Decolonising or anti-racism? Exploring the limits of possibility in higher education

ABSTRACT

Decolonising work in Higher Education (HE) has become increasingly mainstreamed. One issue is the relationship between such work and that of equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI), or the potential reduction and co-option of decolonising for EDI purposes. This article discusses the characterisations of, and drivers for, decolonising inside UK HE, and then situates this against one, institution-wide programme of work. This programme sought to investigate how staff and students have understood the concept of decolonising, and to evaluate the limits of this work. Analysing surveys and interviews using a grounded theory approach suggested a moderate or limited view of decolonising work, and supports concerns that decolonising is losing its radical edge. Echoing work on the possibilities for epistemic and racial justice from inside capitalist institutions infused with the logics of coloniality, the argument questions whether it is possible to know the University otherwise.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-racism
• decolonising
• diversifying
• higher education
• institutional change

Introduction: on decolonising higher education

The symbolism and reality of decolonising the University has a richness in both genealogy and archaeology. In uncovering the nature and development of knowledge-based hegemony and power, decolonising practices bring privilege into dialectical relation with the material and historical traces of alternative ways of knowing the world. Inside higher education (HE), such traces have been drawn beyond current engagements with, for instance, critical university studies, and force an engagement with a range of intersecting oppressions and oppressive practices (Arday and Mirza 2018). As a result, post-and anti-coloniality have been brought into dialogue with a dominant, sector-wide and institutional focus upon equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI).

Through this dialogue, subjugated knowledge enable a richer understanding and recognition of the ways in which commodified institutional and disciplinary knowledge, methodically defined as objective, shape power (Tuck 2018). Such knowledge surfaced through struggles to decolonise reading lists within spaces of high inertia (e.g. Open Letter to the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge 2020). They are also surfaced through social movements that act to destabilise dominant positions (for instance, Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall). Acting collectively, these movements of decoloniality push for a new conception of institutions like the University. Grounded in dignity and life, they stand against ideological positions that privilege particular voices.

The destabilisation of dominant knowledge carries liberatory potential. However, as a key social institution for knowledge production, exchange and transfer, ‘an insurrection of subjugated knowledges’ (Foucault 1980, 82) threatens the very fabric of the liberal University. For Foucault (1980), insurrection works to reveal: first, ‘the historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemisation’; and second, ‘a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated.’ Here, such an insurrection points towards the idea that it is possible to know the world otherwise, or that there are other ways of knowing (Andreotti 2021; Smith, Tuck, and Yang 2018).

Recognising that the world might be constructed otherwise is itself a rupture in the being and doing of the hegemonic University, precisely because it elevates struggles over hegemony, power and privilege. In centring post- and anti-colonialism, alongside the ongoing, material history of coloniality, this process of uncovering and recovering the plurality of histories makes visible subaltern or subordinate identities, and connects both to Black power and indigeneity, and to critical race or anti-racist studies. Following Mbembe (2017, 30), illuminating the plurality of histories holds a mirror to ostensibly white institutions, and points towards alternative modes of consciousness and ways of being in the world.

Mindful that interpretations of decolonising from the UK differ markedly from Australia, Canada, USA, as well as from formerly colonised countries in Africa and Asia, significant tensions have been revealed, in relation to the space for radical and transformatory practice. Whilst the United Kingdom (UK) sector has been increasingly held-to-account for structural and cultural disadvantages, for instance in relation to awarding gaps or mental health support, these have not explicitly connected into enquiries into the toxic realities of racial harassment on campuses (Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) 2019). Such disconnections underpin criticisms of, for instance, the UK Advance HE Race Equality Charter (REC) as too reformist, and unable to engage with subaltern identities, Blackness and indigeneity, and critical race or anti-racist studies (Henderson and Bhopal 2022). Such critiques centre the failure to address the manifestations of settler-colonial narratives inside HE, and the links between coloniality and the capitalist University.

However, such modes of national accreditation have also been criticised by policymakers and lobby groups as being too closely linked with specific, political causes related to identity (Department for Education (DfE) 2020). As one example, the UK Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) bill, currently in its final Parliamentary stages, states that HE providers ‘should not interfere with academic freedom by imposing, or seeking to impose, a political or ideological viewpoint upon the teaching, research or other activities of individual academics’, including ‘contested political ideologies … such as “‘decolonising the curriculum’” (DfE 2021, 38–39). In this way, decolonising has been used to tarnish more liberal responses to racial inequality inside universities, like the REC, and to label them inside culture wars as part of a woke agenda.

