Decolonizing the University

edited by Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial and Kerem Nişancıoğlu

“A must-read for anyone interested in enhancing a historical understanding of our present through a consideration of what it means to decolonize.”—Priyamvada Gopal, University of Cambridge

In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town demanded the removal of a statue of Cecil Rhodes, the imperialist, racist business magnate, from their campus. The battle cry ‘#RhodesMustFall’ sparked an international movement calling for the decolonisation of the world’s universities.

Today, as this movement grows, how will it radically transform the terms upon which universities exist? In this book, students, activists and scholars discuss the possibilities and the pitfalls of doing decolonial work in the home of the coloniser, in the heart of the establishment. Subverting curricula, enforcing diversity, and destroying old boundaries, this is a radical call for a new era of education.

Offering resources for students and academics to challenge and resist coloniality inside and outside the classroom, Decolonising the University provides the tools for radical pedagogical, disciplinary and institutional change.

Paperback | 240 pages | Pluto Press | 2018

Gurminder K. Bhambra is Professor of Postcolonial and Decolonial Studies in the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Palgrave, 2007) and Connected Sociologies (Bloomsbury, 2014), and the co-editor of Decolonising the University (Pluto, 2018).

Dalia Gebrial is the editor of a special issue of the Historical Materialism journal on identity politics and co-editor of Decolonising the University (Pluto, 2018).

Kerem Nişancıoğlu is a Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS, University of London. He is the co-author of How the West Came to Rule (Pluto, 2015), and co-editor of Decolonising the University (Pluto, 2018). He also blogs at The Disorder of Things.