about, I believe the solution begins with having more diverse newsrooms. Newsrooms need to be representative of audiences and readers in order to understand their interests and from there the stories that are commissioned will follow. We must listen to marginalized voices and give them space to speak and write for themselves where we actually had one writer who pitched an article on Nigeria's End-Stars protests and they mentioned that they weren't the right person to write this article and that someone from Nigeria should take it on. And eventually when we came to the end of the section, a student of Nigerian Heritage actually did step up to take the article. So I thought this is just a great example of how we can amplify other people's voices rather than speaking over or for them. And this opened up a huge discussion throughout the spirit of who should be writing which articles and where to draw the line. And for students as well, this means to improve access, perhaps not accepting unpaid internships even if you are in a position to do so. This is because it sets a precedence for the rest of the industry and makes it difficult for people without this sort of privilege to enter. A couple of resources for marginalized communities I thought I'd mention are the Black Journalists Collective. We are Black journalists. The Race Beat Creative Access, Creative Diversity Network and then there are a couple of journalism diversity funds from the National Council for the Training of Journalists and the National Union of Journalists. And then there are also various publications that focus on marginalized communities like Galdam, Pink News, Zora, Juggernaut, Black Ballad, Mellon Magazine, Burn My Girl Magazine and Burn Road D Magazine. And I'm so glad that my mom isn't listening to this because she would have made fun of my presentation there. Anyway, I'd like to summarize by saying to you that the future of a decolonized media industry relies on transparency, access and inclusivity. Only then can we help to tell stories that truly reflect and challenge the world around us and the people living in it. Thank you for listening. Thank you, Maliha. That was brilliant and very important media information and how it colonizes us all. The next speaker is Dr. Mira Sabranatham who is a senior lecturer in international relations in the Department of Politics and International Studies. Her research concerns the colonial and post-colonial dimensions of world politics both in theory and practice. She has recently published on the workings of the international aid system, racism and whiteness in IR and critical pedagogy at SOAS. She has served as the chair of the Decolonizing Working Group and the Academic Senate. And, Mira, I think you will have a lot to say on decolonizing but you have to, the challenge is to say all very quickly. OK. Or maybe try and be selective about what I'll say. Thank you very much, Amina and to the previous speakers and especially to Stephanie and Amina and Angelica in getting this festival together. I think I want to start I try to be optimistic generally in my talks but I have to start I suppose with a note of pessimism. So the last few weeks in this country and in a way this is sort of introducing Professor Habib to the water in which he's about to swim. The last few weeks in this country we've seen an alarming number of government attempts to shut down what looks like the decolonizing project. So we have seen the government issue guidance to schools that they're essentially not to teach material in their curricula which comes from an anti-capitalist point of view or which advocates law breaking this is widely understood to be an attack on Black Lives Matter and extinction rebellion as being sources of information. It's also issued guidance or the Secretary of State for Education has said to universities that unless they adopt a very specific and contested understanding of anti-Semitism that he will look at cutting funding. The Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport wrote a letter to Museum which are arms length bodies saying that if they remove statues or other artifacts that they would also have their funding looked at. So we are really in a moment where the government is taking quite interventionist action against the agenda which appears to be gaining traction and which has obviously been gathering momentum. What on earth is going on? I think there's a number of things that we need to think about in this context and the big thing I think to step outside what the decolonization agenda is and what we want it to be is to think about how it is being weaponized and received in wider society. At the moment it seems to be very much playing the role of the invented moral panic that's in particularly the right wing press that is being used to consolidate essentially relations of identity, relations of white identity and essentially distract the public from what is otherwise a very kind of traumatic time and so you do get the people who talk about the decolonization agenda the most are those people that seem to oppose it. When I've done work and everybody has a story like this, when I've done work with organizations that look to slightly diversify or slightly bring up to date in the museum collections when you start talking about empire and you start talking about these things there is very much a kind of alarmist reaction open racism and all the rest of it. So I think we must do this decolonization work absolutely but we have to be wary about how it is being understood and particularly