Canon Fire

Abstract

Despite sustained critical attention to the politics of knowledge, contemporary anthropology disproportionately engages with ideas produced by academics based in European and North American universities. The ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ movement speaks to core areas of anthropological interest while making a critical comment on the academic structures in which anthropologists produce their work. The articles in this collection interrogate the terms on which academic work engages with its own history, and ask how the production of knowledge relates to structures of race, gender and location. The collection considers the historical, political and institutional context of the ‘decolonizing the curriculum’ movement, the potential impact that the movement might make on education and research, and the major challenges facing it.

Kill your ancestors

“…Rather than a finite generational war that can either be won or lost, the decolonization of anthropology is an open‐ended historical transformation whose outcome is unpredictable. As a collective social enterprise, decolonization should engage everybody in our professional community (Sanchez, 2018a), even as we remain critically attentive to how the endeavor might be performatively co‐opted (Rivera‐Cusicanqui, 2020).…”

Comrades and spies

“…This reflects the ethnic structure of these disciplines (cf. Sanchez, 2018, on racialized structures of anthropology in the UK), which owes at least partially to deep structural inequalities in the Czech education system (e.g., Nekorjak et al., 2011).…”

Re-Thinking the Humanities Curriculum in the Time of Covid-19

“…The emergent student protests have often shone a spotlight on the alienating and colonising nature of curricula in the Global South, and the need to de-commodify the public university away from the neoliberal logic that sees students as fee paying 'clients' accessing the 'curriculum goods' of the university (Klein & Jenkins 2018;Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2017;Ruddock 2018). Calls for transformation in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, India, Turkey, the United States, the United Kingdom, Latin America and others, have sought to challenge the continuing epistemic inequality between Eurocentric thought and indigenous knowledge systems, and the emerging neoliberal regimes of academic productivity, performance management, and the presupposed efficiency (see De Sousa Santos et al 2016;Sanchez 2018;Thaman 2003). In the South African context, the 2015-2016 student movements highlighted the Eurocentric and colonial nature of the South African higher education landscape, with the need to re-centre African epistemic traditions in curricula and de-centre and provincialise Euro-American thought (Maxwele 2016;Ngcobozi 2015;Ramaru 2017).…”