Archives and Decolonial Pedagogy: Unearthing Narratives, Transforming Education

This research project investigates the potential of archives to decolonise teaching and learning within the university. It advances ongoing work being conducted by two of the PIs, Alice Finden and Kavi Abraham, who have been focusing on the emotional role that archival trips play in decolonising IR and Politics classrooms. With this application, we seek to further this work by convening interdisciplinary conversations around university archives and how they may serve a pedagogical function in decolonising very different disciplines.

While calls to ‘decolonise the curriculum’ have been mainstreamed in many universities, they are often framed as a discipline-specific exercise in changing reading lists to better acknowledge (1) how a discipline might be historically connected to colonialism and (2) the range of authors and content that might have been neglected. Implicit here is that universities, as educational institutions, need to consider what knowledge is transferred to students. However, universities are also repositories of colonial historical records and artefacts that demonstrate how closely the emergence of different disciplines has been connected to colonialism. While changing reading lists is important, universities are able to bring students into an intimate encounter with how European disciplinary research traditions and methods have been honed through the objectification of colonial subjects and the accumulation of indigenous knowledge.

We contend that university archives are sources to further decolonisation efforts in multiple disciplines. There is an extensive literature on the uses of archives in the classroom, including those that: show the potential for archival encounters to act as moments of ‘disorientation’ that challenge students’ assumptions and to present them with alternative histories (Perrier and Withers, 2016; Gillilan and Halilovich, 2017; Gilliland, 2011); explore the affective value that archives can have to foster a deep form of learning (Springgay, Truman and MacLean, 2019); demonstrate that archives present inquiry-based models of education (Hayden, 2015)that encourage students to think creatively and imaginatively together (Godfrey, 2015); and present valuable lessons about power and knowledge production (Enouch and Vanhaitsma, 2015). However, much of this work has been confined to museum studies, history, archival studies, and other disciplines for whom archival analysis is critical. Our proposed project builds on these studies but enquires into the pedagogical potential of archives in other disciplines– from politics and IR to psychology to mathematics.

Events

29 Feb - 01 March 2024 - Archives and Decolonial Pedagogy: Unearthing Narratives, Transforming Education