A decolonising workshop for SHS faculty

The UCL faculty of Social and Historical Sciences asked me (Jason Davies, Arena Centre) to include a workshop on 'decolonising the curriculum in their Decolonising the Curriculum 2021
This post makes the slides available to anyone who wants to use them anywhere with a similar group, but also mulls over the rationale for the design of such a workshop.

This is not intended to be some kind of full guide as to how to do this but it is worth mulling over why some things should be there, some are not, how these sessions tend to work and what you might bear in mind running similar sessions. It draws on some years of doing academic development and particularly in the area of inclusive curriculum.

It's also – inevitably – a partial view, and as a middle-aged white guy with only mild disability (an inconvenience, not something that dominates my life at all), I don't have first-hand experience of the kind of marginalisation that we are trying to tackle; all this work has to be embedded in reading, listening and good-faith attempts at empathy. Any session like this also has to be designed to be drastically redesigned on the fly if the audience put forward something specific, point out your design is a failure in some legitimate respect or they point at a specific and urgent situation they want to tackle.

The greatest danger for this kind of session is that it becomes a lot of hand-wringing and pearl clutching by (typically) white people who have the luxury of walking away from it at the end of the session, to leave it on their to-do list for later. Not everyone gets the chance to ignore the consequences of institutionalised marginalisation, and they're the ones we are trying to support. Solidarity has to be more than saying how awful it must be.

Thus, principle 1: design the whole session around having people do something specific. For a faculty workshop, that means they come up with an idea and before they leave they at least have a meeting in their diary to follow up on it.

Which leads me to principle 2: avoid giving people tips on how to make their teaching and curriculum more inclusive, decolonised (etc). This one drives people a bit mad because they often come to these sessions precisely for that – 'tell me what I need to do'. There are quite a few reasons why this is a bad idea.

Firstly, real inclusive, liberatory, decolonising work is not inherently a project (with milestones, plans, and an end), it's a change of attitude anchored in awareness. That awareness might lead you to devise a set of projects but they're the fruit of the tree, not its roots. And this is not a 'fixed awareness' based on knowing and understanding things, having the right answers; it's 'open awareness' that permanently leaves plenty of room for challenge, adjustment, expansion. So if you are giving out answers that sound fixed and final, you are embodying and teaching a way of doing something that is not going to get anyone very far.

One easy way to tell if you have drifted into 'fixed awareness' is to consider how much you estimate you've understood it, because whoever you are, whatever you've been through you don't get it. Not all of it. You might have a superb and profound grasp of one area of bigotry and exclusion that you've experienced for years but it has its limits. No one has experienced all possible combinations of bigotry. We should absolutely listen to people whose experience has shown them things the rest of us do not see but different kinds of marginalisation have different landscapes.

Which leads me to my next principle: always assume complicated lives. Many people refer to what I'm pointing at here as 'intersectionality' but that term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw to refer to the experiences of black woman (in contrast to black men, and women). Since a great deal of what they face is erasure and marginalisation, it seems a bit rich to appropriate and generalise their term; if we want to refer to the lived experience of different bigotries, we need to use something that is both everyday (because the number of people who, for instance, have protected characteristics) but also specific and evocative. Our terminology should not be quietly rebuilding walls in front of the ones we are attempting to tear down. What we do know is that complication has a quasi-exponential effect; it doesn't just add one issue to another, it creates new issues and the overall effect is very much intensified.

The third principle I've settled on in this work is find out for yourself. You have to read books, tweets or blogs, empathise, and tackle any reaction of disbelief or dismissiveness quite hard. The fact is that racism, ableism (any form of bigotry, basically) is pretty unbelievable because it's either absurdly lazy or completely riddled with non-sequiturs. Each person has to make their own journey and trip over their own distinctive ignorance. More to the point, if you're running a short session and trying to equip people to be powerful agents of change, giving them tips makes their enquiries grind to a halt; it can convey a sense that there are experts and novices, and they can never become the former. If there is one thing I hope people get from a session like this, it is the realisation that, yes, they need to go and find out more. 

So as far as possible, my workshops are built around actually getting them to do research of their own: look up via google what difficulties students with X and Y characteristics face - yes, right now. They will discover something they didn't know, hopefully, but more importantly it's a way of saying 'yes this is it, there is not much more to it than going and finding out, and thinking about what you find (preferably together)'. 

In a sense this is very limited and unambitious; workshops with a single focus (eg anti-racism) are likely to be much more powerful than some internet  searching, but if they leave the session as active enquirers taking responsibility for their own education, they are more likely to find their way into such a session and engage more fully than if some guy running a workshop seemed to be saying they should go to an infinite series of workshops in the future.

So, back to SHS in June 2021. The audience are likely to be already interested and knowledgeable, since they have volunteered their time. They are accustomed a qualitative mode of enquiry (with some quant, but erratically and depending on discipline). In brief, these are some of the considerations that went into the design:


Can activities be designed so that people who are fairly knowledgeable can work alongside anyone who has thrown their hat into the ring but is a complete beginner to the situation? 
Is there room for those who experience particular bigotries to share that experience without positioning them as a spokesperson for an entire community?
Many initiatives tend towards the strategic – 'can we make universities more hospitable to marginalised groups? Let's have a five-year plan.' Sometimes these can be vital; targets and commitments create a space in which it is easier to call people to account. But they don't do an awful lot for someone in their second year of a three-year degree. So can we identify 'tactics', things that bring that postponed decolonised future into the present, even if it's transitory and has to be recreated ongoingly?
Given the luxury of expecting people to come in disciplinary clusters, can we create an opportunity for them to begin actual work rather than agree work should be done? 


Writing this post has made me realise just many things have to be juggled. This hasty post may vanish in future as it gets broken down into different aspects, all of which require much more careful explanation but if working towards real inclusion has a motto, it's 'make a start, however imperfect, and keep improving it'.
If you were at this workshop and would like to write a post about it, please get in touch and we can host it here (or link to it if you put it elsewhere).