Decolonize University! Re-Imagining Theories and Practices of Knowledge Production

In recent years we have seen new and more efforts and voices speaking out to decolonize academia worldwide. But what does it mean to decolonize the university and higher education? Why is it important and what does it entail? This lecture series brings to the University of Basel these ongoing debates: the call to decolonize the classroom, universities and knowledge production. This means to tackle the violence of colonial legacies that until this very day continue to manifest in the form of racialized, classed and gendered inequalities and violence across our societies, in and outside of academia.
The series aims to create a dialogue across scholarships bringing together our conversations at the University of Basel with invited guests who approach their academic, institutional and/or political work from a decolonial perspective.
Engaging with practices of un-learning that bring together academics, students, staff and others, will be both difficult and empowering. To guide our conversations, we invite the participants to reflect collectively upon a series of questions: what is the scope of radical decolonial pedagogies in our education system? Can a decolonial approach in pedagogy and research lead to institutional, societal, and political changes? What are the limitations of these actions within a neoliberal context?
Ultimately, the aim of this series is to start a dialogue about decolonisation and foster connections beyond the university through engaging with Non-Western ways of knowing as well as ongoing anti-colonial struggles, testimonies and movements.
To engage with this work, the series intends to offer an inclusive, horizontal and bottom-up approach to knowledge production and exchange. This biweekly lecture series will therefore be accompanied by a weekly seminar, that allows master and PhD students such as those that are interested in further deepening into these conversations, to further reflect on the lecture series and engage with each other’s work in academia and beyond.

Programm

1.3.2022

Intersectional inquiries: A conversation about academia and its colonial entanglements
Prof. Patricia Purtschert (Universität Bern)
Dr. des. Claudia Wilopo (Universität Basel)

15.3.202

Decolonizing Philosophy, Creolizing Sociology
Prof. Manuela Boatca (Universität Freiburg)
Dr. Lerato Posholi (Universität Basel)

29.3.2022

BIPoC Student Power, Organizing within the University
Shalanda Philip (student organizer at University of Geneva, Reflexion Decolonial)
Dr. Noémi Vanessa Michel (Université de Genève)

26.4.2022

Can gender studies be decolonized? On epistemic inequalities and decolonial feminism
Dr. Redi Koobak (University of Bergen)
Prof. Madina Tlostanova (Linköping University) ON ZOOM

10.5.2022

Decolonizing and Liberation: learning with Palestine
Dr. Mezna Qato (University of Cambridge)
Dr. Omar Jabary Salamanca (Université libre de Bruxelles)

24.5.2022

From Anticolonialism to Decolonization: Radical Possibilities
Prof. Priyamvada Gopal (University of Cambridge)