In this post, Claira Turvey reflects on her participation as an undergraduate student in the course ‘Understanding Decolonisation in a Globalised World’, and the importance of carefully curating spaces for inclusive and accessible tutorial discussions. Claira Turvey is a second year Sustainable Development and Social Anthropology undergraduate student. This post is part of the ‘Creating a Challenge Course’ series.
Approaching decolonisation at the university
I joined the university through its Access Programme as a non-degree holding mature student, having – until this time – navigated a world that is not inclusive if you have a chronic health condition. My curiosity about how we learn, live, and work together in more life-centric ways as a society, especially in times of climate breakdown, brought me to the Sustainable Development degree at Edinburgh, and furthered my interest in the way coloniality threads its way through all our lives. Having not benefited from the knowledge and networking higher education can provide, I was intrigued by the possibilities afforded by education yet also wary about how elite institutions play a role in perpetuating power dynamics.
As a constituent part of the university, I wondered what role I had to play during my time here, and this led me to take part in opportunities to interrogate these issues. I learned that the university was undertaking work to counter its colonial history and, after exploring the Race Hub and the Curriculum Transformation Programme, I attended a student consultative workshop, facilitated by the Course Organiser (Omolabake Fakunle), prior to the launch of the ‘ Understanding Decolonisation in a Globalised World’ course. I was astonished at how much collaborative work had gone into the course design.
As my degree is interdisciplinary, I appreciated bringing together students across fields of expertise. The diversity of material being taught, and the experiential learning opportunities, attracted my attention because my interests include bringing different perspectives together and reimagining ways of creating and disseminating knowledge. I couldn’t wait to sign up for the course and become part of this new venture with my peers.
Transformative course content
Lectures and readings focus on the theme of decolonisation through a different discipline each week. This approach reveals the extent to which coloniality underpins and continues to influence contemporary society.
Learning about the challenges encountered by other disciplines in doing this work brings to life the essential requirement of listening and learning with others to counter global challenges. Bringing disciplines into conversation with each other across the course builds a holistic picture of embedded coloniality, alongside hearing from scholars and voices from the Global South.
My own discipline, anthropology, is historically entwined with colonial practices and it is by querying these practices that make visible residual effects of coloniality, while also illuminating different ways of worldmaking enacted by social groups that may serve as alternatives.
Key explorations in lectures, such as ‘Engaging with Decoloniality through Arts and Culture’ with Tessa Giblin from the Talbot Rice Gallery, has so far been a highlight of the course. The often-ignored importance of art in translating a deeply emotional and distressing topic into work that translates and communicates decolonial complexities to a lay audience, whilst retaining its impact, is especially powerful.
Curating transformative tutorials
Another highlight of the course has been tutorials. I especially value the physicality of bringing the desks into the centre of the room, so we sit within a circle, making it easier to see, sense and respond to others.
These discussions are based on the Linked Teaching Approach, with workshop questions clearly linked to lectures and materials. As questions are provided in advance, this inclusive practice gives extra time to engage with ideas, formulate responses, and make best use of tutorial time. In addition, smaller groups within the tutorial class are tasked with different questions, which allows us to engage more broadly with the material and brings together a wider range of insights during playback. This provides lots of food for thought after each class!
The starting point for discussions is always around sharing knowledge and experiences from our own disciplines, giving folks a route into contributing. This allows people to build confidence in articulating their positions and research within the field whilst emboldening what this might mean for developing expertise in the wider world. Importantly, it affords space for everyone to contribute with no sense of anyone being left behind.
Additionally, through witnessing these articulations and reflections from peers, the issues and challenges that arise in their disciplines (and our questioning of these together as a group) allows for unexpected and interesting topics to emerge.
This often feels like the most exciting moment in tutorials – when we collectively realise there is space to think creatively about challenges. We consider how different perspectives could apply to our own disciplines and how fields of knowledge can come together to provide novel solutions to problems. I find the experience of developing insights in collaboration with others stays with me after the tutorial finishes and this permeates how I engage with the rest of my studies.
A lasting impression
Viewing our disciplines with a critical lens and working across expertise silos to shift perspectives can be unsettling and daunting work. Yet, by embracing weaknesses we can more accurately assess the context of challenges and develop nuanced, robust solutions in response. Developing sensitivities to the invisible threads of coloniality that weave their way throughout our lives offers us a choice to reclaim our ability to imagine, and create, a caring and more inclusive world. Fostering collaborative, inquisitive modes of enquiry-based learning is vital to understanding decolonisation in a globalised world.
Claira Turvey
Claira Turvey is a second year Sustainable Development and Social Anthropology undergraduate student. Her research interests include decolonisation and reparations alongside procedural, cognitive and environmental justice, including the rights of nature. Claira also works to improve student experience and widening participation as a student representative within the School of Social and Political Science, and as a Resource Centre Assistant at the Centre for Open Learning. She is also a member of the Student Discipline Committee and CAHSS Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI)committee.
