Decolonising the cultural policy and management curriculum – reflections from practice

ABSTRACT

Decolonising the curriculum is a global imperative that takes different forms and urgency depending on the context. Developments across the globe such as BlackLivesMatter and student responses to the pandemic and online learning have raised new questions about the curriculum – critically questioning higher education institutions’ plans about not only providing access to resources but about the (cultural) authority of curricula, pedagogical and research practices that are still dominated by Western discourses. This paper examines three experiences of curriculum decolonisation in cultural policy and management, an applied subject that has culture as its object, in three different contexts, Serbia, Puerto Rico and South Africa: namely how the pursuit of a pluriversal knowledge ecology found expression in the curriculum, content and pedagogical practices deployed to deliver locally relevant education; and how educators resolved the ontological and epistemic discontinuities between the standard disciplinary canon and local realities to embed and contextualise the discipline.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonisation
• epistemic justice
• curriculum
• content
• pedagogy
• cultural policy and management

Acknowledgements

The Serbian case study was developed as part of EPICA - Empowering Participation in Culture and Architecture: (ID 7744648), supported by the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).