Search Results (7)

This study proposes Tewahedo epistemology, an Ethiopian knowledge system grounded in the Ge’ez language, as a decolonial framework for re-visualizing academic literacy in higher education. Tewahedo, meaning “oneness” or “unity”, integrates multiliteracies—written, oral, spatial, and visual—within a communal and culturally embedded ethos through its Tergwame (ትርጓሜ) epistemes and Andǝmta (አንድምታ) traditions. The aim of the article is to challenge the dominance of skills-based literacy models by positioning Tewahedo as a decolonized alternative, emphasizing contextualized knowledge, communal meaning-making, and epistemic belonging. Through a literature review, the study explores Andəmta as a communal and dialogic system of knowledge sharing, rooted in Ge’ez and Amharic hermeneutics. This framework serves as a template for Africanizing and decolonizing contemporary academic literacy development. Findings reveal that Tewahedo epistemology offers ancient yet innovative strategies for fostering interpretive, explanatory, and multimodal competencies in academia. The study argues that adopting a unified Tewahedo-based academic literacy framework can cultivate intellectual agency, decolonize educational spaces, and center Indigenous Knowledge Systems. It calls for educational reforms that promote cultural diversity, legitimize Indigenous Knowledge Systems, and nurture academic belonging for students in multilingual and multicultural contexts. Full article

Degree awarding gaps highlight the inequitable outcomes of higher education (HE) for racially minoritized students in the UK. This ongoing issue has been described as a “wicked problem”, directly related to structural racism, or policies and practices that continually disadvantage racialized students. Movements to decolonize the curriculum bring hope and the tools to rebuild more socially-just institutions and societies. However, it is sometimes questioned whether the field of science, with its guise of objectivity, needs decolonizing, or what that process involves. We argue that student partnerships are central to building decolonized science curricula that are critical, anti-racist and will evoke social change. In this study, conducted with life sciences students in a UK HE institution, we share critical reflections captured through a mixed methods approach to address how we create an education that is through and for social justice. Education through social justice aims to create equitable learning environments by addressing how structures and curricula invite, engage and support racially minoritized students to be partners in the learning journey. Whereas education for social justice is about co-creating curricula, teaching practices and principles that lead to change makers and fostering more socially-just societies. Our research indicates that an education that is both through and for social justice requires co-creation where traditional power hierarchies are dismantled, and mattering is emphasized. Partnerships and curricula must be centered in anti-racist practices, with a structured and intentional approach to developing critical thinking skills for continual reflection, self-development and actions to promote inclusion and equity in life sciences and society. Full article

If global higher education is truly committed to decolonization, there will have to be some radical changes. A decolonized university would increase the freedom of students and staff through undoing the legacy of the past, a past which was exclusive and homogenous. In order for this to materialize, universities must adopt a different consciousness. They must move away from the current culture that has privileged global north epistemic and pedagogical frameworks that serve to alienate the student from the global south. For universities to be able to undo the effects of the epistemic injustice that indigenous students have faced, the academy must approach education with a new mindfulness of whom it is that it is designed to serve. When we approach higher education with a consciousness of decolonization and a recognition of the identity of whom the education system is meant to serve, then management systems and epistemic and pedagogical frameworks in our universities cannot remain abstract in nature. Rather they must be fully cognizant of the students’ backgrounds, their social needs, and their academic needs. These cannot be mere considerations but must be the information which directs what is taught and how it is taught, for a just education system is not and can never be decontextualized. As Afro-communitarianism prescribes, decontextualization disregards the necessity of, and integral relationships to, others and the world. Any just pedagogical system must acknowledge the legitimacy of, and draw from, contributions in culture, knowledge, and perspective that come from the students themselves—both as individuals and as insiders of a particular class, culture, and indigenous group. It is in this symbiotic relationship where both the student and the educator can begin to be humanized again. Full article

U.S. based post-secondary educational institutions usually have violent origin stories that include land theft, genocide, and the participation in slavery. Schools of social work are no exception. In recent years, colleges and universities, including schools of social work, have started to confront their histories of and participation in racial-settler colonialism. The severance of land as kinship, and land theft, have been a significant part of the harms of racial-settler colonialism. Colleges and universities have benefited from land theft, primarily through land-grants. Still, institutional accountability has been minimal, including limited acknowledgment of harm and modest changes in curriculum and staff. This paper expands the terrain of institutional accountability in social work higher education to consider land-based healing initiatives as a critical remedy for the harms of racial settler colonialism. This paper provides a historical review and decolonial analysis of the connection between social work higher education and land-grant institutions. Building on social cartography literature, a mapping framework for decolonizing higher education is examined in relation to questions of institutional accountability by land-grant universities. This framework is offered in conjunction with contemporary examples of struggles for institutional accountability in and outside of higher education. The paper concludes with future recommendations for research related to institutional accountability and the implications of land-based healing as an approach. Full article