how it's being weaponized in the current context. I don't dwell on those things but we should be aware that one of the things that is going on. I generally try to take quite an opportunist point of view with these things and if we have a chance to engage in public platforms then we should do it. I think it's important to be conscious of that set of issues. There's also a set of issues around what we might think of as internal criticisms or internal critiques of the decolonization agenda. I mean one of the slightly alarming things that happened this summer in the wake of the George Floyd related protest was a series of universities and other institutions issuing blanket statements in favor of Black Lives Matter but without any real content to them just saying that they stood in solidarity with them but without any indication of what was going to change and how it was going to change and what their particular role was in effecting change. And this has led to a wider suspicion that decolonization is just a sort of buzzword just a marketing tool just a neoliberal co-option of anti-racist intentions or thought and that is being used to whitewash other practices. And these are a set of issues that we need to be constantly kind of vigilant about and constantly aware and they're connected in some instances they're connected to a wider pessimism or cynicism about the possibility of doing decolonizing work in what is a very deeply entrenched capitalist colonial type of world order. So how do we navigate this environment if we're trying to do this decolonizing work? It's very difficult and I think we have to be aware that there are no comfortable places in this space. What I think we have tried to do as a group and what I've tried to do in my own practice is try and think about the ways in which change happens and it's disturbing because the kinds of people that need theories of change are either revolutionaries or management consultants and it's not always clear which one we are and maybe sometimes we're doing both. Where there is structural power of course structural power needs huge efforts to overturn but structural power is also constituted by the many individual everyday relations and practices that we have and where we have control over those or where we can reshape them we need to try because it's in doing that reshaping work that we can prefigure the kinds of relations that we'd like to see in a wider space and also develop the organizational power to make those wider challenges but this means that relationality has to be at the heart I think of what our decolonizing practice is about just to respond a bit to Professor Habib's idea that yes we have to have a decolonizing ethos yes we have to improve representation but we have to be critical and we always have to be meritocratic I think what I would say from the experience of talking to students who come from more marginalized backgrounds or who feel less empowered to speak in the classroom is that you can conduct very challenging conversations but you have to build that trust and that respect first right you don't get to the respect by pulling down people who are already under supported you have to create the conditions in which you can have those conversations in a truly open and honest way and unless you create those conditions of equality and respect you can't do that I won't say too much more yes we have to pay attention to the material conditions of fee structures but also the stratification of the workforce in the university the racialization of workers who support the campus and the ways in which they're treated these are all issues that have been there for a long time but I think in this current climate as well universities have to really be conscious and band together and take a stand against government interference into curricula into free speech issues it's ironic that the free speech kind of police say that if you like that the anti-racist are the real enemies of free speech because racism because free speech means the speech to be racist when really we see all the attacks on free speech going the other way in terms of prevent in terms of the examples that I've just given so one of the jobs for Professor Habib when he shows up will be to spur universities UK into action and into taking a much more robust line against interference into that project that we're all into right which is opening up all these other forms of knowledge providing the environment and the conditions in which we can have those wider conversations in which our critical cosmopolitan or worldly understandings can come through because otherwise you know there is this permanent danger that we that we are the Nike campaign appropriating black power without changing the conditions of the workers at all I'll leave it there thank you very much for the opportunity to speak and I look forward to hearing from you I need to unmute myself thank you Mira that was brilliant as have been all the presentations in terms of opening up the political concerns and the very real issues that confront us in terms of where we are with the decolonizing campaign in the universities and in terms of the structures of governance and citizenship that determine where we might go next so professor Habib there have been a number of responses to your talk and there are questions that I have coming up in the Q&A feature I wonder if you wanted to briefly respond to the presentations before we open up the questions or I'm just trying to get the video working on it so colleagues I'm not going to be long because