Decolonizing Academic Success

Numerous experiences, sufferings, and thinkings, originating with indigenous communities and neighborhood groups as much as university academic presses or professional bodies, can teach us if, how, and why to engage in a project of decolonizing academic success. The resources included here aim to provide a means to start understanding decolonization as more than a metaphor and to deepen our sense of what is possible as a process and in terms of outcomes. We invite those with familiarity and stakes in the knowledge and methods of specific disciplinary areas to extend these resources, especially in the Decolonizing the Disciplines section. We acknowledging the time and labor of those who created these resources, often uncompensated, and encourage all to support this work in whatever ways are within each individual's reach.

Locating Ourselves

These resources aim to establish an (un)common ground participants in a decolonial process might acknowledge. They offer not prescriptive 鈥渉ow to" answers but a set of questions we can think with and through:

  • Nayantara Sheoran Appleton鈥檚 鈥 asks that we consider the limits of decolonizing as a term of relevance for an academic context.
  • Quetzala Carson鈥檚 Tedx Talk 鈥溾 鈥渆xplains the tenets of colonialism, how our normative narratives are built, and also shares some strategies on how to engage and combat colonial violence with compassion.鈥
  • 鈥淒ecolonization in an Educational Context,鈥 from the at the University of Victoria, Canada, establishes some key elements of decolonial process.
  • Two manifestos: from Keele University (U.K.), 2018; from University of Kent (U.K.), 2019, produced via a student-led research and focus group.
  • 黑料网鈥檚 Strategic Diversity Plan and Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (in ) as well as Geneseo鈥檚 previous Statement on Diversity and Community establish existing principles. 
Case Studies
  • , from Black South West Network (U.K.) () focuses on "aspects of culture that can鈥檛 be touched or displayed in a case in a museum. They are cultural practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, or skills that are captured in audio, video and digital ways." 
  • 鈥済athers and analyzes about the relationship between Black people, land and place鈥; it includes 鈥溾 discussion tool.
  • demonstrates a teach-in method; it is part of the installments of the
  • collects contemporary videos, Internet artworks, archives, and scholarship on the digital to explore a 鈥減athway of decolonial thinking and doing in the realm of the digital.鈥
  • MIT's is 鈥渋s a city and regional planning publication where people who are doing the daily work of improving communities can share their stories, document their projects, and express their ideas鈥; several episodes focus on 鈥渋nterventions across the academic hierarchy鈥 and decolonizing work.
  • 鈥溾 shows how the Early Caribbean Digital Archive offers 鈥渞e-archiving (remixing and reassembling)鈥 strategies for how we might treat historical texts.
Decolonial Processes for Academic Practice
  • Professor Chanelle Wilson鈥檚 helps faculty and students think about not just what a syllabus should contain but the power dynamics of a classroom.
  • SOAS University of London鈥檚 鈥溾 explains both the idea behind an academic decolonizing practice and how to implement curricular models for those ideas.
  • Professor Paige West鈥檚 鈥溾 offers several practices for a decolonized classroom, including pairing disciplinarily canonical texts with texts by non Euro-American-Australian authors.
  • 鈥溾 explores alliance-building practices, providing a way to think about mutually beneficial relationships across academic and grassroots organizations.
  • Beloit College鈥檚 Mellon Foundation 鈥溾 project explored questions about inclusive classroom spaces, equity at Primarily White Institutions (PWIs), and institutional transformation. It also includes a .
Disciplinary Decolonizing
  • offers Chronicle of Higher Education-reader-sourced ideas for inclusive and anti-racist teaching, including (scroll down), Professor Jenel T. Cavazos鈥檚 redesigned Psychology assignment. 
  • American University鈥檚 asks 鈥淲hat do antiracist and decolonial imperatives in the humanities mean? How do these imperatives intersect with other critical frameworks?鈥
  • Sara Cannon's  aims 鈥渢o help well-meaning non-Indigenous folks like myself educate ourselves on the colonial, white supremacist, and imperialist roots of biodiversity conservation.鈥
  • Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein explicitly reminds us of land claim issues as definitive of colonial/decolonial struggles via
  • , by Amber Hickey and Ana Tuazon, considers 鈥渢he material imperatives of decolonization, rather than simply the metaphorical.鈥