Against this complex, political terrain, a range of universities and learned societies have sought to extend work on EDI: by explicitly implementing projects or programmes-of-work; by enabling discursive space and practices, in relation to processes of decolonising (Universities UK (UUK) 2020); or in professional guidance and reports (Royal Society for Chemistry (RSC) 2022). Whilst much of this work has been catalysed from within social movements, inside universities it has often been a necessary-but-limited response to radical, student-led struggles (for example, Rhodes Must Fall, Fees Must Fall, Why is my curriculum white?, Why isn’t my professor Black?). In part, the prevalence given to the student voice by University senior leaders allows the appearance of authentic and deep change, although its essence remains of consumer-driven consultation. Thus, the focus tends to remain upon the awarding gap and graduate outcomes, rather than a recognition of the validity of knowing the University otherwise.

In uncovering the legitimacy of alternatives, academic and professional services staff are fundamental in defining structures, cultures and practices that reveal the University as-is, and the limits or possibilities of its radical potential. Alongside a survey of students, this article addresses the views of such staff, in order to open-out a discussion of one UK-based, institution-wide experiment, known as Decolonising De Montfort University (DDMU). The argument tests whether DDMU is an ongoing critique of the idea of the University, in order to build the anti-racist University through a dialogue grounded in dignity (DDMU 2022a). The argument analyses the characterisations (and non-definitions) of decolonising across the UK HE sector, and centres how this has been reproduced inside one institution. Using mixed methods and a grounded approach, in an emergent conversation with critical race theory (CRT), it engages the lived experiences of University labourers, identifying the complexities of decolonising, and asking whether universities have the language to do this work for-justice. Is it possible for these institutions to push beyond EDI work, and examine the relationships between anti-racism, critiques of whiteness, and decolonising?

Characterising decolonising in UK HE

Shain et al. (2021) argue that UK HE has seen three phases of decolonisation initiatives: first, from 2014, led by student officer-initiated projects; second, from 2018, movements linked to the University College Union ‘We are the University’ campaign; and third, the institutional mainstreaming of decolonisation work from 2020. There is also an acknowledgement that for many this work did not go far enough in recognising the revolutionary potential of decolonising as a process, highlighted by organic, social movements (Taylor 2016). Such movements flow through the periodisation noted by Shain et al. (2021) because they represent living knowledge, deeply connected to the material and historical struggles of Black and Ethnically-Minoritised (BEM defined in Kennedy 2022) and Indigenous peoples.

Such struggles stand in opposition to institutional objectives to enact decolonisation as a thing, rather than seeing decolonising as an ongoing, open process of questioning. They highlight the possibility that decolonisation may become an increasingly empty container for EDI initiatives, focused upon key performance indicators and risk management. This removes the radical potential for knowing the world otherwise embodied in a movement of decolonising, and its deep relationship with decoloniality. As a material and historical process that refuses the ongoing relations of colonial injustice, which structure hegemony on a global scale, decoloniality generates spatial and temporal logics and relationships of privilege and power, reproduced through settler-colonial and racial-patriarchal practices. Such practices were born from the interconnections of colonisation and capitalist developments, and were fed by the violent separations of exploitation, expropriation and extraction (of people from the earth, from each other, from other beings, and from themselves) (Andreotti 2021).

HE is not innocent in the reproduction of interlocking and intersectional oppressions, which also reinforce global, intercommunal and intergenerational injustices (Stein and de Andreotti 2016). The power of disciplines, disciplinary methodologies, validated modes of subject-based measurements, and the ideas of objective and commodifiable knowledge, shape a limiting social imaginary grounded in privilege (Prescod-Weinstein 2021). This emerged historically and materially in institutions of the global North, in reproducing logics of coloniality, as a process in reciprocal relation with white, male, straight, able privilege (Sian 2019). In this view, in part through ranking and metrics, universities in the North provide intellectual and practical energy for the reproduction of capitalist social relations across a global terrain.

However, decolonising work within academia has primarily focused upon the curriculum, in part because applying a decolonial lens feels more explicit in this context. Work to decolonise the curriculum begins by questioning the authority assigned to white, western universities, as privileged sites of knowledge production (Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu 2018). In the UK, it recognises that the education system is rooted in colonial epistemology, continuing the legacy of Empire, and upholding the spread of European forms of knowledge over that of indigenous knowledge (Andreotti 2021).