I do think it will be useful to get a wider set of views from colleagues I do want to quickly highlight two or three big issues because I think they are coming up both by what colleagues said but also in some of the questions the quick one that I want to reflect on is what Maliha actually raised about the importance of decolonizing the media industry and what she said was three principles which I entirely endorse access inclusivity and transparency but there is a fourth Maliha and that is a critical engagement and I think that we should be honest and reflect on this that this doesn't always happen from progressive activists I'll give you there's an interesting debate that there's an interesting part of the book of Drebels and Rage where I reflect on an engagement on citizen journalism and what Fees must fall had increasingly brought out was a host of what people described as citizen journalists, people who were activists effectively beginning to write about their experiences and that was important from the principle of access from the principle of inclusivity and from the principle of transparency because it pluralized the description of how the struggles Fees must fall was happening and I recall on an incident where a number of activists who were also journalists or participating in the citizen journalism used an example of me owning a legal firm that was responsible for doing some work and I remember the editor of that citizen journalism an academic for writing to me and saying we know this is not true and we'll correct it later on and I said to them but is this fair if you know it's not true why are you allowing it to play out and I remember having an engagement with the student activists about this and I said did you believe that then they said obviously not and I said then why did you write it and they said well it's a political tool and we engaging in a political battle and all rules and no rules apply in this case so the question that I want to pose is how do you ensure that the politician doesn't compromise the very journalistic foundations and principles on which inclusivity transparency and access needs to be premised on and I put it as a question because they clearly cannot be an agenda that says no whole and I just wanted to put that back and I would love to hear Malia's thoughts on that. The second that I want to touch on is what Mira touched on in such powerful ways what I think Mira is speaking to is the strategies and tactics of transforming society or the strategies and tactics of transforming institutions and Mira I start off by assuming that if people are not trying to co-opt the agenda of transformation or decolonisation then they're not very good if you like defenders of the status quo and you'll have two if you like branches or strands one is those in opposition allow the interventions around the curriculum or those trying to co-opt and it seems to me that the task of advocates of transformation and advocates of social inclusion is to understand the mechanics of struggle how do you win public consciousness in your favour and I must say looking at both the struggles of South Africa but also globally one has to say that not all of our tactics have been sensible and we need an internal deliberation within the progressive community on what is good tactics how is it that the struggles for academic freedom the struggles of free speech which was effectively if you like the argument the demand of the progressive community has become effectively the weapon of the right and yes it's cynical that they've done it but what have we done to enable that to happen and what are the reflections on strategies and tactics that we need to engage in and so in Rebels and Rage and in other writings spoken about what I call a radical pragmatism a gender of change but in understanding that we operate in the world that we wish existed rather than the that exists rather than the world we wish existed and I'm worried about the strategic debates that we've engaged in as the progressive community and thinking through this debate in powerful ways and I think we need an honesty there is a strand of nativism within the progressive communities we're lying to ourselves if we say that there isn't existed and too often we are not willing to confront those nativist and ethno-nationalist discourses and we need the courage to do so because that courage is not simply important for that it's important for winning the agenda of public consciousness to winning the majority of the broader public into an agenda of transformation and agenda of decolonization it isn't a mutually a zero sum game as often it's portrayed to be by those on the right and sometimes those on the far left and I think we need a real debate about this and if we don't do that debate we are in trouble and then finally on the financing because there is a couple of questions in this regard I'm not so sure we can get out of the agenda of state finance but I do want to pose the question about could we imagine public financing in more imaginative ways than we have so one of the things that I laugh about if you look at the Ivy Leagues in the United States Harvard has an endowment of 50 billion if you simply do the numbers financial there it returns on a 55 billion endowment is the equivalent if you like of something like two and a half to three billion per per annum the question you have to ask is how much more are you going to raise how much shouldn't that money that returns be deployed in much more innovative ways the question that I pose for the public