Chapter 3: Context

The projects reflected upon here ran from 2018-2022 at the University of the Arts London, a specialist arts university in the capital of the United Kingdom, where I was living and working at the time. Within this period, two significant events took place. In March 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic caused citizens of the UK to go into lockdown. University students and staff attempted to work from home and it soon became apparent that the disease and lockdown was causing disproportionate harm and disadvantage to Black and Asian people, exacerbating existing racial inequalities. In May 2020, an African American man named George Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, which escalated Black Lives Matters protests worldwide and led to numerous other examples of racism, contemporary and historic, to be interrogated publicly. This included protesters in Bristol throwing a statue of former slave owner Edward Colston into the river, demonstrating the significance of colonial legacies left unaddressed (Mohdin, 2023). These events prompted many HE institutions to publish strategies and action plans for reforming and decolonising themselves and their curricula. I offer further details of this in this chapter to set the context surrounding the three UAL projects.

In response to 2020 events, most public institutions published some form of anti-racism statement and strategy. UAL’s Anti-Racism Action Plan states:

‘The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 and the subsequent protests around the world were a significant turning point in the fight for racial equality. It was a painful reminder that radical change is needed within society in general as well as for organisations like ours. As a response to the Black Lives Matter movement, we pledged to work with students, staff, graduates and partners to dismantle systemic racism within our university and the creative industries’ (2021, p.2).

UAL's work to address racial inequalities had started some time before this, prompted by existing evidence of racial inequality within the arts school, including the social media campaign #UALSOWHITE (Occupy UAL, 2015) and article entitled ‘Is UAL too white?’ (Artefact Magazine, 2016). This particular campaign led UAL to increase efforts to close the then-called ‘BAME attainment gaps’ with a new institution wide ‘Attainment Project’ focussed on staff development, which I was appointed to lead.

Since ethnicity has been monitored in UK HE, ethnic disparities in student experience and outcomes have been consistently reported, leading to universities being called ‘exclusionary spaces which marginalise BAME students in a myriad of ways, not least through curricula that centre Whiteness’ (Arday, Branchu and Boliver, 2021). In response to the 2020 events, the UK Office for Students (OfS, 2022) set a target for ‘the sector to eliminate the unexplained gap in degree outcomes (1sts or 2:1s) between white students and black students by 2024-25, and to eliminate the absolute gap (the gap caused by both structural and unexplained factors) by 2030-31’. They also made institutional gap data public to increase accountability and much sector research has emerged to identify gap closing interventions. Although the methods of such research are questioned (Sabri, 2023), one perpetual recommendation made is for curriculum transformation and more conversations about race (Mountford-Zimdars et al, 2016; NUS and Universities UK, 2019; Singh, 2021).  

This sector research reveals that many students experience curricula ‘that does not reflect their socialisation, worldview, history or lived experience’ (Arday, Branchu and Boliver, 2021), impacting their experience, belonging and attainment (Adewumi and Mitton, 2022 and Adewumi et al, 2022). Persistent calls have been made to ‘diversify’ curricula, ‘decolonise’ curricula, to make curricula ‘anti-racist’ or more ‘culturally sensitive’. Increasingly, these calls look beyond names on reading lists, towards ‘a culturally relevant curriculum that facilitates learners’ socio-political awareness, enabling them to challenge hegemonic, taken-for-granted power structures', as argued by Critical Race Theorist Ladson-Billings (Thomas and Quinlan, 2023). Variations of this are reported beyond the UK, with South Africa focusing on decolonisation and Australia on 'curricular reconciliation’ (Ahn, Quinlan and Adewumi, 2023).

UAL’s Anti-Racism Action Plan supports ‘the process of decolonising the curriculum’ and encourages ‘student engagement in the decolonising initiative’ (2021, p.11), like many other university action plans. Similar to LCC Changemakers, University of Kent’s ‘Diversity Mark’ initiative employs students to collaboratively review the cultural sensitivity of curricula at the request of individual academics and was one of two initiatives evaluated by TASO (Transforming Access and Student Outcomes in Higher Education) to evidence ‘the impact of curriculum reform on the degree awarding gap’ (2021). The evaluation found ‘attainment in BAME and White students was marginally higher in reformed compared to comparator modules indicating a positive effect of the intervention’ but was ultimately unable to conclude whether such interventions had a positive overall impact (TASO, 2022, p.2). One of the report’s recommendations is for universities to combine ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches and further institution-wide, student-staff curriculum co-development (p.3) such that is seen in most university decolonisation initiatives, but how is curriculum decolonisation distinct from other kinds of curriculum reform, and how is decolonisation distinct from decoloniality? I seek to explain this in the next section.

