Abstract
The growth in international students in the context of the global ‘internationalisation’ agenda within academia offers significant opportunities for broadening and deepening multicultural exchange, understanding and learning within universities. However, to do so effectively means acknowledging the reality that many universities around the world remain colonial strongholds of white, male, middle-class privilege. Drawing from our respective experiences as a female scholar of colour (SoC) and a female white senior lecturer within an Irish university, in this article, we argue that in order to realise their dreams of internationalisation, universities need to engage with the complex legacies of colonisation, racism, and existent inequalities in a way which makes substantive improvements to students experiences. This means moving beyond individualised neoliberal engagements with specific scholars to one which engages students’ diversity, difference and rich, situated experiences in ways which challenge and unpack the ongoing structures of power which reproduce social divisions in their everyday lives. While a solid body of literature already exists on both the need to decolonise curricula, and on the experiences of academics of colour, far less has been written about the experiences of SoCs and ethnic migrant students within ‘internationalised’ universities. Our article aims to make a contribution in this regard.
Introduction: The opportunities and challenges of the ‘internationalisation’ agenda
While the discourse of multiculturalism is in full force in the academy these days, the practice of multiculturalism actually facilitates the recolonization of communities marginalized on the basis of class, and racialized gender.
Chandra Talpade Mohanty (2003, p.178)
Universities in Ireland, like many worldwide, have eagerly embraced the global ‘internationalisation’ agenda in response to growing geopolitical and economic imperatives. The contraction of a public exchequer funding base has meant that universities in Ireland have had to reinvent themselves in order to survive in a post-industrial, global knowledge economy. Positioning themselves as entrepreneurial, innovative and market-relevant, internationalisation has formed an important part of this process, with considerable emphasis placed on the successful recruitment of growing numbers of international students. Although regular, systematic data is lacking, the number of international students studying in Ireland is reported to have increased by 45 per cent between the years of 2013 and 2017, from roughly 9300 enrolments to 13,500 across the country (ESRI, 2019). According to the Irish University Association website 1 , there are currently 32,000 international students studying in the country and students have become the biggest cohort of non-EU migrants arriving in Ireland every year (ESRI, 2019).
As well as providing much needed revenue to universities 2 , this poses significant opportunities to universities to move beyond the purely instrumentalist and transmission-based views of education that have informed many internationalisation strategies to date (see, for example, Wihlborg and Robson, 2018; Yemeni and Siege, 2016 and Young et al., 2016) to enrich the educational and research experiences of students and staff and to contribute to the broadening and deepening of understanding and engagement within increasingly diverse, multicultural academes and societies. However, to do so effectively means acknowledging the reality that most universities remain colonial strongholds of white, male, middle-class privilege and that efforts at accommodating, celebrating and building upon racial and gendered diversity need to both acknowledge and transform this. As the quote from Mohanty (2003) above indicates, this means moving beyond the hollow rhetoric and discourse of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) to concrete strategies and practices which engage with and challenge the gendered and colonial structures and discourses of power and privilege which reproduce social divisions in students’ everyday lives as well as within society/ies more broadly.
This article aims to make a contribution in this regard by drawing from the respective experiences of a migrant female scholar of colour (SoC) and a white female senior lecturer within an Irish university. While one of our positionalities is that of a female migrant SoC, our focus is on students from black, Asian, Irish Traveller, minority ethnic or migrant backgrounds more broadly and we employ the broad term ‘ethnic minority’ in this regard. Drawing on our joint experiences, we explore the specificities of alienation of ethnic minority scholars, together with challenges faced by teaching staff in attempting to negotiate and transform these conditions within the constraints of a neoliberal, market-oriented entrepreneurial university. While we are aware that our methodological approach and respective positionalities (on which more detail is provided below) leave us open to charges of both non-objectivity and non-generalisability, encouraged by Dennis (2018) we argue that a bracketing of emotions and experiences as ‘epistemic pollutants’ (p. 193) undermines our ability to articulate the visceral ways in which our respective experiences have been felt. In line with Dennis, we argue that ‘to dissolve the particularities of race, culture, gender and other embodiments is to dissolve the experience of being human…’ (p. 194). And to dissolve and negate such experiences is, we contend, to succumb to the recolonisation highlighted above by Mohanty (2003).