university in the UK like so as shouldn't we be creating endowments than in the universities not that it replaces the state but it enables a much more innovative financing there's a debate about social support as social responsibility bonds around climate change and a refinancing of the climate change struggles why aren't we thinking about new bond formats around the financing of higher education and returns that are constructed on in a world where money is so cheap in the UK and US are we utilizing the mobilization of financial resources in imaginative ways I think too often progressives don't think about how to reimagine financing for public institutions and how you could create a mix of public private and state that are far more imaginative than we are much of that debate ironically happens in the Ivy Leagues of the US universities rather than in the public institutions and I do think that if the future of the public university is to be protected then we need to think in refinancing in ways that are more progressive but more imaginative in the traditional state financing protocols that have governed us for the last 60-70 years I'll stop there and I could speak about all of these issues in different ways perhaps I should end by saying we advance very strongly a social justice agenda but I've also said that we will not run at a loss that I've always said radical your agenda if you're sustainable the suits leave you alone when you're not sustainable the suits start interfering and it seems to me that that's a lesson that we need to learn and so has many other institutions around the world I'll stop there and perhaps we can open up from Thank you Professor Habib and as we're talking about uncomfortable things I suppose I should say we're just emerging from a very brutal transformation and change project which has indeed all of those very questions about financial structures HE sector funding and the life of the university at the heart of the whole process and how we go forward so your intervention and your arrival is looked at with great anticipation I'm going to go through the questions there are quite a few so if I read off a few in bunches of I have 12 questions I will read them off and if the panelists can then respond and Professor Habib I will highlight the ones which are directly addressed to you the first question from an anonymous attendee is what can social academician offer for the world another question from Paul Atherton surely the only way for a university to decolonise is to re-establish a university that is free or finance or reliant on state funding or private money does the panel think that so as could change its means of being funded in order to give it the freedom for genuine effective change so I think Professor Habib has partially answered that in his comments just now with regards to how he envisages the funding structure but of course Professor Habib you can respond to that again a question from Anakane Newman who is very positive about your presentation complimentary and she says that her question is about the point that you made about the surfacing of all forms of knowledge needing to also be critical and her issue is that it is a difficult thing to do in the hard sciences because the standard of scientific rigor and empiricism especially is extremely narrow leaving little space for personal experience and subjectivity as the basis for knowledge and she draws on Professor Cornwall's point about this too and her question is how in practical terms do we embrace different knowledges in a critical manner while enlarging the definition of what counts as knowledge so I think the question is in practical terms how do we embrace different knowledges in a critical manner while enlarging the definition of what counts as knowledge another question from in the B I'd disagree that anthropologists a question or a comment actually a comment and a question I disagree that anthropologists are equipped to question everything everywhere so the questioning is hardest closest to one's own skin for example scandals like the unethical employment practices at the HAU journal how do you train in self reflection so perhaps Andrea might like to respond to that one a question from Emily actually not one question three questions ever since the industrial revolution knowledge has become compartmentalized and specialized how can higher education holistically approach knowledge in a multidisciplinary manner going forward so a little bit more from you Professor Habib on multidisciplinary another question how can we rethink finance or financial framework to allocate funds that better manage our priorities and again that might be something you feel you've already answered Professor Habib but you might want to answer that again and how can we merge local and global cooperation for greater solidarity I'll stop at that point allowing you to respond to those questions so far and the response is open to all panelists some questions are specific to Professor Habib but the other panelists might want to come in as well do you want me to start Amina yes please okay so let me three or four questions that come out of it let me start again with the one of state financing so here's what I want to ask a question I mean Amina started off by saying we've just come through a very brutal transformation and change agenda and Amina the question we have to ask is how did we get there how did we get as so as in a situation where our finances were so imperiled that we had to effectively undertake as I understand it anything between an 