LSE facilitates discussions on decolonisation to explore the practical and theoretical implications for thinking about social, political and economic issues. Every year events are hosted across the School, bringing together internal and external thinkers for a public audience.
2022
This event investigates how knowledge of ‘the Other’ is embodied and reproduced through the pedagogic practices of teaching and learning in our western elite systems of higher education. The discussion centres around an appreciation of the centrality of agency and voice in creating alternative world views and the importance of raced, gendered, and classed power relations inherent in everyday cultural perspectives and research practices.
Speakers: Professor Heidi Safia, Dr Camacho Felix, Adndrea Encalada and Dr Armine Ishkanain (chair)
Date: Tuesday 7 June 2022
Watch a video of the event
2021
This event explores the psychology of racism through the book 'Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?' The author discusses how racial identity develops from very young children all the way to adulthood in black, white and mixed race families. The discussion seeks to understand what we can do to break the silence and have better conversations with our children about race to build a better world.
Speakers: Beverly Daniel Tatum and Minouche Shafik (Chair).
Date: Wednesday 8 December 2021
Recording now available on YouTube
Decolonising Development Studies
This event explores how decolonising courses and research has a special pertinence when it comes to development studies, which responds to ideas and theories in development practice itself – often viewed as an inherently colonial project. The speakers share on the challenges of address this and the mechanisms required to achieve better impact.
Speakers: Dr Rosalba Icaza, Dr Yirga Gelaw Woldeyes, Dr Althea-Maria Rivas and Dr Eyob Balcha Gebremariam (Chair).
Date: Tuesday 27 July 2021
Recording now available on YouTube
This event discusses the social sciences’ failure to acknowledge the extent to which modern nation-states were bound with colonial extraction and domination. Positing colonial histories as central to national imaginaries and the structures through which inequalities are reproduced, the speakers will explore a framework for a reparatory social science, oriented to global justice as a reconstructive project of the present.
Speakers: Professor Gurminder K. Bhambra and Dr Armine Ishkanian (Chair)
Date: Wednesday 26 May 2021
Recording now available on YouTube
This event discusses what the intellectual and political project of anti-racism and decolonisation will look like in the context of Palestine. Speakers will explore what this requires of academics and their universities.
Speakers: Rana Barakat, Muna Dajani, Mezna Qato, Omar Jabary Salamanca and Fran Tonkiss (Chair)
Date: Friday 21 May 2021
This event asks whether an ‘African’ identity is a colonial imposition, an innate spiritual attribute or something in-between. The speakers discuss this with emphasis on the nuances of ‘African-ness’, considering definitions of what it means to be African; how this is embodied for people on the continent and in the diaspora; how this is explored as an intergenerational conversation; and the relationship between African identity and Pan-Africanism.
Speakers: Prof. Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Dr. Althea-Maria Rivas.
Date: Tuesday 18 May 2021
Recording available on YouTube.
This event addresses the legacy of colonialism within international health systems and asks: what is the relationship between histories of imperialism and health, development and human rights? The speakers discuss global, regional and local systems of oppression, what decolonisation means in global health, and offer integrative approaches to global health research, policy and practice.
Speakers: Dr Sumegha Asthana, Dr Mosoka Fallah, Professor Paul Farmer and Dr Robtel Neajai Pailey (Chair).
Date: Wednesday 3 March 2012
Recording available on LSE Player
This event discusses the process and challenges of fighting against systemic racism in academia and daily life. The speaker explores the concepts of Pain, Trauma, Imagining, Healing & Recovery” with regards to fighting against systemic racism in academia and daily life.
Speakers: Akosua Adomako Ampofo
Date: Friday 29 January 2021
Recording now available on YouTube
Malinowski, Decolonisation and Race
This event recontextualises Malinowski in the context of colonialism, a century after the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific. The panel looks at different facets of the work and legacy of its author, Bronislaw Malinowski.
