Who has the Time and Responsibility to Decolonize English Studies?

Abstract

What does decolonizing teaching practices and curricula mean, and who has the time and responsibility to consider these issues? This essay thinks about these questions from the first-person, embodied perspective of someone who has recently finished a PhD in modernist literatures of Virginia Woolf and Jean Rhys. In this essay, I think about the issues of precarious employment as an early-career researcher who has held casual contracts and fixed-term research positions in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Estonia. The latter country is my homeland, and Estonian is my native tongue. This essay goes on to consider what it feels like to study English in universities in the UK and finally teach it, as a foreigner to the language and culture one learns and teaches. The first half of this essay is dedicated to sketching out how an immigrant might end up dedicating her career to English, and the second part more specifically talks about how she ended up doing research for a project that looks into practices of decolonizing curricula and inclusive teaching methods by statistical analysis and qualitative interviews with colleagues. The interviews are about issues that the statistical representation will never be able to show and address; in these interviews, the difficult process of decolonization of curricula and teaching really unfolds.