Decolonising the curriculum feels doable and achievable, in part because it gives space for the autonomy of academics inside the curriculum that they prescribe or curate (Keele University 2018; The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) 2018). More radically, challenging the Eurocentric monopoly on knowledge enables diversification to point towards the overcoming of epistemicide (Andreotti 2021). This highlights justice and names injustice, and requires reflection upon curriculum relationships and teaching practices, content and learning materials, and knowledge hierarchies. As a result, decolonising presents a deeper challenge in addressing both the visible and invisible elements of HE’s colonial legacy (Andreotti et al. 2015). It is an opportunity to question the extent to which institutions meet social needs, and to rethink, reframe and reconstruct how they function.

Yet, there is tension between a more radical approach to decolonising, focused upon an open process of questioning the structures, cultures and practices of the institution, and the reality that coloniality is woven into every fibre of UK HE. Moreover, the pragmatic conflation of decolonising, situated as broadly anti-racist with a focus on equality of opportunity, with EDI priorities in relation to awarding and talent acquisition, limits the horizon for long-term transformation across the sector (Shain et al. 2021, 925). Institutionally, this is exacerbated by the need for buy-in, where initiatives require sign off from gatekeepers, in order to make large scale structural or policy change. This presents the serious risk of decolonising, reduced to outcomes-focused decolonisation, ‘becoming little more than a superficial buzzword, severed from its radical essence’ (Doherty, Madriaga, and Joseph-Salisbury 2021, 234).

As decolonising seeks to delegitimise privilege, there has been push-back from government ministers, some academics and the media, focused upon ‘culture wars’, cancel culture, and the ‘war on woke’ (Hall, Gill, and Gamsu 2022). Public policy, government guidance and ministerial statements: focus upon ‘academic freedom’ in opposition to the ideology of ‘decolonising the curriculum’ (DfE 2021); deny the veracity of white privilege (The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) 2021); hone in on the ‘forgotten’ white working-class in education (The Education Committee 2021).

Institutional conservatism, and its responses to policy-based governance and regulation, then conditions change at the intersection of decolonising and HE. As such, it becomes difficult to challenge and negate, authentically: cultures and structures of privilege and power; the reproduction of exclusion and borders inside and through classrooms; the dominance of white, male ontologies and epistemologies; and, alternative histories and conceptions of a meaningful education and life. Against these forces, it becomes important to engage with how individuals interpret the concept of decolonising within their institution. Without clarity in the meaning of the work being undertaken, can an institution take an authentic approach to decolonising? Without a shared understanding of the aims of an initiative, can a community work together for lasting change? It is important to question how such voices shape the radical potentiality of the agenda, or mirror the conservatism of its co-option.

DDMU: a movement of dignity?

Between 2017 and 2019, De Montfort University (DMU) engaged with a consortium in a nationally-funded project, focused upon the awarding gap. At DMU, this project focused upon examining the gap across 40 pilot courses, and implementing curriculum change via co-creation (Ansley and Hall 2019; Hall et al. 2021). During 2018–2019, evaluation of co-creation events with students and staff generated six themes (Ansley 2018; Ansley and Hall 2019).

• Trusting, authentic relationships in the classroom and on campus.

• A feeling of not belonging, leading to exclusion.

• Developing approaches to curriculum delivery with which students can connect.

• The creation of safe and pluralistic communities on campus.

• Developing cultures that enable personal development.

• Supporting diverse needs in relation to employability and post-university life.

These stakeholder outcomes were clearly focused on inclusion and diversity, and the need to broaden the institutional approach, rather than more radical needs or demands. However, different groups of home and international students reported experiencing the institution differentially. As a result, this project revealed a desire re-imagine how universities can deal with particular, material histories of exclusion/erasure and challenges of inequality in the present. Emerging from this desire, DDMU sought to situate learning and teaching against the broader, staff-student experience of the University (Hall et al. 2021).

A starting point for this is the DDMU (2022b) working position, which focuses upon ‘acts of dialogue and listening that seek to make sense of complex denials, exclusions and violences, which have been enmeshed with the idea of the University in the global North.’ Seeking to create both spaces and cognitive and affective capabilities to discuss ‘basic problems of privilege, inequality, division, exclusion, othering, exploitation, alienation, dehumanisation, and institutional and structural oppression’, although this is noted as risky and potentially painful for universities. However, it is also necessary, in order to recognise both ‘the ongoing colonisation of certain bodies and identities by capitalist higher education in the global North’, and ‘that there are differential experiences of the University.’ Here, it connects with Hall’s (2021, 202) identification of:

an ongoing process of decoloniality, which deliberately diminishes predominant voices, disinvest from power structures, devalues hierarchies, decentres knowledge production, and diversifies ways of knowing. Its movement is to generate empathy and mutuality towards entangled subjectivities, such that individuals become many-sided, social beings, capable of lifelong transformation.

