2.1. Decolonising the Arts Curriculum (2018-2019)

At the start of 2018, in the role of Educational Developer (Diversity and Inclusion), I worked with Rahul Patel (UAL academic) and Hansika Jethnani (Student Union Education Officer) to curate the first Decolonising the Arts Curriculum zine for UAL. To curate is ‘to be in charge of selecting and caring for objects to be shown in a museum or to form part of a collection of art, an exhibit, etc’ (Cambridge, 2025), and this is what we did. The zine was a platform for students and staff to share different perspectives on, and experiences of, curriculum decolonisation, through different means of expression. We encouraged divergent responses in content and form and our only selection criterion was for contributions to speak to the notion of decolonising arts curricula. When publishing the contributions, we did not want to impose the stringent format restrictions and impersonal peer review processes of conventional academic publication; we wanted to take care of the contributions in their intended forms. So, we chose the versatile, DIY format of the ‘zine’, also attracted to its subversive counterculture history (more about this in Chapter 5). Zine 1 comprises 64 pages of diverse contributions from a range of students and staff and has been disseminated widely within and beyond UAL, in print and online.

The zine itself has had significant influence in and outside of the UK HE sector but was just one of several project outputs. Through 2018-2019, Patel and I worked with UAL librarians to organise cross-college exhibitions and events to launch the zine, at which contributors shared perspectives on physical platforms with voices amplified. Some recited their zine contribution while others made new contributions in response. These college-based exhibitions and events were generative, with more people contributing more perspectives on decolonising the arts curriculum. We started referring to the event series as a ‘caravan’ as mostly racially marginalised people gathered and travelled with us, appreciating the space to share untold stories. As academic lead for the project, I was responsible for coordinating the production of the printed zine, liaising with the print company and budget holders, and then coordinating all necessary logistics for the cross-college events, which involved varying requirements on each site and different levels of care and support for each contributor to speak or perform. I later created and managed the project website to host the online zine and document the live events.  

I wrote for zine 1 ‘Confessions of a Colonial Lecturer’ (Panesar, 2018, pp.42-43), an image-text piece in which I reflect on the colonial, Eurocentric curriculum I used to teach. This focusses on an example I used to include in design history lectures: a wallpaper design commemorating the jubilee of Queen Victoria, Empress of the British Empire, which I used to explain the shift in early modernist design from decorative to abstract. At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to how the wallpaper celebrates the British Empire and communicates negative racial stereotypes of colonised peoples. In my confession, I reflect on the context around the example and its relationship to my own racial positioning as a child of Empire. My confession was enlarged for the exhibitions and I took to the stage to offer embodied retellings of the story, embellished with verbal and non-verbal expressions of shame, frustration and anger, through tone of voice, pace and body language.

Other contributors did the same, using the stage and microphone to elevate and amplify their stories, in canteens and foyers through which people passed. In this way, the exhibitions and events became public interventions, ‘opening up spaces for indigenous thinking and doing’, as Gurnam Singh writes in the zine 1 foreword (2018, p.1). The generative effect of the zine 1 ‘caravan’ led to the production of zine 2 in 2019 and further cross-college events, under Rahul’s leadership (Akussah et al, 2019). And we shared our story of curating the zine on other occasions, including the iJADE Conference on ‘Creating spaces: Inclusivity, ethics and participation in art and design education’ (Panesar and Patel, 2019).