8 to 10 percent 8 to 12 percent cut of the of the budget and the question we have to ask is how is it and I'm not against the insourcing by the way I think it's very important I did insourcing at BITS largely as part of the decolonization how is it that the cost of insourcing in 2018 constituted 60 percent of the challenge of the financing that played out in 2020 when we did it at Virts we had worked out how it would play out and how we would finance it for five years and the question I raise in this is why it's important for social justice advocates to be committed to understand the issue of financial sustainability not to ignore it because otherwise you land up in very very difficult conditions so yes to social justice but yes also to understanding how you're going to finance social justice impediments if you're going to embark on social justice and say somebody else is going to work out how we finance it you're going to get into serious trouble and ultimately it comes to the cost of the social justice mandate itself so I'm one of those executives that says yes to social justice but don't ask me to ignore the finances I'm going to bring the two in conversation and I take money seriously because I know that you can't advance social justice without money and thinking that through is as important as is the social justice agenda and that applies both to serve but it applies to the financing of our education well I would love to think about in systemic terms why aren't we using social support bonds in the financing of our education why aren't we raising endowments that are invested and then reinvested in paying for new generations of talented students from coming in so as has some of the most incredible alumni how have we asked them how is it that so has reached our 100 years in 2018 and there wasn't a centenary campaign to raise money for an endowment to pay for talented students I ask these questions because they have to be the very core of reimagining financing I think we're going to have to add a measure of state financing think about this since 2012 so has gets no subsidy for much of its academic programs it's all based and it's all financed through fees how can you reimagine that in ways that are more innovative and more thoughtful so that we can start reimagining and use so as as the very basis for reimagining financing system why and so I think we need I would love to see academics in so as starting to say here's how you could refinance it and not say the only way you can refinance it is through a state agenda that was pre or post 1945 what are the new mechanisms with new financing arrangements with new interest rates how can you reimagine financing of the so as and from the other institutions I put it as the first issue second I want to come to is the issue of surfacing knowledge and yeah there was a very specific question how can you think about it we've been doing some debate about this at bits partly because it's a more comprehensive institution and there's been some debate about decolonizing the curriculum in the hard sciences and I want to pose if you like three ideas that came out of that the first is the actual technical structure of courses so let me give you an example we had a program in engineering where you would only offer a course which was a prerequisite in the first semester of the year and if you like if you failed the course you couldn't proceed to the next year because it was a prerequisite for a course the second year and what it meant because it was only offered in the first year it meant the whole effectively the student had to wait for a year before they could try and do the course again as part of the decolonization debate it required a simple technical reform we will offer the course in the second semester as well in an online format and what that fundamentally shifted was mobility patterns of students who were undertaking a course in this thing so it's a technical reform of a very structure of a course that people had never thought through and the forcing of the debate reimagined so that's the first the second from a pedagogical point of view there's quite an important discourse on applications and using applications of scientific concepts in real world context that people can identify with it's a pedagogical debate around how would you think through notions of gravity or notions of similar scientific concepts and apply them in real context and much of the curriculum is constructed without any understanding of local understandings and thirdly in the hard sciences is the acknowledgement of where knowledge comes from the belief that all of this knowledge is simply a construct of western academics and intellectuals is false and we need to understand the overall contribution and it seems to me that in all three elements there is a substantive decolonization component that can be party to the hard sciences now there's a lot of reflection on this efforts and I'm just expressing the debate that comes out in our in these forums and I think that there is much to be learned and thought through around the hard sciences and then finally I want to approach global and local partnerships but also tie that to the issue of multidisciplinarity and unidisciplinarity why do we have unidisciplinarity at an undergraduate level but can't we start thinking of multidisciplinary undergraduate courses let me ask you a question what prevents us from having a partnership between imperial and so as on a new course on gaming that brings software technology students from imperial with students who are