Managing racism? Race equality and decolonial educational futures

Abstract

III) based at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) aims to be the world's leading centre for interdisciplinary research on inequalities and create real impact through policy solutions that tackle the issue. The Institute provides a genuinely interdisciplinary forum unlike any other, bringing together expertise from across the School and drawing on the thinking of experts from every continent across the globe to produce high quality research and innovation in the field of inequalities.

Inside the ivory tower, the view from a “space invader”: An exploratory study into the ways racialized PhD students experience white ignorance in elite universities in the UK

“…This entails the acknowledgment of institutional racism and practices of white ignorance that impose dominant ways of knowing, which continue to influence our universities at present (Brunsma, 2013; Embrick & Moore, 2020; Funez, 2022). Moreover, it entails ensuring that structural disadvantages resulting in attainment gaps for minoritized racial students are carefully addressed (Ali, 2022). It also involves reviewing epistemic biases, not only in terms of curricula (Rudolph et al., 2018) but also between PhD students and professors.…”

“…Over recent years, the project of decolonizing higher education has been high on the agenda. Campaigns advocating a reckoning with colonial histories—including “Rhodes Must Fall” at the University of Oxford and recent student‐led campaigns such as #LiberateMyDegree and “Why is My Curriculum White?”—confront institutional racism and its manifestations in the Eurocentric curriculum (Ali, 2022). These protests demonstrate that decolonization is an unfinished project and that the UK university setting is becoming the ‘canvas on which recent national battles over the ongoing colonial memory and epistemology are being played out’ (Klinkert, 2021, p. 2).…”

Missing in Action: Where’s the Unconscious in Anti-Racist “Unconscious Bias Training”?

“…Unconscious bias training thus aims at alleviating racism by making people-university staff and development practitioners, in this case-conscious of their racial biases. Adopted by a range of academic institutions and multilateral, governmental, and nongovernmental development agencies (e.g., Lehman et al 2023;Smith et al 2017;Ali 2022;SSHRC 2023;Guterres 2021;Save The Children 2023;World Bank 2015, training workshops/modules are meant to curb racial prejudice by identifying and critically evaluating participants' racial predilections. Deliberation and awareness raising endeavor to bring to the surface participant prejudicial shortcuts, thus combating "unintentionalism with intentionalism" (Corrêa d'Almeida and Grossi 2016).…”

AI Empire: Unraveling the interlocking systems of oppression in generative AI's global order

“…The racist implications of AI such as the disproportionately negative impact on Black people in predictive policing (Richardson et al, 2019), recidivism likelihood prediction (Angwin et al, 2016), and mortgage application evaluation (Zou and Khern-am-nuai, 2022), among others, have become textbook examples of algorithmic harm. These AI-facilitated types of discriminatory oversurveillance and exclusion that serve to perpetuate inequities and amplify racial hierarchies have been theorized as the “New Jim Code” (Benjamin, 2019) or “algorithmic racism” (Ali, 2016). They give rise to new forms of race-based discrimination, while reinforcing entrenched structures of systemic oppression and capital accumulation by commodifying Blackness in digital spaces (Browne, 2015).…”