TASO and OfS guidance call for curricula to be relevant for diverse learners, avoiding the more contested term of 'decolonisation’, even though this is included in many university anti-racism strategies. University of Kent’s Anti-Racism Strategy states:

‘Decolonisation approaches are increasingly used as a vehicle for developing pedagogy which is inclusive of racially minoritised students. We recognise that both the term ‘decolonisation’ used as a metaphor in this way, and whether the University should be ‘decolonising’ as a process are contested. Nevertheless, it is something that Kent will pursue.’ (2021, p.12)

Such contestations include UK government ministers stating that ‘there is no need to decolonise the school curriculum because it is not colonised’ (Swerling, 2022). The notion of decolonisation as metaphor comes from Tuck and Yang who explain how decolonisation is misused by institutions as a ‘metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools’ (2012, p.1) and that actual decolonisation is an unsettling process enabling the ‘repatriation of Indigenous land and life’ and in which the ‘real and symbolic violences of settler colonialism’, past and continued, are not overlooked (p.2). 

Decolonising/Decolonisation is the verb/noun intended for these processes, to decolonise and be decolonised, and for universities, an undoing and reparation of the epistemic violence of colonialism. Surrounding this, in the epistemological and ontological realm, is ‘decoloniality’ and the ‘decolonial turn’, which is based on the premise that ‘coloniality survives colonialism’ (Maldonado-Torres in Ortiz, 2023) and requires an epistemological ‘delinking’ from knowledge structures imposed by the West (Tsang, 2021). Decoloniality calls for ‘a practice of imagining and acknowledging alternative ways of knowing, sensing and being’ (Ortiz, 2023) as well as the intertwining of these states. Rivera Qusicanqui (2020) explains how this ‘knowing is a bodily political practice’, while Silva (2014) describes the intertwining as ‘onto-epistemologies... that shape the conditions of knowledge and existence’ (Ortiz, 2023), the ways that we know and the ways we become.  

Storytelling is a key aspect of decolonial praxis, for facilitating ‘alternative ways of knowing, sensing and being’ that expose the false claims of Western- and Euro-centric knowledge being universal. Mignolo (2009) describes the delinking from the pervasive illusion of universality as ‘epistemic disobedience’, while Escobar (2010) challenges the universal with 'pluriversal imagination’ (Ortiz, 2023). For Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2021), storytelling is a ‘pivotal decolonial method’ in which:  

‘the story and the storyteller both serve to connect the past with the future, one generation with another, the land with the people and the people with the story’ (Ortiz, 2023).  

In Chapter 5, I will explain how these aspects of decoloniality relate to principles of Critical Race Theory and the method of counter-storytelling. For the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss how decolonisation and decoloniality relate to the British university, its curricula and its history.  

The UK was a colonising, imperial nation, and played a major role in the movement of black and brown people across former colonies and to the UK. British universities played a key role in this. Professor Sir Hilary Beckles is an acclaimed historian, reparations advocate and Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies. In a 2020 lecture, he presents an historical account of British academia’s role in facilitating – ideologically, strategically and administratively – the project of British colonialism and the movement of black people through the transatlantic slave trade. He explains how John Locke helped the ideological framing of ‘people as property’ in 17th century Barbados and Carolina and how Adam Smith’s 18th century colonial economics protected Britain's financial interests. He discusses the emancipation of Black slaves and points to several academics and academic institutions actively involved in ensuring that Britain profited from this, while slaves gained nothing more than their so-called freedom. In an article for the United Nations (2024), Beckles explains how ‘for two centuries, emancipated Black people have been calling for reparations for the crimes committed against them’ and are gaining momentum in working collectively and transnationally to set out their legal and moral rights to compensation.

In ‘Towards Decolonising the University’, Professor Toni Williams writes:

‘...activists have compelled some universities not only to acknowledge but also to redress their accumulation of wealth through colonial exploitation and to revisit decisions about whose lives become venerated in portraits on the walls and statues on streets’ (Thomas and Jivraj, 2020, p.v).

