Decolonizing the Liberal Arts Curriculum  

The Decolonizing the Liberal Arts Curriculum symposium is a collaborative effort between faculty at NYU Liberal Studies, NYU London, NYU Abu Dhabi and our colleagues in Britain and from around the world that seeks to discover and develop new approaches to scholarship and pedagogy in the Liberal Arts. Furthermore, the symposium is designed to help participants apply theories of decolonization to their research and pedagogy. The symposium aims to move beyond catchphrases and keywords  to develop pathways for academic units and individual faculty members to reshape their research and curriculum towards a more globally oriented, less Eurocentric and more epistemologically diverse set of methods, methodologies, and pedagogies. In particular, we want to: 

1. 1. Provide researchers with new ways of intervening in their fields that acknowledge the colonial legacies of their academic disciplines and create new circuits of collaboration with members of the societies (in which) they work while discontinuing practices that those communities attribute to oppressive legacies of the past. 

   2. Provide instructors with methods of re-orienting their syllabi and coursework away from Europe and identifying multiple centers of knowledge in the majority world around which student learning can be formulated. 

   3. Provide academic units with new toolboxes from which they can derive ways of resetting their curricular goals and guidelines, and thereby accommodate a more diverse learning environment.