Browse
This short afterword recognizes that sustainable futures require responsible stewardship of resources. It estimates the carbon footprint entailed by the production of this volume. It shares the methodology used to calculate it, the assumptions underpinning the model, the inherent error margins and any calculation that seeks to explore the environmental costs of our actions. The chapter also explores the options for offsetting this footprint and the debates and ethical questions they raise, discussing why the editors and contributors felt it important to calculate the carbon footprint of their endeavour and what they did with that knowledge.
In August 2020, the British Council held webinars to discuss decolonization. These were held in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, BLM campaigns and the heightened global focus on race. A series of events looked to define decolonization(s) and consider how these might be applied to the British Council’s portfolio. At the same time, the British Council was embarking on its anti-racism action plan with five pillars addressing learning and understanding, organizational culture, policies and practice, global leaders and products and services. The fifth pillar examines decoloniality as it relates to the British Council becoming actively anti-racist. The aim is to ‘better understand how colonialism has centred and privileged ways of knowing and working from the global North; and how a process of decolonizing cultural relations would address that.’ This chapter considers how a cultural relations organization negotiates this space, focusing on the British Council’s anti-racism plan and the Decolonisation Series and reflecting on the issues and challenges such organizations encounter as corporate strategies and staff-led activism intertwine.
This concluding chapter reflects on the value of connecting discussions around sustainable futures and decolonization. Drawing together the three parts of the book, and considering the journey from seminar series to publication, the chapter explores fruitful avenues, challenges and paths worthy of future research and dialogue.
This book explores the connections between sustainable futures and demands to decolonize education; conversations that often occur separately, despite their interdependencies. The idea of sustainable futures lies at the heart of contemporary education and development agendas, including UNESCO’s Futures of Education initiative, which aims to reimagine how knowledge and learning can shape the future of humanity and the planet by equipping learners with diverse ways of being and knowing. Yet, much of the knowledge, values and skills in formal education continues to be Eurocentric, and many education systems maintain colonial legacies of exclusion and violence. Protests, including those led by the Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, Indigenous and other anti-colonial, anti-racist social movements, have called for education to be decolonized and for diverse knowledge systems, languages and values to be the basis for realizing equitable and sustainable futures. These demands have become accentuated by multiple crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic.
The book looks at the journey towards decolonization and sustainable futures from theoretical and practitioner perspectives: introducing concepts that underpin debates about decolonized futures; bringing to the fore the epistemic injustice in the exclusion and marginalization of non-Western knowledge systems, languages and value systems; and exploring different approaches to praxis in schools, universities and society. It also develops a call for reparative futures, highlighting the need for acknowledgement and repair of past injustice and violence in order to build dignified and inclusive futures for all.
How do we predominantly understand and practise citation and quotation in academia? What alternative practices are already in evidence, and may be usefully theorized for greater diversity in the sources and types of knowledge we valorize? This chapter considers these questions as a way of addressing the epistemic-material violence of knowledge-generating systems still inflected with colonial and patriarchal values. After setting out how epistemological and material reparations are intimately entangled, the chapter posits that paying critical attention to the politics of citation and quotation may be necessary to re-craft strategies for more sustainable futures. By focusing on the problematic of quoting Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing-living that involve intimate, sometimes wordless, conversations with human-plant-animal-material elements, the chapter explores how moving beyond the conventional reliance on human language to paying attention to indexical and iconic semiotics may benefit from a careful use of multimodal media. It concludes with a plea for greater experimentation with citational, quotational and publishing practices.
Bringing together the perspectives of researchers, policy makers, activists, educators and practitioners, this book critically interrogates the Western-centric assumptions underpinning education and development agendas and the colonial legacies of violence they often uphold.
The book considers the crucial connection between the idea of sustainable futures and the demand to decolonise education. Containing an innovative mixture of text, stories and poetry, it explores how decolonised futures can be conceived and enacted, offering theoretical and practical examples, including from practice in educational and cultural organisations. In doing so, the book highlights education’s potential role in facilitating processes of reparative justice that can contribute to decolonised futures.
This book explores the connections between sustainable futures and demands to decolonize education; conversations that often occur separately, despite their interdependencies. The idea of sustainable futures lies at the heart of contemporary education and development agendas, including UNESCO’s Futures of Education initiative, which aims to reimagine how knowledge and learning can shape the future of humanity and the planet by equipping learners with diverse ways of being and knowing. Yet, much of the knowledge, values and skills in formal education continues to be Eurocentric, and many education systems maintain colonial legacies of exclusion and violence. Protests, including those led by the Black Lives Matter, Rhodes Must Fall, Indigenous and other anti-colonial, anti-racist social movements, have called for education to be decolonized and for diverse knowledge systems, languages and values to be the basis for realizing equitable and sustainable futures. These demands have become accentuated by multiple crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic.
The book looks at the journey towards decolonization and sustainable futures from theoretical and practitioner perspectives: introducing concepts that underpin debates about decolonized futures; bringing to the fore the epistemic injustice in the exclusion and marginalization of non-Western knowledge systems, languages and value systems; and exploring different approaches to praxis in schools, universities and society. It also develops a call for reparative futures, highlighting the need for acknowledgement and repair of past injustice and violence in order to build dignified and inclusive futures for all.
The chapter explores the relationship between the idea of sustainable futures and demands to decolonize education. It argues that existing ideas about sustainable development and the future of education often see development as synonymous with Western ideas of modernization, progress and economic growth. Education has often reflected this through prioritizing the development of human capital and valorizing Western knowledge systems, values and languages. Yet, these dominant views have contributed to environmental catastrophe while often exacerbating inequalities and failing to meet basic human needs. To tackle the ‘wicked problems’ of sustainable development, Western ideas need to come into critical conversation with non-Western conceptions of sustainable futures. Efforts to decolonize education may have a crucial role to play by enabling learners to evaluate the potential benefits of different knowledge systems for creating sustainable futures. The chapter concludes with some suggestions as to how educational institutions can decolonize to support sustainable futures.
In 2017, the Runnymede Trust released an influential study on racial disparities in Bristol schools, shocking many educators in the city. In accounting for the below-national-average attainment of young Black learners, the report highlighted ‘the unrepresentativeness of the curriculum, lack of diversity in teaching staff and school leadership, and poor engagement with parents.’ This chapter provides an account of two initiatives that have sought to respond to the report – a citywide project called the One Bristol Curriculum and the collaborative efforts of teachers within a multi-academy trust. In drawing together learnings from these initiatives, the chapter (tentatively) identifies some common school-level factors that support efforts to decolonize the curriculum in Bristol schools, the need for knowledge and expertise beyond the teaching profession, mobilizing capacities within professional learning networks, and, given the unconducive policy environment, the need for teacher agency and leadership as a basis for curriculum development.
Universities have a responsibility in reproducing and validating knowledge and culture across generations. Movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Why is My Curriculum White? have led many universities to focus on decolonization to exercise this responsibility in socially just ways. Despite considerable critical literature on decolonization, there are few examples of what is entailed in decolonizing a university. This chapter uses examples from a UK university to identify practical steps that universities can take to reorient their recruitment, estates, curricula and pedagogies in ways that empower students to critically engage with the provenance, applicability and relevance of teaching. The chapter also reflects on the limitations and risks of trying to decolonize entirely from within, and the importance of building alliances with local and global communities. It also considers the importance of a ‘whole institution’ approach and points to decolonization as an embedded process of curriculum development rather than an end state.
