Civic Approaches to Decolonisation

In this video, Dr Marie-Annick Gournet (one of the lead educators for Week 4 of this course) talks to Bristol mayor, Marvin Rees about Bristol’s One City Plan.

The One City Plan is ambitious and wide-ranging. It contains an important strand around education, which includes CARGO’s work on the school history curriculum that you heard about in the previous step. It also involves a Learning City Strategy and Partnership which includes community organisations like CARGO, schools, colleges and universities in Bristol working towards common civic aims.

One of the Plan’s commitments is to ‘to increase the diversity of educators in the city, and support education partners in launching a Bristol curriculum that reflects the city’s diversity and history’.

Just as the University must look outside itself to ensure a meaningful decolonisation, Marvin Rees discusses how a city must also seek to work at the national and global levels to effect change. He, like Lawrence Hoo in the previous step, emphasises the importance of adequately resourcing programmes that are seeking to change structural legacies.