‘Why is my curriculum White’: Decolonisation of the curriculum: A challenge before UK universities (Video)

By Thomas Sebastian

LONDON Aug 25: The UK’s student union has been leading two campaigns ‘Why is my curriculum white’ and ‘Liberate my degree’ since 2015 which got a shot in the arm with the spread of the movements ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Rhodes must fall.’ Now the UK universities are responding to it with efforts to decolonise and diversify their curriculum.

The student movements were questioning the Eurocentric nature of the curriculum. In Eurocentric view the western countries or the global north is the original source of all knowledge, and the global south are the receivers. The western countries continue to dominate the global market for ideas. They have monopoly control of the tools of dissemination of ideas. This was challenged before but now the struggle has come to the UK universities.

The universities are a key battleground for ideas. They have the power to decide which knowledge is valuable and worthy of dissemination. And they have a knock-on effect on the public discourse. The public discourse may seem far away from the academia. But one must agree the common sense do not come out of the blue but must come from somewhere.

Universities that were established during the colonial period justified imperialism. Racism was promoted as scientific idea in these citadels of knowledge which helped to perpetuate colonialism. The universities that started their life during the colonial period in the colonies like India acted as outposts of the universities in the imperialist countries. Though former colonialism ended during the 1950s and 1960s the colonialism of the intellect is continuing through these universities. The students and movements such as ‘Rhodes must fall’ are demanding a change in this.

Take the case of the discipline of economics, where capitalism is discussed as having risen autonomously in Western Europe thanks to the enlightenment values of rationality and objectivity. It does not consider the fact that capitalism would not have arisen in Western Europe in the 17th century without the surplus generated through colonialism and slavery.

An effort to rethink and reformulate the curriculum has started in the University of Birmingham. They have a initiated a few steps and one of them was a conference on ‘Decolonising the Mind.’ This conference explored various ways in which we can decolonise our mind as well the curriculum. Click to Listen to the Recording.