In DDMU’s first phase (2019–2021) distinct priorities emerged, in relation to: institutional structures, cultures and practices (including reviews of policies, quality assurance, governance); staff development (including developing communities of practice and an enhancement toolkit); student engagement (including partnership-working with the students’ union); Library and Learning Services (including decolonising collections and reading lists, and staff development); and research (including self-auditing and enriching the research environment, and the impact on research-engaged teaching). Through this work, there emerged questioning of how BEM staff and students come to know themselves through the University. There was a concomitant, emerging reflection for many white staff about their being and doing in the institution.

In an interim evaluation of Spring 2020, low returns to a survey of students (n = 35) and staff (n = 66) highlighted the difficulties of undertaking deep, relational work where individuals were isolated, lacked community, and where the struggle to survive, live, work and study, made engagement with cultural change problematic. Issues raised by respondents included: a concrete desire to focus upon equality; the need for explicit work to tackle discrimination, including in disciplinary processes; representation inside and outside the classroom; and, developing conversations around harassment and discrimination. It is important to note that limited numbers of students (n = 2) and staff (n = 2) contested the premises of the project.

During 2021, and influenced by strategic impulses to focus upon the outcomes of the University Access and Participation Plan, the REC, and the awarding gap, DDMU shifted its focus to four obligations (DDMU 2022a). Three of these focus upon governance, organisational development (including staff representation, reward and recognition), and culture, whilst the fourth is specifically focused upon equity in education and research. This renewal highlights how a horizontally-informed project, with a theoretical position strengthened by social movements focused on post-coloniality, critical race, and abolition studies, is conditioned by particular strategic energies and desires. The resulting operational changes include emphasising: the distributed leadership required to decolonise at module, course and departmental levels; the security offered to projects of engaging known approaches like co-creation with students and creating a network of champions; and, the demands of governance metrics for participation, progression and outcomes.

What follows is an analysis that reveals perspectives on the development and dissemination of more radical, decolonising principles, which for the project team lay beyond discussions of racial inequality within the institution. This respects that there are different chronologies and impulses behind both decolonising and anti-racism. In this, we do not make claims about generalisability, and the discussion is intended to offer others a starting point for thinking about the limits of decolonising in their own context. However, it might usefully be noted that DMU is a teaching-intensive and research-active institution. It has a strong, historical focus upon widening participation, and recruits more non-white students than the UK HE sector average. Governed as a Higher Education Corporation, and with an income of around £240 million, it offers 400 academic programmes in four faculties to around 25,000 full- and part-time students. The majority of these are UK (77%), and undergraduate (81%), served by around 2600 staff. Clearly, there is more nuance to this description, but it does hint at the limits of the case study and analysis that follow.

Methodology: generating meaning about decolonising

As a means of taking stock whilst DDMU moved into its second phase, the project team wanted to explore what decolonising means to the University community, with a focus on the practicalities of decolonising and challenges faced by individuals. Following ethical clearance, the study began in May 2021 with surveys of staff (n = 214) and students (n = 85). The staff surveys were then enriched through 14 interviews, undertaken in July, after analysis of the survey outcomes, with staff who volunteered their interest. In all, 53 staff volunteered to be interviewed, and 14 were randomly selected. As per institutional guidance on fieldwork during the pandemic, interviews were managed virtually, using MS Teams. Academic and professional services staff were interviewed because, unlike students, these were stakeholders not yet engaged through in-depth, qualitative research.

The staff and student surveys focused open-ended questions on the decolonising programme, in relation to individual: awareness of the project; understanding of the project’s aims; engagement with the project’s activities; needs for future support to engage with decolonising; barriers and opportunities for decolonising; and, desired, practical outcomes in relation to decolonising. Following analysis of the survey, a series of interviews also utilised open-ended questions, in order to provide colleagues with the opportunity to develop their conceptualisations and understandings, and also to share personal perceptions of decolonising within HE. Questions focused upon: the necessity of the University’s engagement with decolonising; practical actions at the level of the individual, the team, and the University; the characteristics of a decolonial university; the limits of decolonising for the individual, the team, and the University; the relationship between anti-racism and decolonising; and, what decolonising the University means to the individual.

