Learning Network on Decolonization – Faculty of Political and Social Sciences

The Learning Network on Decolonisation of the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences aims to initiate activities to decolonize education, research and services to students and staff. The network brings together students and staff from the different departments and programs at PSW, to colearn and co-create knowledge and practices to help reform both the curricula and teaching and research practices, as well as student and staff policies at the Faculty. The action plan for the academic year 2021-2022 (see overview in annex) includes 1) a monthly lecture and workshop series, by international and local (diaspora) experts, offering innovative insights and hands-on training for staff and students on racism (& sexism) in academia, the decolonisation of the curriculum, and of teaching and research methods; 2) the creation of an annotated bibliography with resources on how to decolonize academia (both education and research); 3) the formulation of recommendations to the Faculty and University for the improvement of services to students and staff (incl. international student recruitment and staff hiring practices etc.) Calls for the decolonization of society in general, and of specific sectors and institutions in particular, including both development cooperation and universities, are gaining traction in recent years. Grounded in longstanding traditions of anticolonial resistance and decolonial and postcolonial studies, these critiques have gained momentum with the international reverberations – including in Belgium – of the Black Lives Matter movement, targeting systemic and institutional racism. Decolonization refers to a much needed reckoning with the colonial past, but it also and especially requires tackling the colonial present: it challenges global inequalities and their local articulations – at the intersection of racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination – that reproduce colonial power relations in the present. Both development cooperation and academia are increasingly responding to these calls for decolonization, as evidenced among others by the 2021 Policy Supporting Research call (PSR 4) by VLIR-UOS, in which the Belgian Directorate-
General on Development Cooperation (DGD) invites “Tracks for the decolonization of the Belgian development cooperation”, and by the many academic initiatives and publications on
“Decolonising the university” (e.g. Bhambra, Gebrial & Nişancıoğlu, 2018), sparked by student movements such as Rhodes Must Fall (2015). Decolonising the university starts with creating spaces and resources for a dialogue among staff and students on how research and education are organized, and how this frames the knowledge we produce and teach about the world. In keeping with the Global Minds objective to foster global citizenship and solidarity in society to better respond to global challenges, the Learning Network aims to reckon with the academic tendency to interpret the world based on perspectives, values, and experiences from the Global North. The Network will address Eurocentrism in the curriculum, as well as intersectional inequalities (i.e. multiple, overlapping inequalities based on the interaction of racialization, gender, age, physical and mental disabilities, income status, etc.) in education and research practices, by offering not only perspectives from the Global South, but also and especially from both academic and non-academic diaspora experts on decolonization.