Oxford University’s own institutional history is deeply entangled with British colonialism, and the legacies of the Victorian imperial imaginary are still visible in the Rhodes foundation and in many scholarly disciplines. 

Our aim as convenors of this webinar series is to bring together higher education researchers working across a range of global academic spaces, sites and topics. All seven seminars address the impact of colonial legacies and contemporary racisms, in their different forms. We want to challenge the institutional colourblindness that has, until recently, characterised liberal universities, and allowed academic fields to imagine themselves as safe ‘post-racial’ spaces. Black Lives Matters has had a profound impact on universities, pedagogies and research agendas, surfacing submerged racisms, and forcing educational scholars to ‘see race again’ (Crenshaw et al 2021).  

The series will show how HE researchers - who engage as scholars, activists and policymakers - are responding to these political and analytical challenges, making sense of coloniality’s shadows and the emergence of new racisms. Whether addressing the way whiteness is learned, the coloniality of quality assurance infrastructures in Africa, neo-racism in the US, or the decolonising of research methods, they show how research in global higher education can draw on the insights of postcolonial theory and critical race theory.

Everyone is encouraged to sign up for as many of the webinars as they are able to attend. Certificates of participation will be available for those who come to at least six of the sessions

David Mills, Solomon Aware Zewolde and Natasha Robinson