The study used mixed methods and then applied a grounded approach to analysis, in order to centre participant voices. In analysis, CRT approaches aimed to bring marginalised experiences to the forefront, or to situate dominant voices against those experiences. In this, the researchers attempt to analyse the limits of possibility for decentring institutional privileges, and to model these limits from the lived experiences of those labouring inside the University (Malagon et al. 2009). This approach also seeks to consider the wider structural and cultural aspects that maintain subordinate and dominant racial positions (Solórzano and Yosso 2002). As a result, the experiential knowledge of the research participants is centred, and this reveals the potential for challenging deficit-model, master narratives of decolonising and for centring counter-narratives (Parker and Lynn 2002).

The analysis of the surveys and interviews involved a three-stage process, moving from low- to high-level conceptual analysis (Birks and Mills 2015). The process begins with the initial, open coding of the text, during which the researcher familiarises themselves with the data and the core points raised (Saldaña 2009). The second phase of analysis sees the researcher begin to form categories within the data, recognising the links between codes and bringing together related concepts. The final level of analysis supports the researcher in understanding how the codes and categories relate to one another, and how they integrate into a theory.

Grounded theory analysis involves a constant comparison method, through a continual process of evaluating new data against that already collected, to support the definition of emerging theory (Cohen et al. 2011). This process relies on the researcher’s theoretical sensitivity, their ability to give meaning to the data and to understand what is pertinent to the emerging theory (Strauss and Corbin 1990). Delgado Bernal’s (1998) notion of cultural intuition takes this further by acknowledging the researcher’s personal, as well as professional, knowledge and experience and the ways in which this can inform the research process. In this way, the role that the researcher plays in the co-construction of knowledge, in partnership with their participants, is acknowledged.

This emphasises the importance of the researcher’s own positionality within the research. Positionality helps distinguish between different world views and philosophical standpoints, and the influence of the researcher’s background on the interconnections between ontology, epistemology and methodology. In this case, the researchers’ are insiders to both the DDMU project, and also to DMU, and two have worked on the former since its inception. The third was not known to the interviewees and undertook data management, including transcription and anonymisation. As trade union and social activists inside and outside the University, their individual and collective approach focused upon social justice, including in the research context.

These individual and collective positions pivot the fieldwork around ways of knowing that may be hidden or subjugated. They also emerge from a reflection on the ways in which knowledge production from the North has been destabilised ontologically, epistemologically and methodologically, by the material and historical insurrections of the South (Andreotti 2021). However, they are also mindful of the limits imposed inside institutions by the material history of whiteness, and how resistance, inertia and denial play out. Thus, recognising the power of subject-based, methodologically-reinforced hegemony of knowledge from the global North, this research attempted to bring the range of desires and denials into conversation (Lorde 2018).

Building on this, the researcher can then reflect on how their many-sided identity influences their understanding of and outlook on the world. This moves them beyond a one-sided positionality, defined in relation to disciplinary demands and methods, the subject under investigation, the participants, and the research process and context. This impacts researchers working in relation to decolonising, where it is crucial to consider the role that a many-sided identity might have on the creation and analysis of data. Here an approach that focuses upon the voices of the participants, as opposed to hypotheses on the part of the researchers, pushes towards an authentic representation of the structural, cultural and practical complexities of the lived experiences of decolonising.

Findings: a limited approach to challenging inequalities

The analysis of findings is conceptualised in relation to: challenging racism and inequality; diversifying the curriculum and addressing the awarding gap; equality and inclusion; and, the potential for radical perspectives. These emerge from the dialogue between the survey outcomes and interview analyses, and reported instances are given below where a code emerged and was categorised against these themes. These instances relate to the staff and student surveys and the interviews. Where there are apparent differences between staff or students, these are drawn out.

In terms of the survey, the majority of student respondents (n = 85) were female (n = 65), white (n = 43), had no declared disability (n = 61), and were heterosexual (n = 42). Sixty-four classed their nationality as UK/British, whilst 46 did not consider themselves to be from an ethnically-minoritised background. A small majority of staff respondents (n = 214) were female (n = 124) and white (n = 126), whilst most had no declared disability (n = 170), and were heterosexual (n = 167). One hundred and eight-three classed their nationality as UK/British, whilst 157 did not consider themselves to be from an ethnically minoritised background. Some staff identified their ethnicity as not being a skin colour, and instead articulated that they were melanin-deficient. These staff also noted that the UK Office for National Statistics ethnicity category ‘any other white background’ was not representative. Overall, 108 professional services staff and 106 academics completed the survey.

