300664 Decolonising Higher Education (MA: Soziologie der globalen Welt) (S) (SoSe 2024)

This seminar combines three research fields that have been rapidly developing over the last years: first, the post-colonial critique that is increasingly turning its attention to the perspectives and voices of those formerly governed, and to the role of academia in shaping unequal dynamics across the world. The new approaches focus on the modalities of action and rooms for manoeuvre under the conditions of pronounced power asymmetries, but also processes of de-centering – as they can be currently observed in the field of higher education. The second line of research examines the recent changes in the global landscapes of higher education that are driven by neo-liberal policies and the enhanced competition between countries, universities, the academic staff, and students. Their work is especially observable in the scope of marketization and in different forms of classifying and measuring, and it is becoming increasingly visible in critical voices reacting to those. The third line of research centres on the questions of legitimacy and validity of knowledge. Modernity has allotted the centre stage to canonised academic knowledge. Today, more and more actors call for re-thinking the prevailing knowledge hierarchies and the modalities of knowledge transmission. These debates take place at different sites of knowledge production, increasingly also entering the academia.
These three research fields ‘talk to each another’: They allow for critically assessing the durable inequalities in (higher) education and the changing parameters at different levels. On this basis, the seminar will link (the critique of) power and authority to knowledge production and dissemination as well as the (changing) coordinates of knowing and belonging. Selected texts will also allow for reflection on the possible and desired transgressions and more generally on the possibilities of future knowledge as well as on the future of knowledge.
These preoccupations will lead to a fourth thematical bloc dealing with universities as social spaces and as sites of knowledge. Universities are usually described as sites where academic knowledge is produced and disseminated. But universities are also social spaces where extra-curricular forms of knowledge are re-produced and contested. Material / spatial and temporal dimensions (studying is a process) are important to consider: the materiality of university premises is significantly shaped by historical dimensions comprising manifold symbols (monuments, plates, ornaments) that affect the teaching, research and the manifold social encounters. It has a significant sensory power that can enhance or reduce the sense of belonging to the academic community. As a social space, universities are shaped by different forms of normativities informed by historical formations such as colonial forces, patriarchy, or by canonical hierarchical orders within the disciplines. These are mirrored in the curricular dimensions of academic learning. Their power often prevents critical questioning of the academic ‘rules of the game’ (P. Bourdieu).