By School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, QMUL. Co-chaired by Ashvin Devasundaram and Martin Barge.

WHEN: Friday, 13 October, 3pm BST
WHERE: Queen Mary University of London, GO Jones Lecture Theatre, 327 Mile End Road London E1 4NS

Reserve your seat here

What does decolonizing the university mean? Is it about representation of people of color in the faculty of the university? Is it about representation of voices that have not been heard in academia? Is it something else?

Sandew Hira, author of the 600 page book Decolonizing The Mind – a Guide to Decolonial Theory and Practice, discusses this question in his lecture at UWC. Hira explains how colonialism has created a specific form of knowledge production for the social sciences, mathematics and the hard sciences that has produced distorted views of the world of humans and nature. He analyzes the methods and mechanisms of how knowledge was produced outside the West and how colonialism has created methods and mechanisms that instituted mental slavery in science.

The European Enlightenment has produced comprehensive, coherent and integral theoretical frameworks to understand the world. Hira argues that an alternative comprehensive, coherent and integral theoretical framework is necessary and possible that challenges the European Enlightenment. He presents this framework of Decolonizing The Mind (DTM) in his latest book.

The DTM framework consists of three dimensions:

1. The critique of the Western colonization of the mind and thus Eurocentric knowledge production.

2. The development of an alternative comprehensive, coherent and integral knowledge production.

3. The translation of this new knowledge in viable policies to built a new pluriversal world civilization.

He argues that we need to move from general critique of Eurocentrism to specific critique of the various disciplines. That critique should be accompanied by the question what the practical value of decolonial critique is for policies that have been derived from those disciplines.

About Sandew Hira:

Sandew Hira, penname of Dew Baboeram, is secretary of the Decolonial International Network Foundation. He is co-editor of the book series Decolonizing The Mind together with Arzu Merali of the Islamic Human Rights Commission and Prof. Stephen Small from the University of California Berkeley.

Hira studied economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in Holland. He has written 25 books on different topics, among them colonial history.

His website is www.sandewhira.com

His CV is here: https://iisr.nl/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/CV-Sandew-Hira-20200921.pdf