Can Political Science Decolonise? A Response to Neema Begum and Rima Saini
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929918808999 |
| Author | Akwugo Emejulu |
| Subject Matter | Professional Section: Teaching |
research-article2018
Professional Section: Teaching
Political Studies Review
2019, Vol. 17(2) 202 –206
Can Political Science
© The Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
Decolonise? A Response to
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918808999
DOI: 10.1177/1478929918808999
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Neema Begum and Rima Saini
Akwugo Emejulu
Accepted: 4 October 2018
Introduction
Neema Begum and Rima Saini have clearly set out the grim reality facing women of
colour early career researchers in political science. Political science, and British academia
more generally, is enmeshed in a multi-pronged crisis. This is an economic crisis trigged
by budget cuts from central government and the introduction of tuition fees.1 While many
political science and international relations departments have seen their coffers swell in
these austere times, this new injection of cash actually masks a longer running labour
crisis within departments which are over-reliant on the precarious, under-rewarded and
undervalued labour of PhD students and teaching fellows who do much of the heavy lift-
ing in terms of teaching, tutoring and pastoral care. The complex economic relations
within departments intersect with the long-standing crisis of legitimacy.2 As evidenced by
the 2018 statistical report of the Equality Challenge Unit and work by my colleagues and
me in the first double issue of the European Journal of Politics and Gender, this crisis
relates to the under-representation of people of colour – women of colour in particular –
and white women in the discipline as a whole, in its senior ranks specifically, and the
gender and racial disparities in citations and publications in the discipline’s most prestig-
ious journals. Furthermore, with the spread of Rhodes Must Fall, Leopold Must Fall and
other decolonisation sister struggles, such as those highlighted in Julie Cupples and
Ramón Grosfoguel’s recent book on unsettling eurocentrism in the westernised univer-
sity, political science is also facing an epistemological crisis about its knowledge produc-
tion and how different kinds of knowledge produced outside and against the white male
Eurocentric gaze are largely delegitimized and excluded within the discipline. In this
short riposte, I aim to amplify Begum and Saini’s analysis of the intersecting inequalities
of political science and attempt to set out a roadmap for decolonising political science.
From my vantage point, it is not at all certain that there is either an understanding or a
political will to confront the problems plaguing the discipline and the profession of
University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
Corresponding author:
Akwugo Emejulu, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: a.emejulu@warwick.ac.uk
Emejulu
203
political...
To continue reading
Request your trial