Event Details

The Centre for Social Justice and Wellbeing in Education is delighted to present a seminar delivered by Professor Azumah Dennis, focused on rethinking post-16 education to envisage a more equitable and decolonial future.

‘Like a raison in rice pudding’, Black women in Higher Education are both invisible and hypervisible. Starting with a reflexive account of who she is and the stance from which she speaks, a necessary (though insufficient) part of a decolonial repertoire, Azumah uses a series of “what if” speculations to envision a more equitable, decolonial future for post-16 education:

What if:

• we accepted the purpose of post-16 education was to cultivate the ethical imagination.
• we placed the disciplinary founding fathers of philosophy and social sciences in their place; contextualising them and their ideas as emergent from a specific time and place, rather than universal?
• we refused a single authoritative voice, perspective or approach? Choosing instead to remain within indeterminacy, accepting all conclusions as tentative, all settlements as temporary – including this one?
• we located unheard, silenced or trivialised voices relevant to our disciplines – exemplified and amplified them, placing them alongside orthodox voices in an implicit motion of critique?
• we enacted a post-16 education in which the voices of policy makers, professionals and students engaged in mutually productive dialogue?

Read more about Professor Carol Azumah Dennis