Nilanjana Gupta:

Even today, 75 years after independence, we're still struggling with what are the goals of education? Who is, you know, who is this education for? What do we want from this education? We still have to really struggle with these things, because of this rupture that happened, which was completely transformative. So I think that, you know, it was the thing about colonization is that it was such a disjuncture that took place, which is why it has such a long impact, as well. We can't talk of just, you know, getting rid of the imperialists, and we can't get into a system where we think that just getting rid of the political structure can actually change the impact of, or transform, get rid of the impact of colonization. So that's a big struggle, I think, for every person, in every section, in every way, in our kind of situation.

Riadh Ghemmour:

So I would say one of the biggest barriers of decolonization comes from leadership. decolonization requires a collective commitment where everybody needs to be on board to make this process happen, and to make decolonization happen. And sometimes leadership is not on board because they don't understand decolonization, or they are not willing to give up on power to make room for decolonial practices within higher education and beyond. An example that I can cite is that I've been doing a lot of decolonial work within the University of Exeter and beyond. And it's very common that a lot of people when they come to spaces, to speak about decolonization there, they tend not to listen, and to expand their understanding, knowledge, and experiences from a decolonial perspective, of course, so the resistance and the defensiveness happens quite a lot in my experience. I think we need to feel uncomfortable, and we need to feel challenged, I would say, when we speak about decolonization, because we need to start from this point. It's the point of departure in order to create a socially just world.

Subhajit Naskar:

The social reform agenda, since it was abandoned the society, the unequal framework that existed in society, remained and remained largely and which is why the gap between haves and have nots have widened over the years -- even after seven, six and seven decades, it hasn't changed much. So, and the university campuses or the discussions in the education of the higher education sectors have started reflecting the way sort of colonial the post-colonial framework existed in the political discussions. So the campuses which was thought to be a very, very egalitarian project never realized its potential truly, and which is why the campuses, Indian campuses, or the Indian universities and the higher education sector, never been able to or largely ignored the kind of experiences of the students and teachers of the most vulnerable sections and the most marginalized castes, Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes, the Dalit and the Adivasis

Nicola Thomas and Ian Cook:

The challenge of decolonial thinking is that there's a lot of unlearning. And a lot of recognizing of privilege of position of the ways in which marginalization of people has occurred and kind of the legacies of past decisions, which you know, our ancestors might have made kind of how that reverberates today and how that affects our in positions now. So, but lots of us students, and indeed, Ian and I, are on a journey of learning to recognize these things in ourselves and gaining greater insight. Or people may have got huge experience of of marginalization and they have a more than aware of the effects of colonialism and racism in their lives. So people come into the class and it's a challenging space: decolonizing discussions, antiracist discussions, discussions about colonial violence is very risky for people involved, depending on what position they're in. So, we're really conscious in our, in our module teaching that we need to kind of think through how to hold this conversations safely. But also how to ensure that we do have difficult conversations and that we enable us to feel that we've got the tools to have those conversations about personal identity about recognizing privilege about recognizing how we might inadvertently have harmed someone without meaning to because of that privilege, or enabling someone who has experienced a does experience marginalization to feel that they are safe in this space. And in the context of a country which doesn't really talk about empire and really doesn't want to talk about racism, we don't have a lot of widespread community understandings of how to have these conversations. That's quite a new conversation for us to have. So, we really look for ways in which we can kind of help us all appreciate the processes of racialization and how we can think about how what those processes, what affects those processes result.

Frances and Fatima Pirbhai-Illich:

One of the things that I've struggled with is how to engage with that mainstream population in critical conversations around the concepts of interconnectedness, interrelatedness and interdependence with humans more than humans and materiality -- and also how to engage in difficult generative and collaborative conversations with the mainstream population, in order to become aware of, and to let go of, some of the privileges that they're invested in maintaining. So basically, it's to actually walk the talk, not just talk the talk. And it's very easy to intellectualize this decolonizing information and theories, but more commitment is needed to undo and repair the harms. The other challenge we felt was where people jump into act without necessarily understanding what they're doing, or without having engaged deeply in the process of unsettling their own entanglement with and complicity in coloniality. And associated with this is that there is no quick fix to any form of decolonizing. It's necessarily, because of the complexities involved, a long-term and possibly multi-generational project.