Dr David S.P. Thomas suggests that complete decolonial redress is incompatible with the business of the UK university that ‘aims to remain an economically viable enterprise, operationalised through global competition and neoliberal consumerism (2020, p.1). While this appears to be the case for UK universities, some have started to take steps towards compensation and the repatriation of items stolen by colonisers, with the example of Glasgow University paying £20m in slave trade reparations (Carrell, 2019). Lokhun (2020) explains:

‘The idea of reparations is often framed in monetary terms – financial settlements, waiving of fees, scholarships – to victims of the Atlantic slave trade and/or their descendants. However, reparations can be much broader and encompass relationships, communities, land and systems, and should also be considered for other victims of crimes of against humanity, such as indigenous communities’.

This highlights the need for universities to enact restorative justice and rebuild relationships with communities affected by colonialism and for HE curricula to prompt and support staff and students to do this. For the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) blog, three educators reflect on their work to do this at Plymouth University, ‘emphasising the links between decolonisation, belonging and attainment’ (Winter, Turner and Webb, 2023). At King’s College London, academics examine initiatives undertaken within the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine to discuss the notion of compensation and ‘challenge colonial legacies, racism, and knowledge production norms’ (Tamimi et al, 2023). Meanwhile at Cambridge Assessment, researchers look at the role of teacher training in decolonising compulsory education (Johnson and Mouthaan, 2021), where mandatory staff development is accepted and strictly regulated, unlike in HE.

While HE staff have avoided such work, students have been leading the university decolonisation movement and playing active roles in curriculum reform. However, some students have expressed concerns about decolonising curriculum, especially when graduating into globalised industries and markets. In a comprehensive review of global decolonisation initiatives, Edwards and Shahjahan (2021) explain that while many students:

‘...invited a more inclusive African Engineering curriculum, some were anxious about the loss of transferable skills, across disciplines and national scales... for some, a decolonizing curriculum stifled ‘mobility of labour since most graduates would simply possess contextual knowledge which cannot be used elsewhere in the globe’’ (citing Fomunyan, p.1126).

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò suggests that for Africa, decolonisation ‘risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ and pressures former colonies to renounce, at their own detriment, ‘any and every cultural, political, intellectual, social and linguistic artefact, idea, process, institution and practice that retains even the slightest whiff of the colonial past’. He sees Western universities ‘obsessing over whether a particular idea or institution is “authentically African” or imported from outside’ and calls for us to instead consider what is valuable for Africa today (Reisz, 2022).

In response to such concerns, Adewumi and Mitton emphasise in ‘Diversifying the Social Policy Curriculum’ the argument of decolonial scholar De Sousa Santos that decolonising curricula does not mean we have ‘to throw the prevailing literature into the dustbin of history, but rather to include “Eurocentric critical tradition in a much broader landscape of epistemological and political possibilities”’ (2022, p.56). This refers to a broader landscape, rich with diverse knowledge generated, recorded and shared through various epistemological traditions and modes of expression and communication; knowledge that is not only racially and geographically diverse, but also in terms of language, social status, gender and other aspects of identity subject to marginalisation and oppression. 

In this way, curriculum decolonisation aligns to the Critical Race Theory principle of intersectionality, which promotes understanding of how oppressed identities compound, with an emphasis on understanding the interaction of identities like race and gender rather than treating them ‘as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis’ (Crenshaw, 1989). Intersectionality is identified by Daniel (2021) as a parallel movement to decolonial activism in the #Rhodes Must Fall campaign, which was led by mostly black students at the University of Cape Town. Daniel identifies intersectional ‘hierarchies and power relations within the movement’ that highlight the distinct ‘discrimination against and precarisation of black students’. The same distinction is revealed when looking at intersectionality within UK student populations; the disproportionate precarity and inequity of outcomes for black students is evident across the literature, calling for racialised coloniality to be addressed directly, rather than through broader social justice initiatives.  

The literature reviewed in this chapter reflects some of the recent discussions and developments around curriculum reform and decolonisation in UK HE and calls for curricula to centre the knowledge and (hi)stories of racially marginalised and colonised peoples, and to highlight ‘how coloniality continues to shape, knowledge production and education systems’ (Doharty et al, 2020). In ‘Decolonising Arts Education – Towards a New Enlightenment’, Gurnam Singh asserts that ‘a decolonial arts education needs to find a way of delegitimising all forms of racial supremacy’ and that art schools can do this through ‘innovative forms of expression’ and ‘actively integrating indigenous traditions, languages, and perspectives into the educational framework’ (2023). This is something the three UAL projects sought to do and in chapter 5 I discuss how this was through the traditions and languages of counter-storytelling. First, I will outline my methodological approach in framing and reflecting on the projects as practice-research.