Throughout, there are limitations that need to be borne in mind. First, whilst the researchers cross-checked and tested analyses with a focus upon the authenticity of outcomes, they brought a particular positionality to this, as identified above. Second, the numbers of survey respondents and their demographic make-up was not representative of the institution as a whole. Third, interviewees were drawn randomly from a subset of survey respondents, and felt a desire to voice their opinion. Fourth, the fieldwork took place during the Covid-19 pandemic, which had impacted institutional engagement with DDMU. Therefore, there are limits to any claims that can be made from this dataset.

Challenging racism and inequality

When exploring their understanding of decolonising, respondents primarily spoke about challenging racism and inequality (118 instances). They spoke of the need to reduce racial disparity, discrimination, disadvantage and inequitable outcomes for BEM staff and students. However, it was felt that in order to address inequality, the University must first understand the reasons behind it, reflecting and learning from its causes. In particular, inequality was seen by staff as something to review, to mitigate, to reduce and to address. In contrast, students spoke of diminishing, battling, eradicating and preventing racism and inequality. This may reflect a more optimistic outlook on the part of students, as opposed to some staff who have seen similar initiatives come and go with little impact.

I’m relatively pessimistic you know, I don’t necessarily have that much hope for change, and I suspect, you know, whether we’re around in 50 years time or not, I suspect we’ll still be having the same conversations about this … I grew up in a predominantly white area and I dealt with those things and it was, it’s a lot less subtle today, but my daughter’s had the exact same things, dealt with the same things and that’s 30 years, well 35 years later. But yeah, there’s the idea of perceived progress, a veneer of change, but yeah there’s, it’s still there. Staff Interviewee 8

For student survey respondents, the focus was on knowing how they can add value, and engaging with hands-on learning experiences, Moreover, some spoke of activism around specific issues such as the rise in xenophobia during the Covid-19 pandemic. It should be noted that some students did not like the idea of the project or want to get involved, claiming that they were apolitical, that DDMU was a virtue-signalling activity, or that it made minorities tokens. Students who were distance learners also felt they would struggle to engage.

Yet, respondents overall viewed decolonising as a way to remove barriers to success for those who have been disadvantaged due to their race. Specific examples were not given here, only an acknowledgement that some individuals faced obstacles to achieving that others did not. Similarly, the notion of institutional or systemic racism was recognised and accepted as a root cause of the issue, but specific examples of this in practice were not given. Students wanted anti-racism to be the dominant culture, and to move away from centring whiteness, but did not articulate how in any detail beyond enhanced engagement in diversified opportunities, better communication, and cultural celebrations.

The concept of structural and unconscious biases was also highlighted in this way, alongside micro-aggressions. This would suggest that whilst respondents are familiar with the terminology, and acknowledge the existence of the issues, they perhaps do not understand what these may look like in everyday practice, and therefore may not know how best to respond. This vagueness perpetuates throughout the responses, with only a handful of individuals able to identify specific examples.

Diversifying the curriculum and addressing the awarding gap

In contrast, when speaking about diversifying the curriculum (74 instances), respondents spoke more specifically about the kinds of action taken. Only one student survey respondent spoke about the curriculum, noting the need to ensure truthful histories are taught, and emphasising the need for adding voices and widening critiques of extant works. All other instances of this topic were raised by staff, which raises issues about the priorities for, and engagement of, these groups.

Staff emphasised the importance of broadening the perspectives that are represented within a subject of study, ensuring a broadening of voices. The need to present a global curriculum was noted, in particular as a direct opposition to what was felt to be a traditionally white, western narrative in most subjects.

To consider the influences and materials that determine teaching and to address the curriculum to provide a balanced basis for education, ensuring that ‘traditionally accepted realities’ have been challenged and where necessary, corrected. Staff Survey Respondent 162

This was viewed as important for ensuring that content is relevant for the modern student body. Responses understood that students had the opportunity to learn more effectively from a curriculum in which they could see themselves represented, so that they could relate. Decolonising was viewed as an opportunity for staff to reflect critically on their curricula, to share good practice, and thereby consider the value that is placed on different sources of knowledge.

For these respondents, decolonising represented a chance to grow and develop, and to refine their practice. It is important to note that staff respondents highlighted the need for appropriate mentoring, in relation to this pedagogic work, and that practical strategies and toolkits for changing practice were required. Moreover, they reported a need for open debates, and compulsory workshops to address whiteness, including in ensuring that assessment practices were inclusive and equitable.

Considering the University’s previous work alongside public discussion, it is unsurprising that addressing the awarding gap (61 instances) emerged as crucial for respondents. Students spoke solely of the need to narrow the awarding gap and many viewed this as the primary goal of the DDMU project.

