Decolonising the Curriculum
| Author | Rima Saini,Neema Begum |
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918808459 |
| Subject Matter | Professional Section: Teaching |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918808459
Political Studies Review
2019, Vol. 17(2) 196 –201
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929918808459
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Decolonising the Curriculum
Neema Begum1 and Rima Saini2
Accepted: 30 September 2018
Social science courses are increasingly coming under fire for the over-representation of
white male authors and theorists. Campaigns such as ‘Why Is My Curriculum White?’
call into question the ‘Dead White Men’ approach to teaching political theory, where few
female and theorists of colour are included on reading lists. The ways in which knowl-
edge is produced, propagated and perpetuated through White, Western perspectives also
spawned the related campaign ‘Why Is My Professor White?’ These campaigns are taking
place against a backdrop of immense changes in the higher education sector among a
number of other sectors including within the NHS, which in 2018 saw thousands of uni-
versity academic staff go on strike over pensions, and a spate of anti-casualisation cam-
paigns crop up at universities across the country. Changes such as these disproportionately
affect women and ethnic minorities because of the extent to which we are subject to
structural inequalities. Ethnic and gender penalties are present at every academic pay
grade. Women are more likely to be on casual, part-time contracts. And ethnic minorities
still constitute a minor proportion of senior academic and management staff in most
universities.
As women of colour (WOC) in the academy – emerging scholars of race who have yet
to begin permanent academic roles – the decolonisation campaigns hold personal as well
as professional resonance for us. They fuel our desire to impart real change in the way
politics is taught in the United Kingdom and to help make a space for scholars like us.
However, this desire must sit alongside the realities of our future in the academy. We both
started out PhDs in the mid-2010s with the hope of becoming critical and radical but
essentially fully fledged and secure academic employees. The structural changes the
academy is undergoing not only undermines the work we do to represent the work of
subaltern scholars in the field of politics but makes us question our ability as well as our
desire to survive and thrive as academics.
The State of Academia
Restricted funding, heightened competition for students and increasingly bureaucratic
measures of benchmarking through the Research (REF) and Teaching (TEF) Excellence
Framework have destabilised the simpler academic trajectories of previous generations of
academics. Although Universities rely now more than ever on the research and teaching
1Centre of the Dynamics of Thnicity, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
2Department of Sociology, City, University of London, London, UK
Corresponding author:
Rima Saini, A229 College Building, City, University of London, St John Street, London EC1V 4PB, UK.
Email: rima.saini.1@city.ac.uk
808459PSW0010.1177/1478929918808459Political Studies ReviewBegum and Saini
research-article2019
Professional Section: Teaching
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