How diverse is your reading list? Exploring issues of representation and decolonisation in the UK

Abstract

There is a growing impetus, from university students and administrations, to decolonise the curriculum and develop diverse reading lists. Yet, there is limited theoretical or empirical analysis of the authorship of current reading lists to justify this imperative. The present study developed and applied a method for auditing the authorship on reading lists of two modules, one from science and one from social science, in a research-intensive British university. The paper explores whether these reading lists can be considered descriptively representative of the student body or scholarly community. The analysis of reading lists found empirical basis for concerns that university curricula are dominated by white, male and Eurocentric authors, with some exceptions. The reading lists did not represent the diverse local student body but came closer to representing the demographic profile of academic staff. To interpret these findings, the paper argues that reading lists have a role to play in decolonising our universities, and offer opportunities to critique and deconstruct disciplinary boundaries. Further research is required to explore student and staff views of reading lists and the meaning of diversity, to evaluate existing tools, and address barriers to decolonising our curricula on a global scale.

Decolonising the curriculum beyond the surge: Conceptualisation, positionality and conduct

“…Recent studies have called for examining student and staff experiences and perceptions, and for the understanding of existing tools for, and obstacles to, decolonising curricula in UK HEIs (Schucan Bird and Pitman, 2019). To conduct this examination and reach this understanding, we chose to focus on a number of student-and academic-led initiatives at UCL as our case study.…”

“…and Why Is My Curriculum White? Many centres, courses and student-staff bodies have launched initiatives to broaden the range of their reading lists, such as the Alternative Reading List Project (Schucan Bird and Pitman, 2019). The movement took various shapes and modes, from changing reading lists to efforts to decolonise entire disciplines.…”

“…Thus, decolonisation has to address more than the curriculum to destabilise what bell hooks (2012: 4) calls 'imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy'. The legacies of exclusions and distorted representations also marginalise diverse students' interests, histories and perspectives, as well as their sense of belonging, learning, engagement, attainment and participation in higher education (Schucan Bird and Pitman, 2019). In this sense, decoloniality in HEIs is a call to assess the legacies and continuation of colonialism in production of knowledge and in education systems, examining values, rationality, and ways of knowing and being, and their relationship to society (De Lissovoy, 2010).…”

Diversity or decolonization? Searching for the tools to dismantle the ‘master’s house’

“…For papers with multiple authors, each author was categorized by race and gender, and we also coded for their position in the list of authors. Gender and race of authors were inferred from publicly available information including names, pronouns, photographs and interviews, where available (following Schucan Bird and Pitman, 2020). For case studies, we counted those instances when the reading contained a separate section with a geographical example or when the authors referred to examples used as 'case studies'.…”

Decolonising Terrorism Journals

“…Although both questions are essential, the more relevant for this paper is the second one. Such dominance means little or no room for non-Western scholars' work on university curricula [54]. That said, addressing such dominance will not be easy because it challenges "whiteness" in academia and raises uncomfortable questions about racism for the whole of academia, which includes academic publishing [23,55].…”