From what I can tell, [DDMU] is about fixing the gaps within awards that occur between ethnicities that are not white. Student Survey Respondent 19

For staff, awarding gap work involved exploring the issue more deeply in order to develop an understanding of why differential outcomes occur. This would then require a plan of action with an aim to reduce, and eventually overcome, the awarding gap. Staff wanted to analyse the link between decolonising practises and the impact these might have on the awarding gap.

A project that is looking to understand why there is a difference in attainment levels for students from BAME groups compared to their white counterparts and how we as an organisation can remove that gap. Staff Survey Respondent 78

It is notable that the links between a diversified curriculum and the awarding gap were not made explicitly by respondents. Instead, these were seen as separate issues, to be addressed through outcomes-focused initiatives. Thus, whilst some students wanted more awareness of the coursework experiences for BEM students, their focus was on appealing decisions and accessing academic support, rather than curriculum change.

Equality and inclusion

Respondents referred to terms such as inclusion (44 instances), equality (24 instances), representation (22 instances) and raising awareness (21 instances). These will be discussed as a group as they are all common language used within existing EDI work within HE, and this is likely why the terms are prominent within the responses given. When grouped together we can see that they make up the second most prevalent topic within the study (111 instances), perhaps due to compulsory staff EDI training, and conceptual exposure.

Across the surveys and interviews, responses highlighted the importance of celebrating the University community, recognising the different journeys people take to arrive in HE, and allowing all voices to flourish on campus. A particular importance was placed upon ensuring that everyone feels welcome, that all cultures are respected and valued, and that everyone is able to feel a sense of belonging.

a decolonised university for me is something that everybody feels they own a part of, that it isn’t owned by a few, designed by a few, dictated by a few, it’s collectively owned, designed and enjoyed and celebrated genuinely by everybody. Interviewee 12

Decolonising was viewed as a way to level the playing field, and to ensure that BEM students and staff were given the same opportunities as their white counterparts. Equality was collapsed into equality of opportunity, and viewed in terms of outcomes, access to learning and career opportunities, and in the general fairness of student and staff experiences on campus.

Building a more equitable, accessible, balanced and fairer academic campus.’ Student Survey Respondent 65

Staff also spoke of the need to ensure that our staff population is representative of students. They felt that students should have access to role models with whom they could relate and identify. Staff noted that greater representation is needed in decision-making roles across the institution, for example in board memberships. It was felt that whilst the University has some staff diversity, BEM individuals are missing from leadership and management roles where they might influence institution-wide policy and practices for:

ensuring students of colour achieve their full potential and can see role models and people ‘like them’ in everything we do. Staff Survey Respondent 48

Here, whatever the limits of the project, DDMU was seen as important in raising awareness, in particular where it enabled an engagement with data and student voice that contextualise issues. These centre inequalities and exclusions, help staff to understand the need for decolonising/anti-racist work more clearly:

that’s where I see [DDMU] as being important is, trying to just really get to as many people as you can, to open people’s eyes. Interviewee 10

Radical perspectives

There was little in the way of radical change proposed by respondents. Instead, responses tended to be moderate or limited, with perspectives lacking an emancipatory or transformatory stance. For instance, there was a desire to ensure that international recruitment does not contribute to a neo-colonialist agenda, by taking money from countries in the South. Potentially, staff and students are more confident talking about race equality and EDI than about more radical concepts like decolonising. This questions whether universities regulated and governed around value-for-money have the necessary vocabulary, and also the courage and faith, to participate in meaningful conversations around decolonial practices.

Although the surveys were framed openly, and allowed space to describe and discuss the politics of decolonising, the most radical perspectives came from interview participants (18 instances). Within the interviews, colleagues spoke of decolonising as a vehicle with which to challenge where we are now as an institution. They highlighted stuffiness in academia and a need to question ‘just the way it is’. Decolonising was viewed as a different way of thinking, and as an opportunity to reimagine the university and it’s role within society.

decolonising is about reinventing, reimagining and saying actually, universities have changed, the people who make them up has changed, and the conversations that they have and should be having are changing and need to change further and decolonising is part of that. Staff Interviewee 12

Whilst some wanted to build an anti-racist University and centre anti-racist behaviour, others saw decolonising as an opportunity to overturn the current system entirely. These individuals saw the ultimate goal of decolonising as the emancipation of marginalised groups and dismantling white privilege. This was an opportunity for BEM individuals to shed the inequality and injustice that they have historically internalised. Developing this point, some felt that this has no final outcome or end-point, as a decolonised University that can be described. Rather, it is an ongoing process of open questioning.

