School of Global Studies

Decolonizing Education: Towards Academic Freedom In Pluriversality (DETAFIP)

School of Global Studies

The School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex invites participation in a one-day conference on the 11th April 2016 and a two-day seminar on the 12-13th April on the Decolonization of Education towards Pluriversality/Multiversity. The conference and seminar will focus on how best to challenge and change orthodoxies within the academy that preserve the hegemony of dominant perspectives on what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts. Emerging from the growing critique and activism centred on decolonizing the curriculum, we will consider the following questions:

  • How do we achieve cultural democracy in our classrooms?
  • What practices have been most effective in provoking change to pluriversify/multiversify curricula in and across different disciplines?
  • What lessons can be learnt from pedagogic practices that open up our institutions to plural perspectives and challenge Eurocentrism?

Our aims are to:

  • facilitate exchange of experiences among those involved in struggles for decolonizing education at all levels, particularly in the academy and all its forms of knowledge production, dissemination and exchange – from what is taught in the classroom, to what appears in its journals and scholarly publications, to how expert knowledge is disseminated;
  • advance a pluriversal/multiversal perspective on knowledge generation and exchange in order to foster spaces for theoretical and methodological approaches that promote the self-determination, creativity and community self-empowerment of peoples excluded from and by the university as an institution for the reproduction of existing structural relations of power;
  • facilitate the development around DETAFIP of a network of role models across disciplines whose work and engagement in decolonizing the academy and other institutions and spaces of education can serve as inspiration and as a point of reference in drawing interested scholar-activists and their communities into working together in building transnationally a global citizenship educational campaign for curricula of pluriversality/multiversity.

The conference will be of interest to students, scholars, and activists working with questions of decoloniality/decolonization, as well as those who wish to gain an introduction to this field. It will be of particular use to lecturers and researchers seeking to decolonize their classrooms, curricula, teaching practices, research and writing, and to student activists seeking to bring about change in their own institutions. It will also be of interest to independent researchers as well as those working for various non-governmental and governmental organisations, including local and central governmental authorities, consultants, policy-makers, trade unionists and even representatives of political parties, in relation to the concerns of reparatory justice, environmental justice and cognitive justice arising from centuries of coloniality in the institutions of education in the UK. 

The events will take the form of a one-day conference followed by a two-day seminar. The conference will consist of keynotes, panels and small group workshop sessions, followed by a cultural programme to include a fashion show, films and music. On the following two days, the seminar will focus on a more interactive set of interventions to discuss cartographies of power and structures of knowledge, decolonization of the paradigms of social science and post-colonial studies; and discussion of pluriversality/multiversity as an alternative to unipolar Euro-American knowledge systems dominating the world academic landscape today. 

We invite a broad range of contributions – papers, posters, photography displays and short films - on Global South and critical Global North epistemologies and ontologies and Black[i] Minority Ethnic (BME) experiences in Britain, with no limit on the topics of the presentations. 

For information about the conference and seminar please email decolonisingeducation@sussex.ac.uk


[i]  ‘Black’ is a political term with its origins in the anti-racist and civil rights movements. Whilst originally referring to people of African and Caribbean descent, the word has come to encompass both Asian and Arab people, seeing commonalities in their shared oppression. The word is used to empower these communities, less as ‘ethnic minorities’ but as global majorities and foster a sense of solidarity in the common struggles Black people face (LiberateYourself, 2015). The term ‘Black’ is used here in a political sense and will encompass those of African, Caribbean, Asian and Arab descent