Universities and museums are places of producing and evaluating knowledge. Historically, they are dominated by Eurocentric or Western ways of thinking in the tradition of the European enlightenment. The decolonizing movement aims to challenge and transform these ways knowledge is constituted and taught at universities and other educational institutions by giving voice to representatives of hitherto marginalized knowledge systems, for example from indigenous and colonized peoples or from social classes who have been excluded from the academic system.

In this lecture series, we will give an introduction to the decolonizing movement and its context of postcolonial theory. We will further discuss strategies for decolonizing academic systems and museums like including non-European perspectives into the curriculum, actively recruiting diverse students and faculty, examining practices of appropriation and shedding light onto the power relations within the education system. Hereby, we want to acknowledge the uncomfortable presence of colonial thought within academia and challenge the colonial legacy in contemporary society.

The lecture series is part of the Aurora European Universities Alliance teaching programme. Faculty members from the Aurora Universities will contribute to these issues from their different disciplinary and geopolitical background. We will also include non-European perspectives (e.g. US and New Zealand as a ‘settler society’) and inputs from museum curators.

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