Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
This chapter discusses the Westernization of social theory in contemporary China. Based on the author’s experience as a researcher and lecturer at Fudan University, it provides insights on the Eurocentrism of Chinese sociology and suggests some actions to foster greater epistemic pluralism. Pedagogical practices have a central role in reproducing this Eurocentrism, just as social theory plays a central role in sociology at large. This chapter helps us understand how top Chinese universities interact with the Western knowledge towards which they show great openness.
When universities in South Africa exploded in widespread student protest demanding equal access to higher education and decolonizing the curriculum, two questions plagued activists and researchers: what do we teach students in this context; and how do we teach students in a manner that is responsive to the context? Regular teaching and learning proved insufficient to help students reflect on their situation and were even met with suspicion and hostility. This chapter discusses the production of a series of public performances and memorials through which students were able to reflect on their social reality, and how a monthly on-campus Salon afforded academics and students the opportunity for deliberation in a flattened, non-hierarchical and decolonizing space.
Over several years, members of the Salon curated performances that emerged as a decolonial praxis in response to their experiences of alienation in the university. These curated performances and memorials allowed students (1) to reflect meaningfully on violence, resistance, and the racialized self, (2) to trouble ideas about the purpose of the university, and (3) to expand our conceptions about teaching and learning by performatively incorporating our bodies, histories, and indigenous practices into a kind of decolonial praxis that opened new possibilities for exchange and reflection.
This chapter reflects on the motivations, practices, and collaborations of the Decolonizing Research Methods (DRM) project at Goldsmiths, University of London. While Goldsmiths has written ‘Liberate Our Degree’ into its strategic plan, it leaves the strategies for complying to academic staff. The DRM project is based on a series of eight themed workshops that situate Western academic research in historical, political, and social conditions that are tied to colonial practices of difference and hierarchy. The aim of the workshops is to deconstruct the epistemological foundations and categories of knowledge on which academic research is based, including the social identities and relationships it establishes, reinforces, or perpetuates. The chapter provides detail about the design of the workshops, and reflections on practice, including how they generate and facilitate participants’ ideas, assumptions, experiences, and values in relation to the theme. The ‘lecturer’ does not use slides or prepared talking points but acts as a facilitator, providing directed tasks and suggested readings to generate ideas, provoke discussion, analysis, and reflection. This pedagogical format is a great opportunity for co-producing classes, but it also presents challenges, particularly in managing expectations and highly personal responses, as well as disagreements.
This chapter tackles the slippage between university initiatives that focus on ‘decolonizing knowledge’ and those that focus more broadly on diversity, equality, and inclusion. We focus explicitly on how decolonizing involves an inherent process of reconstituting schemes of valuing and producing knowledge. This differs from diversity’s focus on representation. In order to explore these dynamics of decolonizing knowledge production, we draw out the decolonial critique of Eurocentrism (that is, the practice of bifurcating the study of the West from the study of its global colonial interlinkages). We stress how decolonial thought embraces a relational mode of thinking that ties connections across time and space, and we look at how the calls for decolonizing knowledge are tied to the larger project of anti-colonial justice. We finish the chapter with some practical guides for teachers, academics, researchers, and students who are interested in engaging with the process of decolonizing knowledge.
Despite progress, the Western higher education system is still largely dominated by scholars from the privileged classes of the Global North. This book presents examples of efforts to diversify points of view, include previously excluded people, and decolonize curricula.
What has worked? What hasn’t? What further visions do we need? How can we bring about a more democratic and just academic life for all?
Written by scholars from different disciplines, countries, and backgrounds, this book offers an internationally relevant, practical guide to ‘doing diversity’ in the social sciences and humanities and decolonising higher education as a whole.
This chapter responds to the growing demand for recognizing plural forms of knowledge production in higher education, by drawing attention to the inclusion of overseas ‘East Asian’ students and scholars in Western universities and host societies. While postcolonial, decolonial, multiculturalist and feminist scholars have made contributions to the emancipatory inclusion of the majority of humanity, the presence and embodied knowledge of ‘East Asians’ remain underutilized and peripheral.
In addressing these questions, this chapter initiates a discussion on the position of ‘East Asians’ in Western universities. The case of Chinese international students in Britain is used to highlight how Eurocentric research frameworks would reject certain knowledge as invalid and affirm an elitist agenda. Empirical data collected through ethnography and a survey with two groups of Chinese international students in the UK is presented. Unknown and uncomfortable complexities appear simultaneously, and only by acknowledging them will academics ‘do diversity’ that follows an epistemically inclusive framework.
This chapter reports on a collaborative workshop, organized jointly by the University of Guelph, Canada, and Bremen University, Germany, designed to share information and practices about the participants’ everyday experiences of ‘doing diversity’. The chapter illuminates the complex and messy relationships between policy and praxis and the extent to which institutional context praxis can shape understandings of how policies are enacted, embodied, and experienced.
