coloniality – Critical Pedagogies Project

Learning and teaching coloniality in the present: CPG Annual Lecture 2025

About the event

The Critical Pedagogies Group annual lecture this year will take the form of a roundtable panel discussion. Scholars, educators, and students will come together to discuss the realities of coloniality in higher education today. The panellists will explore how decolonial work is understood, the challenges of institutional resistance, and the role of student-academic collaboration in advancing social justice.

The roundtable will be part of a launch event for the ‘Unpacking the Curriculum: A decolonial enquiry’ report, which you can read about here: https://blog.westminster.ac.uk/psj/tools/survey/

How, where, and when to attend

This year’s lecture will not be livestreamed or recorded. If you would like to attend the in-person event, please register using this TicketTailor link. https://www.tickettailor.com/events/studentpartnershipuow/1642755 You will receive an email before the event with specific room information.

The panel discussion will be held on April 8th, from 5-7 pm at the University of Westminster Regent Street Campus (309 Regent St., London W1B 2HW) You can find information about the location and access details at: https://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/visit-us/regent-street

About the panellists:

Carol Tellez Contreras (she/her) is an Indigenous queer Bolivian Law student. Living in Europe, she has faced issues with colonial thinking that prevails, which affected her views of her identity. This emphasised her interest in issues surrounding decolonisation, anti-racism, and intersectionality. Her legal studies have made her even more aware as to how these issues are present through legal systems and institutions.

Kelsea Costin (SOAS) is a research assistant for the Pedagogies for Social Justice Project (PSJ). Her most recent publication on student and staff perceptions on decolonising the curriculum has appeared in a special edition centring social justice and pedagogical partnership in Social Sciences. As part of a student-staff collaboration, Kelsea believes that relationality and student-staff partnerships are crucial for dismantling institutional structures and challenging coloniality in the academy.

Kyra Araneta (she/her) is a Lecturer in Student Partnership and Social Justice in the Centre for Education and Teaching Innovation (CETI) at the University of Westminster. Her research focuses on decolonial pedagogies, social justice education, storytelling and the role of student-staff partnerships in fostering ethical learning environments. As a mixed woman of African-Asian descent, Kyra dedicates her praxis to challenging contemporary forms of coloniality in academia, centring underrepresented and marginalised voices, and advocating for anti-racist and decolonial learning spaces.

Mrinalini Greedharry (University of Essex) has been having conversations about colonialism in Canadian, Finnish, and British university classrooms for about thirty years now. She is interested in how people understand themselves through colonial systems and re-imagine themselves through colonial critique. You can contact her at mrinalini.greedharry@essex.ac.uk

Onni Gust is Associate Professor in History at the University of Nottingham. They teach transgender history and histories of race, gender and sexuality in colonial context, mainly focusing on the ‘long’ eighteenth century. Their book, Unhomely Empire: whiteness and belonging, 1760-1830 was published in 2021. Onni is currently working with natural history museums and artists on a new research project, ‘Kin: transgender history with and beyond the human’ looking at what it means to write transgender history in the context of climate catastrophe. Their article, ‘Of mermaids and monsters: transgender history and the boundaries of the human in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain’ begins to address this question.

Our zine-making workshop is back!

As regular readers of the blog and listserv members will know, we had to re-schedule our spring zine-making workshop to July 10th, 2024. The workshop will take place at the University of Westminster Cavendish campus from 1-4 pm.

You can now book your tickets to the workshop at https://buytickets.at/studentpartnershipuow/1223825

In the ongoing atmosphere of redundancies, restructuring, and cuts in higher education, it is more important than ever that we continue to come together and craft our vision of the university we want. Our theme for the afternoon is the creative destruction of the university. You can read more about how we came to be thinking about this in our previous post.

The workshop will be facilitated by Dr Annapurna Menon (she/her), who joined the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Sheffield in September 2022. Her doctoral research focused on the coloniality of postcolonial nation-states, specifically studying the Indian nation-state’s exercise of power in Indian-administered Jammu & Kashmir. She has also published on topics relating to Hindutva, right-wing politics, decolonial theory militarisation and gender; activism and pedagogy as an activist tool. She enjoys learning with and from students, colleagues and friends, and believes that critical engagement in all academic and activist spaces is very important right now.

Spring Critical Pedagogies Workshop – Sign up!

Tickets are now available for our spring zine-making workshop at https://buytickets.at/studentpartnershipuow/1223825

We invite you to join us on May 8th, from 1-4 pm at the University of Westminster’s Cavendish campus, for an afternoon of thinking, playing, and making zines together. Our theme for the afternoon is the creative destruction of the university. You can read more about how we came to be thinking about this in our previous post.

If you aren’t already subscribed to our email list, now is also a good time to sign up for early announcements about our workshops, annual lectures, and reading group meetings. You can sign up for these at: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CPG&A=1

Through the fire: working and dreaming in the colonial university

Wide Sargasso Sea begins with a fire that burns down the plantation the protagonist Antoinette and her family have profited from, and it ends just before she herself is about to set a fire that will burn down her husband’s English estate. It’s an interesting structure for a novel that is, in many ways, about enduring colonialism, rather than destroying it. Rhys’ protagonist, a white Creole heiress, is buffeted about by patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism, and the only actions available to her seem to be destructive ones, either destroying herself or destroying the structures that scaffold her life. The genius of Rhys’ novel is to finally turn fire into a creative act.

In the spirit of Antoinette, and creative destructionists everywhere, we’ve been reflecting on how often our more recent discussions in the reading group seem to turn to burning down the system, rather than enduring, reforming, or transforming it. There’s an important difference in tone and tactics between all these ways of responding to the colonial university, and over the years, the reading group has certainly tended more towards transformation than anything else. But is it possible to transform fundamentally colonial logics and practices? Can we achieve this as individual educator-researchers in our daily work? Do we need more collective praxis, imaginary, and theory to build the anti-colonial university? These are not new questions in critical pedagogy, unfortunately. However, the persistence of those questions reflects the fact that many of us continue to experience labour in higher education as demoralizing and even unethical, forcing our training and commitments as feminist, anti-racist, and queer scholars into constant battles with the coloniality of the university.

We would like to invite you to join us for a spring (early May) zine making workshop on the theme of creative destruction of the university. If you have never made a zine before, fear not, information and gentle guidance will be available! While we organize the workshop and firm up the details, we’d like to invite you to begin to contemplate the theme of creative destruction, gather your daydreams of fire, and notice anything that shows you the shape of the university you really want to work in.

If you would like to know more about when and where you can sign up for the workshop, you can register on our listserv here: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=CPG&A=1