Around the world, there is a strong and growing imperative to decolonize curricula in higher education. Student and staff movements have questioned the dominance of Eurocentric and male authors in our syllabi (e.g. #LiberateMyDegree, #WomenAlsoKnowStuff, Alternative Reading List Project) and highlighted the potential of renewed curricula for transforming higher education (Heleta, 2016; Le Grange, 2016; Luckett & Shay, 2017). Responses to this agenda have been multiple and diverse. Within the UK, there are examples of individual teachers taking action to interrogate their curricula alongside a growing collection of toolkits and checklists that provide practical guidance for staff to develop inclusive/ decolonized curricula (such as Decolonising SOAS Working Group, 2018; UCL, 2018).

While decolonizing work is taking place across universities on a global scale, the nature and extent of this work varies by discipline. The humanities and social sciences are most commonly associated with efforts to decolonize, with particular fields, such as Political Science (e.g. Mngomezulu & Hadebe, 2018) and Anthropology (Mogstad & Tse, 2018), at the forefront of this movement. In comparison, strategies in the natural sciences are more tentative. As spirited debates take place across disciplines (Last, 2019), this LRE special feature specifically explores the role played by our disciplines in shaping individual and collective responses to the decolonizing agenda. 

Publication date: From May 2021 - January 2022. 

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Guest Editors

Karen Schucan Bird, UCL (University College London), UK.
Ludovic Coupaye, UCL (University College London), UK.

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Article list 

Research article

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