Equity, equality, diversity, inclusion, belonging, dignity, justice, accessibility, accountability, and decolonization are individual concepts used to engage with problematic social situations of marginalized groups. Phrases that put together these concepts in different ways, such as “equity, diversity and inclusion”, “equality, diversity, and inclusion”, “diversity, equity and inclusion”, “equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility”, “justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion”, and “equity, diversity, inclusion, and decolonization” are increasingly used, indicating that any one of these concepts is not enough to guide policy decisions. These phrases are also used to engage with problems in the workplace. Universities are one workplace where these phrases are used to improve the research, education, and general workplace climate of marginalized students, non-academic staff, and academic staff. EDI policy frameworks such as Athena SWAN and DIMENSIONS: equity, diversity, and inclusion have been also set up with the same purpose. What EDI data are generated within the academic literature focusing on EDI in the workplace, including the higher education workplace, influence the implementation and direction of EDI policies and practices within the workplace and outside. The aim of this scoping review of academic abstracts employing SCOPUS, the 70 databases of EBSCO-HOST and Web of Sciences, was to generate data that allow for a detailed understanding of the academic inquiry into EDI. The objective of this study was to map out the engagement with EDI in the academic literature by answering seven research questions using quantitative hit count manifest coding: (1) Which EDI policy frameworks and phrases are mentioned? (2) Which workplaces are mentioned? (3) Which academic associations, societies, and journals and which universities, colleges, departments, and academic disciplines are mentioned? (4) Which medical disciplines and health professionals are mentioned? (5) Which terms, phrases, and measures of the “social” are present? (6) Which technologies, science, and technology governance terms and ethics fields are present? (7) Which EDI-linked groups are mentioned and which “ism” terms? Using a qualitative thematic analysis, we aimed to answer the following research question: (8) What are the EDI-related themes present in relation to (a) the COVID-19/pandemic, (b) technologies, (c) work/life, (d) intersectionality, (e) empowerment of whom, (f) “best practices”, (g) evaluation and assessment of EDI programs, (h) well-being, and (i) health equity. We found many gaps in the academic coverage, suggesting many opportunities for academic inquiries and a broadening of the EDI research community. Full article

In this paper, I focus on the process of building a dissertation that honored the Black souls of my undergraduate participants along with my own Black soul as a form of resistance to advance racial equity in higher education. Through endarkened narrative inquiry, this paper will address the internal tensions I navigated in building a dissertation that centered Blackness through the prism of what I have conceptualized as Black Finesse. I unveil components from my dissertation that manifested a shift in how knowledge generation can be developed and written. I conceptualized a methodology entitled race-grounded phenomenology (RGP) and call for a re-imagining of qualitative research around the ways Black students navigate higher education. I reflected upon the internal tensions and mental leaps of my dissertation process through theoretical decolonial inquiry. As decolonial praxis to unmake the canon of research and dissertation creation, I lean upon four elements of decolonizing higher education as a way to reimagine decolonial futures that were actualized via my dissertation process. Full article

During 2015 and 2016, staff and students at university campuses across South Africa embarked on two campaigns for decolonizing higher education, but the efforts were met with various forms of violent repression and rationalization of violence by state and private security services. In the face of the securatization of university campuses countrywide, ordinary mediums of teaching and learning proved inadequate for helping students reflect on their social reality, and similarly, public gatherings for socio-political deliberation and commentary became irregular because of the policing and surveillance of student protest action. By reflecting on the curation of three memorials and performances about seemingly racialized violence in this context, this article interrogates the meaning and the relation to the aesthetic, as well as the commentary on the context within which it is produced. Drawing on the work of Mbembe, Fanon, and Spivak as theoretical interlocutors with respect to how I understand violence, this article reflects on how three interdisciplinary curatorial events raise pedagogical challenges and opportunities for critical reflection in a context of repression. It was precisely through this interdisciplinary effort that the black body, violence, and context aligned to produce a public pedagogy on physical and representational violence. The three curatorial moments allowed for meaningful reflection on violence, resistance, religion, and the racialized self that not only drew attention to the artifacts and the performances but deliberately opened possibilities for a kind of public classroom where the discussion, articulation, and critique of violence is possible and productive. Full article