focused on aesthetics and storytelling from so as imagine creating games that have a social justice mandate how do we save the world from climate change so a narrative of social justice and narrative of aesthetics on how you create games and students learn coding we at vitz currently have a joint program on doing games on making games between engineering and the faculty of humanities that brings students from both faculties together and it's one of our most popular courses and if you're talking about narratives and telling new stories they are as much part of gaming as they are of this thing so imagine a course by imperial vitz and so as on creating new games for the future at the heart of London it's about jobs it's about new narratives and it's about bringing and multidisciplinary across the engineering science imagine a course between so as in the school for hygiene and tropical medicine on pandemics because Ebola just showed you that if you want to manage pandemics you need to look at cultural questions as much as you need to look at public health questions why shouldn't we be looking at public professionals in the management of pandemics as a joint course between school of hygiene and tropical medicine so as imagine Makarere in East Africa into a conversation that transcends and brings students from Makarere school of hygiene and tropical medicine conversation so I do think we can think of this in global and national and in cross institutional terms in ways that we've just not imagined and that's what I would like to start opening a conversation with far more I know some of it's already happening but far more than we've imagined imagine in Alhambria launching 15 to 20 new courses in partnership with institutions both in the UK and elsewhere in the world and that bring students across institutional but also continental boundaries and we could imagine a new financing mechanism for that and that's something that we need to explore in a far more dramatic way than we have stop there thank you shall I go next yes thank you Adam that was great I wanted to pick up the question specifically about anthropologists and I would agree that actually anthropology provides us with the tools but the practice of anthropology anthropology is possibly the most colonial of all disciplines I have to say I graduated from SOAS with a PhD in anthropology and went straight to work on the housing estates of south London as a community organiser because I felt so disaffected by having been trained to be a kind of elite Africanist anthropologist but those very skills of anthropology that was taught of critical questioning and partisan observation and awareness of self and other have been hugely important to me as a university administrator engaging with people so I think it depends on how you put those tools to use there's nothing inherent in the tools themselves but they're very useful tools and this brings me to a point about the question about multidisciplinary which is very close again to my heart in terms of my own education I think we could provide our students with a call curriculum no matter what they study where they study they study things that will challenge them no matter what their subject is that they go on to do and in that kind of core and they also learn history, economics there's a core about what are the things you need to be able to have as thinking tools tools for thought to address the global issues of our times I was involved in a project once in Brazil where they set up what was called the scholars feminist schools that trained people who had not had any access to education in the qualities of thinking the critical thinking that feminist theorists bring and they use that to educate people going into political office going into local government it was a fabulous project and something like this that could underpin what we do and just one comment about the political economy of knowledge and journals and what counts as knowledge and what counts as truth and I think it's good for us to be reminded that we have publishers that are making absolutely huge amounts of knowledge and knowledge and it's good for us to be reminded that 90 million pounds profit was made by Elsevier last year from the labor of academics which is subsidized by student fees so we have a rotten system which is a boundary maintenance system where peer review maintains the boundaries of disciplines hierarchies of knowledge plays into the ref plays into promotions and so again a more radical vision of the university which values multiple forms of knowledge and journals as kind of acceptable knowledge I think it's something that we can start at so as we can think differently we've tried already to widen our promotion criteria to take other forms of research and other meanings of research into account and again we could start some of this stuff and start and be part of quite a lively debate in the UK about these forms of exclusion. Thank you Andrea if the other two panellists do you mind holding on while I bring in the other questions we are on a timer of about seven minutes I'm going to do some speed reading because we want to get all the questions in and Professor Habib will have to do some speed answering in a minute as we wrap up because our next panel Migrants and Refugees starts at 1pm Meenakshi now asks about how do we go about curriculum and knowledge sourcing when often critical frameworks and lenses are themselves shaped and dominated by Western thought I think you've sort of addressed that in your keynote Farisa asks what are the