Decolonising the curriculum

Social science courses are increasingly coming under fire for the over-representation of white male authors and theorists. Campaigns such as ‘Why Is My Curriculum White?’ call into question the ‘Dead White Men’ approach to teaching political theory, where few female and theorists of colour are included on reading lists. The ways in which knowledge is produced, propagated and perpetuated through White, Western perspectives also spawned the related campaign ‘Why Is My Professor White?’ These campaigns are taking place against a backdrop of immense changes in the higher education sector, which earlier this year saw thousands of university academic staff go on strike over pensions, and a spate of anti-casualisation campaigns crop up at universities across the country. Changes such as these disproportionately affect women and ethnic minorities because of the extent to which we are subject to structural inequalities. Ethnic and gender penalties are present at every academic pay grade. Women are more likely to be on casual, part-time contracts. And ethnic minorities still constitute a minor proportion of senior academic and management staff in most universities. As women of colour (WOC) in the academy – emerging scholars of race who have yet to begin permanent academic roles – the decolonisation campaigns hold personal as well as professional resonance for us. They fuel our desire to impart real change in the way politics is taught in the United Kingdom and to help make a space for scholars like us. However, this desire must sit alongside the realities of our future in the academy. We both started out PhDs in the mid-2010s with the hope of becoming critical and radical but essentially fully fledged and secure academic employees. The structural changes the academy is undergoing not only undermines the work we do to represent the work of subaltern scholars in the field of politics but makes us question our ability as well as our desire to survive and thrive as academics

Demarcation and definition: explicating the meaning and scope of ‘decolonisation’ in the social and political sciences

Decolonisation of the curriculum is a burgeoning yet controversial project of radical change, gaining slow but steady traction in higher education politics departments across the country. At its heart is the acknowledgement and systematic unravelling of colonial and imperial practices in the UK university system. This article pins down what decolonisation is and is not, highlighting the barriers and tentative opportunities to effective decolonisation work. This is discussed in the context of the structural constraints that critical scholars of race — particularly those at the intersection of marginalised racial and gender identities — work against in the academy

Hot Spots on the Fermi Surface of Bi2212: Stripes versus Superstructure

In a recent paper Saini et al. have reported evidence for a pseudogap around (pi,0) at room temperature in the optimally doped superconductor Bi2212. This result is in contradiction with previous ARPES measurements. Furthermore they observed at certain points on the Fermi surface hot spots of high spectral intensity which they relate to the existence of stripes in the CuO planes. They also claim to have identified a new electronic band along Gamma-M1 whose one dimensional character provides further evidence for stripes. We demonstrate in this Comment that all the measured features can be simply understood by correctly considering the superstructure (umklapp) and shadow bands which occur in Bi2212.Comment: 1 page, revtex, 1 encapsulated postscript figure (color

Large-amplitude electron-acoustic solitons in a dusty plasma with kappa-distributed electrons

The Sagdeev pseudopotential method is used to investigate the occurrence and the dynamics of fully nonlinear electrostatic solitary structures in a plasma containing suprathermal hot electrons, in the presence of massive charged dust particles in the background. The soliton existence domain is delineated, and its parametric dependence on different physical parameters is clarified.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figure, presented as a poster at the 6th International Conference on the Physics of Dusty Plasmas (ICPDP6), Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, 201

Perceived quality of society

Drawing on evidence from across Europe, this report explores new ways in which policy can support and encourage high levels of wellbeing, using data from the European Social Survey. Much of the established evidence and analysis around wellbeing is based on a single measure – life satisfaction. This report combines contributions from City University London, the New Economics Foundation (NEF) and the University of Cambridge to explore new ways of understanding and measuring wellbeing

The 2022 Conservative leadership campaign and post-racial gatekeeping

The Conservative party leadership contest that took place in the summer of 2022 was unprecedented for, amongst other things, its level of ethnic diversity. This paper argues that this doesn’t indicate a sharp, contemporary liberal turn within the party. It argues the opposite, in fact, that recent senior ethnic minority cabinet members and leadership contenders represent some of the party’s most right-wing ideologues in years. Through critical discourse analysis of narrative related to race, borders, immigration and the ‘nation’ in selected media appearances made by ethnic minority leadership contenders Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javid, Nadhim Zahawi, Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch as part of their campaigns, this paper positions these individuals – in distinct yet interrelated ways – as ethnic minority post-racial gatekeepers, continuing yet intensifying a long trend within the Conservative party of the reproduction of the racial status quo legitimised through nominal ethnic minority representation