Speakers: Vicky Barnecutt, Dr Freddy Foks, Emma Pizarro, Catherine Whittle (Chair).
Date: Thursday 28 January 2021
Recording available on YouTube
Decolonising the Global Publishing Industry
This event addresses the potential for new publishing models that overturn the dominance of Global North research, addressing support non-Western languages, Global South journals and the values underpinning the types of work considered publishable. To achieve these decolonial ambitions, we ask whether the academic publishing sector only responds to the whims of university practices or whether it can be a force for change in itself?
Speakers: Dr Godwin Siundu, Dr Simidele Dosekun, Professor Florence Piron, Elizabeth Walker and Dr Ram Bhat (Chair)
Date: Wednesday 27 January 2021
Recording available on YouTube
2020
This event focuses on a recent study undertaken to explore the barriers and academic resistance towards attempts to decolonise the undergraduate history curriculum at one institution. The purpose of the research was to critically engage and explore a number of discourses which construct how academics challenge and resist plans to decolonise the curriculum from an academic developer's perspective. The speaker encourages discussion with participants to reflect and to explore how to support academics undertaking decolonising curriculum activities.
Speakers: Danielle Chavrimootoo
Date: Wednesday 15 July 2020
Recording now available on YouTube
Campaigns across universities to decolonise the curriculum advocate far-reaching changes in teaching and research. Responding to the international decolonise movement in universities and beyond, this panel of LSE researchers interrogates some unexamined framings that shape, and arguably limit, our understanding of the ‘Middle East’.
Speakers: Dr Sara Salem, Marral Shamshiri-Fard, Dr Sara Camacho Felix and Dr Michael Mason (Chair)
Date: Tuesday 3 March 2020
This event examines the progress made in decolonising Africa’s knowledge systems and the complicated role played by global North-South knowledge exchange programmes in attempts to further the continent’s epistemological agency. A crucial conversation with leading thinkers on current attempts to decolonise Eurocentric knowledge systems in Africa, and their role in challenging the enduring effects of colonialism in African and global society.
Speakers: Professor Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Dr Wangui wa Goro, Dr Romina Istratii and Dr Sara Salem (Chair).
Date: Thursday 16 January 2020
Recording available on LSE Player
2019
This event asks how might the modern, rather than the human, be recovered as a way of looking at a common inheritance? And why is modernity resistant to being recovered?
Speakers: Amit Chaudhuri and Dr Robin Archer (Chair).
Date: Thursday 6 June 2019
Recording now available on LSE Player
This event explores why students across the world are calling for the decolonisation of the curricula and what universities can do about it. From Cape Town to Oxford and beyond, student movements across the world calling for education to be decolonised have gained prominence over the past few years. In fact, academics have been raising concerns about the foundation of Africa scholarship as far back as 1969 at an African Studies Association in the United States.
Speakers: Dr Simukai Chigudu, Dr Laura Mann, Dr Lyn Ossome and Professor Alcinda Honwana (Chair).
Date: Wednesday 6 March 2019
Recording available on LSE Player
2016
This event examines why South African universities have become a site of struggle and aims to make sense of the rise of student movements. When the University of Cape Town became a key site of struggle in 2015, faculty and university leadership were taken by surprise as students demanded a change in the curriculum and increased access to affordable education. The student struggles expanded into broader demands for decolonisation, transformation and Africanisation.
Speakers: Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Wendy Willems (Chair).
Date: Wednesday 9 March 2016
Recording now available on LSE Player
2015
This event explores connections of knowledge with feminist politics in the neoliberal era, when new forms of patriarchy have emerged; asking whether we can have a fully decolonised global feminism that is both politically effective and socially radical. The speakers discuss gender's constitution within a worldwide economy of knowledge shaped by the power and wealth of the global North.
Speakers: Professor Raewyn Connell and Dr Ania Plomien (Chair).
Date: Monday 18 May 2015
Recording available on LSE Player