Archives and Decolonial Pedagogy: Unearthing Narratives, Transforming Education

Overview
While calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ have been mainstreamed in many universities, they are often framed as a discipline-specific exercise in changing reading lists to better acknowledge (1) how a discipline might be historically connected to colonialism and (2) the range of authors and content that might have been neglected. However, universities are also repositories of colonial historical records and artefacts that demonstrate how closely the emergence of different disciplines has been connected to colonialism. While changing reading lists is important, universities can also bring students into an intimate encounter with how European disciplinary research traditions and methods have been honed through the objectification of colonial subjects and the accumulation of indigenous knowledge.  

This workshop explores how archives can be tools of decolonial pedagogies not just in disciplines such as History and Museum Studies, where archival visits are routinely employed, but Politics and IR, Psychology, Mathematics, Business, and the Natural Sciences. The workshop will convene scholars at Durham and from around the UK for:

• a panel of educators (broadly defined) on their own work on decolonisation and education;
  
  
• a trip to Durham’s archival records and a talk from the archivists;
  
  
• a student-led session on archives and decolonisation;
  
  
• a ‘sand pit’ discussion where  we talk about how we can make more use of archives in our teaching

Times:
29 February: 11.00am - 5.00pm
01 March: 9.30am - 4.00pm

Register your interest: 
To help us gauge the potential size of the workshop, please register your interest here: https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=i9hQcmhLKUW-RNWaLYpvlB_vMPgXcx5Pg5SIQmrDlAxUOTNSVkhOTlBNSzRGNDBZMTVPQ1daTEdGVS4u

A sign up form will be sent in December. 

Questions?

Contact kavi.j.abraham@durham.ac.uk or alice.finden@durham.ac.uk.