Decolonisation statement

The department of Philosophy is committed to reflecting on how to expand the philosophical canon and incorporate perspectives into the curriculum that critically reflect on the ways that colonial histories have contributed to a distorted and unduly narrow ‘traditional canon’.

A group of Philosophy students sat in a lecture hall. One student is writing in a notebook. One student is working on a laptop.
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We are taking steps towards making our current modules conceptually and demographically decolonised. Here are details of some of the ongoing work in our current modules:

  • Writing Philosophy: (out of a total of four topics), one topic on Al-Ghazali, an 11th century muslim Persian philosopher, and one topic on black anger as a reaction to slavery and racism featuring a debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley.
  • Philosophy of sex: sexual racism; race, colonialism and pornography.
  • Ethics and Society: integrates ancient Chinese perspectives on well-being and virtue, addresses philosophical work on social oppression and the concepts used by social justice movements.
  • Feminism: black feminism, decolonising feminism, feminism and capitalism, feminism and climate crisis (including contributions of indigenous knowledge to addressing climate crisis).
  • Global Justice: colonialism and reparations.
  • Religion and the Good Life: includes discussions of virtues in Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Islam, and Judaism, alongside discussion of Christian virtues
  • Political Philosophy: features Mencius – a Chinese philosopher of the 4th century BC, and discussions of the racial contract.
  • Social philosophy: racial capitalism, transnational feminism.
  • Philosophy of Law: engages with movements for prison abolition.
  • Environmental Justice: Recognition justice, environmental racism, settler colonialism, indigenous environmental justice, rights of nature, whether conservation needs to be decolonized.
  • Memory and the Self: addresses debates within ancient Indian and Buddhist philosophy that predates a current debate in philosophy and cognitive science by 1500 - 2000 years.
  • Bioethics: takes up work on racism in healthcare.
  • Philosophy of Psychology: content on how most psychology is conducted on only WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic) populations, and the problems we encounter when we try to generalise from findings on WEIRD populations to how the human mind develops and works in general.
  • Living Well, Living Badly: the module on the philosophy of well-being examines early Confucian perspectives on well-being
  • Phenomenology: the work of Frantz Fanon, whose philosophy focuses centrally on questions of race and decolonisation.
  • Philosophy of education: liberatory pedagogical methods, including from Malcom X, bell hooks, W. E. B. Du Bois.

In the Philosophy and Religious ethics part of  the programme, specifically:

  • LGBTQ studies: students learn about diverse global conceptions of Gender and sexuality, and contributions from Asian, African and Chinese scholars. 
  • Religion in Britain: our topics include studies of faith, ethnicity and globalisation, and evolution of global spiritualities in the British religious marketplace, as well as "God is not a White Man" (Chine McDonald) and other critiques of white Western constructions of religion, power and privilege.
  • Ethnography of Lived Religion: our ethnographies focus on intersectional identities, examining gender, religion, race and ethnicity, as well as experiences of people of colour, migrant communities in the UK, indigenous spiritualities like Voudou, or faith in displaced communities. 
  • Feminist and Queer Studies in Religion: Jasbir Puar and  Andrew Kam Tuk Yip on identity assemblages. Minna Salami on Europatriarchy and black feminism, as well as global learning on gender and sexual diversities from South East Asia, Latin America, former Soviet Union, and Muslim communities in the West. 

The work of decolonising is an ongoing process. It has been supported by a series of talks organised by graduate students, and our recently introduced annual Expanding the Canon lecture, as well as our annual Minorities and Philosophy lecture, and recently instated Philosophy of Disability and Difference lecture.The department also has a database of decolonising resources for use in teaching, recently compiled by one of our graduate students, which we will continue to develop. If you have feedback on this work or  suggestions for future endeavours, please do contact us.