About us

This project began in 2019 in the School of Biosciences at the University of Sheffield. We first formed a reading/discussion group comprising students and staff focused on Decolonising the University, edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu. These discussions motivated us to explore how we could improve our teaching and research, resulting in the creation of this guide for colleagues in our department.

The guide is motivated by/builds on decolonial scholarship and student-led movements such as ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Why Is My Curriculum White?’. We have decided to use the name ‘Contextualising the curriculum’ instead of ‘Decolonising the curriculum’, as this better reflects the nature of our project, and refrains from misappropriating the term "decolonising".

This working group comprises:

Alison Wright (NERC Independent Research Fellow)

Beth Dyson (Associate University Teacher)

Colin Osborne (Professor of Plant Biology)

Daniela Palmer (NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow)

Eleanor Harrison (NERC Independant Research Fellow)

Fay Morland (PhD student)

Frane Babarovic (PhD student)

Grace Wardell (PhD student)

Jocelyne Sze (PhD student)

Mary Eliza (PhD student)

Nicola Hemmings (Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow)

Peter Price (PhD student)

Suma Mani (PhD student)

Stephen Rolfe (Senior lecturer)

Rebecca Ford (Undergraduate student)

Last updated: November 2021