From management meetings to meaningful change: risks of institutional capture in the decolonisation of UK higher education and recommendations for delivering structural change

As there are growing calls from below, alongside expanding formal initiatives, to decolonise universities, Dr Rima Saini outlines what decolonisation means in the higher education context. She highlights that it is a radical project of institutional transformation that lies in exposing and upturning the colonial underpinnings of our universities. Given the immensity of this task, Saini explores the risks of institutional capture – that structural change will be absorbed into management strategies- and offers recommendations for meaningful change

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

Multi-center validation study of automated classification of pathological slowing in adult scalp electroencephalograms via frequency features

Pathological slowing in the electroencephalogram (EEG) is widely investigated for the diagnosis of neurological disorders. Currently, the gold standard for slowing detection is the visual inspection of the EEG by experts, which is time-consuming and subjective. To address those issues, we propose three automated approaches to detect slowing in EEG: Threshold-based Detecting System (TDS), Shallow Learning-based Detecting System (SLDS), and Deep Learning-based Detecting System (DLDS). These systems are evaluated on channel-, segment- and EEG-level. The TDS, SLDS, and DLDS performs prediction via detecting slowing at individual channels, and those detections are arranged in histograms for detection of slowing at the segment- and EEG-level. We evaluate the systems through Leave-One-Subject-Out (LOSO) cross-validation (CV) and Leave-One-Institution-Out (LOIO) CV on four datasets from the US, Singapore, and India. The DLDS achieved the best overall results: LOIO CV mean balanced accuracy (BAC) of 71.9%, 75.5%, and 82.0% at channel-, segment- and EEG-level, and LOSO CV mean BAC of 73.6%, 77.2%, and 81.8% at channel-, segment-, and EEG-level. The channel- and segment-level performance is comparable to the intra-rater agreement (IRA) of an expert of 72.4% and 82%. The DLDS can process a 30-minutes EEG in 4 seconds and can be deployed to assist clinicians in interpreting EEGs.Comment: 24 pages. For submission to International Journal of Neural Systems (IJNS

Book review: Derron Wallace, The culture trap: ethnic expectations and unequal schooling for Black youth

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