Yet, in the main, respondents were outcomes-focused. The limits of their horizons were defined against wishes to: change pedagogy; diversify representation; review structures and policies; remove gaps; address marketing and recruitment; and, develop clear sanctions for racism. Some wished to secure funding to undertake this work. More critical staff wanted a clear explanation of the methodology underpinning the programme, alongside lists of key deliverables or performance indicators, which would enable them to curate their engagement objectively.

Conclusion: decolonising or anti-racism?

Much of the practical activity and subsequent theorisation of decolonising, including in educational spaces, has been energised through the practical work of social movements in a range of indigenous and formerly colonised contexts. This has a deep relationship with the ontological and epistemological complexities of engaging the material histories of struggle in BEM and indigenous communities, and bringing those into conversation with institutions in the global North (Bhambra, Gebrial, and Nişancıoğlu 2018; Tuhiwai Smith, Tuck, and Yang 2018). This is one reason why critical university studies have been seen as too reformist, with a concomitant push for an abolitionist approach to HE as a deeply alienating space that reproduce the logics of coloniality (Hall 2021).

In particular, the process of understanding the responses of a subset of an institution’s staff and students to a declared decolonising project, underpins the limited space that exists for the University to engage authentically with the genealogies and archaeologies of subjugated knowledge. There is limited theoretical or practical appetite for going beyond the revelation of buried knowledge (Foucault 1980), or for legitimising alternative ways of knowing the world (Tuck 2018). Instead, the focus is upon reinforcing the alleged objectivity of disciplinary methodologies with a focus upon knowledge production, and this further disguises both ways of knowing and the relationships that flow through them, inside a transactional and functionalist coherence. As a result, the radical potential of decolonising and the revelation of whiteness in relation to the logics of coloniality, tends to be reduced to everyday, anti-racist practices, or to inclusion and diversity agendas (Shain et al. 2021).

The outcomes here highlight this reduction, even where respondents had an emergent or established critical race literacy. The ability to consider reimagining or reproducing the University otherwise was stunted, and this questions whether and how institutions and the global North have the language to discuss decolonising. For many UK institutions, decolonising gained traction much more recently than issues of race, and for some students and staff it is very difficult to internalise the need for decolonising, let alone to understand what structures, cultures and practices might define it. This is a critical next step for DDMU, requiring cooperative and courageous conversations, which draw upon connections between anti-racism, whiteness and decolonising.

Bringing the analysis into conversation with the DDMU (2022b) positionality statement, it is clear that work has begun around diversifying the syllabus, decentring knowledge and knowledge production, and magnifying unheard voices. However, more is required in relation to explicitly defining decolonising as a movement of the dignity of difference. This is also true of the diversification of infrastructure, devaluing hierarchies and revaluing relationality, and in relation to power and privilege in the institution. This reality questions whether the universities of the global North, governed, regulated and funded in relation to value-production, are able to do this work, or whether it requires a different conceptualisation of higher learning at the level of society.

It is clear that it is easier for individuals to focus upon daily, personal and local approaches that may be about challenging racism, however, that is recognised in practice. Engaging in behaviour change, potentially through mandatory training on issues like anti-oppressive practice and micro-aggressions, and having these as goal-oriented, feels achievable for many. Here, there is a focus upon the agency that may be enabled through formal policy, and the need for power structures to validate anti-racism. This stands in asymmetrical relation to the work of decolonising, as a long-term process focused upon institutional change, which questions how institutions are embedded inside global ecosystems. Moreover, this process is one of unlearning at deep, personal and institutional levels, with a focus upon refusing and overcoming exploitation, expropriation and extraction. Rather than positioning outcomes as central, decolonising has a process of open questioning and movement at its heart (Andreotti 2021).

Whether this is possible inside the University, when it is governed and regulated against the logics of coloniality and for-value, is questionable. The respondents in this research reflected dominant, subject-based and methodological imaginaries for a reformed University that was anti-racist, liberal and humanist, and broadly ‘good’ (Connell 2019). Alongside the diversification of the established curriculum, this appears to represent the limits of agency inside institutions conditioned socially against whiteness, white privilege and white fragility (Prescod-Weinstein 2021; Sian 2019). At issue is the dialectical relationship between these limits and the inertia of institutions like universities. This leaves open the question of how the radical questioning of movements for racial justice is best served in relation to those institutions. Is it possible to imagine the University otherwise?

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the work undertaken by the Decolonising De Montfort University team, and the participants involved in this study. They would also like to acknowledge the courage and faith shown by those struggling for anti-racism.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.