potentials of local researchers in developing countries and what can they offer to the understanding of decolonisation and breaking stigma around a colonialism mindset Dr Dom Jackson Cole asks Professor Habib could you please expand on deracialising meritocracy and how can we ensure that deracialised meritocracy doesn't just continue to be a tool of capitalism and reproduction of privilege but with more tokenistic shallowly visual representation so quite a huge question there Rubina what should be the government's understanding of and funding of education so as is that a critical juncture how do you plan to influence the suits in the short term Laurie Allen how do speakers view the rule of academic freedom as a rights claim as a set of guarantees for students and teachers enabling the exploration of uncomfortable and critical ideas on campus and off campus in pursuing a decolonising agenda what responsibility do academic managers have in ensuring academic freedom for students and scholars what are its limits if any and what specific challenge do you foresee ensuring academic freedom to pursue decolonised education with the move to blended learning as what solutions are there to the problem of governmental managerial surveillance of online teaching so that's a connected huge question there Anonymous attendees have a couple of questions how might disciplinary grounding which needs to proceed multi-disciplinarity be pursued in contemporary higher education grappling with decolonisation in the way you set out in your presentation and the second one are there some models of integrating decolonisation and meritocracy which have been found to be socially just and so thank you to everyone for their questions and over to professor Habib we have and the panellists we have four minutes I could give you one minute each so I'm just going to I'm going to take a minute and say perhaps some of these ideas are really ideas that are going to be discussed when I come in in January what I'm hoping to do is take three months to actually go around so as engage colleagues and stakeholders on all of these fundamental questions and for those who would like to have and send me an email please feel free to send me an email in this regard I do want to say there are experiences elsewhere in the world where we grapple with it so for instance meritocracy and the issue of social justice is something that I've grappled with for eight years at once both are taken seriously we don't always get it right but there are experiences that we can bring to it I'm sure there are cases in other parts of the world that we need to surface in a much more productive way the issue of Rubina asked the question about how do you hit the Suits and Bay right in the beginning I have one answer Rubina I'm going to hit the road trying to raise some money I think that there's been some work done by Graham Upton and others around difficult decisions that's created by a foundation but what I would love to do is raise more money for Suarez and I think we haven't had enough and we need to focus on that at least in the short term so that we can correct the kind of business model of Suarez to enable the kind of social justice agenda we have and finally on academic freedom I'm of the view that academic freedom is always not unqualified by bringing academic freedom and social accountability together and I wrote I was part of a commission in South Africa on the academic freedom commission and I have some thoughts on this but I will say to you I've already had quite a few emails from advocates on both sides of the Palestinian Israeli divide sending me demands even before I've returned so I'm expecting quite a robust introduction to that question as I emerged as I come in in 2021 so I'll stop there and say I'd be happy to tell take these issues if people would like to just send me an email Andrea's got my contact details please feel free to write to me Thank you Professor Habib Andrea if you don't mind can I invite Malia and Mira to speak because they didn't have a chance last time to wrap up in the last two minutes I'll just say thank you very much there's loads of questions to answer and I think they're really important to continue to do so and I hope everybody brings this energy and these interrogations to the rest of the festival Thanks Malia Thanks Mira Sorry I turned my camera off instead of turning my voice on I guess I don't necessarily have a whole lot of answers for these questions but I think a lot of the root causes of these questions is the current split between the economic side of a business and the philosophical side of education and I think when we learn how to merge the two of them that's when we'll have solutions I'm not sure how we can work within the current economic system while keeping our ethics intact but I'm excited to see what Soas has in store especially Professor Habib's sort of practical more pragmatic view in it Thank you so much Padmin It only remains for me to thank the panelists for such a wonderful conversation that has emerged and as Mira says let's hope that we continue the passion and as you will see Professor Habib at Soas we like disagreements we like conversations, we like pushing the boundaries so we hope everyone will continue to join us and be with us for the rest of the festival I'd like to invite you to go to the next room to refugees and migrants which is going to be another brilliant conversation and a panel Thank you to all the panelists Thank you to all the attendees It's been a brilliant start Thank you colleagues Bye