Week two summary

Welcome to the end of week two!

Over the course of this week we have explored what it may look like to decolonise a range of social science disciplines. We started off by introducing where some colonial routes lay in the social sciences. For example, how social science scholars have understood what it means to be human through a ‘universal’ subject that was white, European, middle-class, heterosexual and male. The acceptance of this subject as the one worthy of knowledge production resulted in the suppression of other knowledges. Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called for the creation of an ‘ecology of knowledges’ to create a pluriversity that values a variety of knowledge systems.

To summarise just a few of the ideas that have been highlighted and covered:

In economics we saw how the routes of the discipline lay oppositional to slavery due to the influence of Smith’s influence on economic thinking. However, economics still developed in the colonial era and has been influenced by this context. In the classroom context, many teachers in economics are using the CORE approach. This is a practical way to integrate decolonial practice in economics teaching.

In law, we saw clearly how Euro-American law’s ideal subject is that of the white property-owning man. Key to decolonising law is not just questioning the content of the law, but challenging the nature of law and its codes that allow it to reproduce racialised ideal subjects.

Coloniality in education studies occupies a range of scales, from decolonising global education policies through to decolonising the curriculum in education studies in individual institutions. Dr Angeline Barrett and Dr Rafael Mitchell’s podcast on what it means to view education from the ‘Global South’ and how this challenges eurocentrism in the education curriculum.

In sociology, Professor Gurminder Bhambra introduced the idea of connected sociologies and in particular how colonialism is constitutive of the modern world and, therefore, key in how we come to understand the modern world. Yet sociology’s conception of the modern continues to lack a place for comprehensive consideration of the role of colonialism. Practical insights were provided by the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies (SPAIS) department at Bristol who developed their own preliminary report, Decolonising the SPAIS Curriculum: Evaluating Mandatory Units, in an effort to decolonising the disciplines with the School.

Decolonising social science requires true collaboration. This collaboration must work towards interrogating current discriminatory and colonial assumptions that underlie education.