I am going to live tweet some of @GKBhambra Institute for Curriculum Enhancement, Annual Facing Out lecture and discussion 'Why decolonise the university?' Taking place this morning @LancasterUni

Gurminder begins by positioning the resurgence of calls to decolonise the university & Why is my Curriculum White movement, in the wake of #BlackLivesMatter & current (nationalist) politics of HE in the UK

Drawing on her personal experience, & her Dad telling her to always ask questions about Imperial Histories, and how Empire was taught and is still taught in schools.

Quotes John Dewy on the University is a vital repository of common learning, & how women transformed universities & their curriculums (as they entered the academy in ever greater numbers).

Yet the entry of people from the former Empire, & their attempts to transform universities & their curriculums is deeply resisted...

Now situating this resistance historically, that is in the context of abolition, & Hall & Drapers transformative UCL legacies of British slave-ownership project & what it exposed about the history of slavery, colonialism, Empire, and crucially, taxation

Understanding how the British state was formed through colonial taxation needs to be central to our understanding of the modernity, including the formation of the welfare state and including within that the formation of (Mass) Higher Education in the UK

Estimated 45 trillion dollars extracted from India alone by the British Government/State, but the distribution of this tax haul happened only within the British state- Britain is an Imperial state.

Social science that is grounded in the “nation state” is deeply flawed for above reasons, in its failure to face the facts of Empire through which British state was formed - from this foundational flaw nationalist narratives of a left behind white working class continue to flow

How do we transform education as a whole in a way that recognises that Britain was an Imperial state, and is a multicultural society?

Underachievement is not a consequence of deficit of minority students, but is a consequence of social inequalities and the absence of curriculums, formal and informal, which represent the facts of British history and the full diversity of British society

Discussing ethnic achievement gap data

The Swann report (1985) was pivotal and it helped flatten inequalities in achievement in schools http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/swann/swann1985.html

By way of contrast, universities have done almost zilch to confront the ways in which they actively produce ethnic and racial disadvantage

One of the most important initiative is to close the attainment gap - through assessment but also through the curation of the canon (which is & has never been historically static)

Note Any typos, mistakes and/or interpretations in this thread are my own and not Gurminder’s !

Introducing @globalsoctheory brilliant check it out

And now the @CSociologies and it’s public open access curriculum

Decolonising the university is not about removing colonial histories or bits we don’t like, rather it is about surfacing the histories of knowledge that have shaped the contemporary & the inequalities in the present

In short, decolonising the university is doing THE proper work of the university