Sally Matthews
I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University. I teach courses in Comparative Politics, Political Economy and African Studies. One of my research and teaching interests is to try to think through what it means to "decolonise" the curriculum.
My project
My project adds some onions to our decolonisation pot in that it looks at some of the difficult but necessary aspects of decolonisation - the bits that, like onions, make you cry but are really needed! It involves revising the course “Introduction to Comparative Politics”, a term-long module taught to first-year students in the Department of Political and International Studies at Rhodes University. I would like the course to be different in these two ways:
The course needs to be appropriate for my context and responsive to current concerns about decolonising university curricula.
The course needs to be taught in a way that resonates with the values underlying calls for the decolonisation of university curricula: the classroom space should be interactive and inclusive and should encourage open-mindedness and a critical orientation towards dominant forms of knowledge.
You can read about my project here.