By moving beyond the assumed epistemological superiority assigned uniquely to Western universities as privileged sites of knowledge production, we seek to include the emotive experiences of ethnic minorities and to explore how/if these can be engaged with in a classroom setting in a way which facilitates and promotes deliberative processes of shared empathy, exchange, understanding and knowledge leading to challenges to and transformations in the structures, practices and discourses of power and privilege which promote social and racial polarisation within academia and beyond. In doing so, recognising Ireland's and specifically Irish academia's complex association with the process of colonisation not only needs to be acknowledged – it is the history in most urgent need of redressal if Ireland is to build a robust and just pedagogical infrastructure.
We develop our argument as follows. In the next section, highlighting the burden of embodying the ‘single story’ (Adichie, 2009), we outline what, for us, a truly internationalised Irish university must broadly entail. We also provide a brief overview of the current situation of Irish universities in this respect. In light of this background, the next section details the standpoint of a female SoC experiencing university life in Ireland as a site of Saidian conflict, followed by an account of a white, female academic working in the same university which she experiences as a site of pedagogical-entrepreneurial conflict. We conclude with how such sites of learning, exchange and knowledge might be transformed in ways which move us beyond the sterile ‘audit culture’ and individualised approaches of current EDI initiatives to ways which seek to upend and reconfigure the spaces – physical and intellectual – through which such transformations can take place.
The internationalisation project and the global academia
Migrant students coming from different countries, regions, cultures and religions metamorphose and homogenise themselves in the imagination of Westerners into a ‘single story’ (Adichie, 2009). For example, the hijab worn by an immigrant student, no matter from which part of the world, pushes her life story into the narrative trope of the backward Muslim. Students coming to the West or ethnic minority students within the West embody these single stories in their bodies and in their everyday life through their skin colour, through their accent, and, above everything else, through becoming the real Other whose story has already been understood through dominant media perceptions. This embodiment of a history, which is not real but imagined, is the biggest burden that lies on the shoulders of every ethnic minority student – the burden of embodying a story that is not their own. EDI efforts of universities do little to stop such flattening of identities. Targeted, for the most part, at the individual minority students themselves, they fail to engage broader imagined histories and racialised narratives within the wider student and faculty body – imagined histories and racialised narratives which stem from the gendered coloniality of power which flattened and subjugated diverse identities and ignored the intersection of race, coloniality and gender (Lugones, 2010). It is these imagined histories and racialised narratives which should become the central focus of projects of decolonisation.
Calls to decolonise universities have, of course, gained momentum in recent years, notably following the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in the University of Capetown and the ensuing Rhodes Must Fall Oxford campaign in the UK in 2015, together with a range of other campaigns aimed at challenging the Western bias in universities (Chantiluke et al., 2018). There have been a number of important contributions from a range of scholars as to what such a decolonisation project might mean. Broadly seeking to question the epistemological authority assigned uniquely to the Western university as the privileged site of knowledge production, scholars from the global South and North alike, have collectively highlighted the importance of colonialism, empire, racism and discrimination as key forces shaping contemporary universities, in a context where their role has been systematically erased from view. While, for some (Bhambra et al., 2018; de Souza Santos, 2017; Oyedemi, 2020; Peters, 2015), the focus is on epistemologies, knowledge and curricula, for others (Baez, 2000; Gititi, 2002; Gunning, 2000; Harris and Gonzalez, 2012), the focus is on the experiences of faculty of colour and/or ethnic minorities where gendered and racial discrimination appear to go hand in hand. As we have already noted, less attention has been given, to date, to the experiences of ethnic minority students in this regard. Decolonisation remains, for the moment, a contested term, consisting of a wide variety of conceptualisations, approaches, normative concerns and political projects. For us, as we have noted above, the decolonisation work necessitated by such a project goes beyond the diversification of curricula, staffing and research. Drawing on our combined experiences within our own institutions, together with our engagement with colleagues further afield, decolonisation work necessitates a process which moves beyond individualised neoliberal engagements with minority scholars alone in a subjectified, universal manner to one which acknowledges the discriminatory, colonial roots of our universities. Such work must link EDI initiatives with classroom activities and pedagogies aimed at engaging students’ diversity, difference and rich, situated experiences and knowledges so that the discourses and structures of power which reproduce gendered and racialised divisions and discriminations can be identified, challenged and transformed.
In this context, Ireland is a particularly interesting case as the country played a unique role in the history of British colonisation 3 . Levels of racial discrimination among Irish university graduates are high. Over a quarter (27 per cent) oppose more Black people coming to Ireland and just under a fifth (22 per cent) oppose more Muslims coming (IHREC/ESRI, 2020). More broadly across Irish society, migrants are five times more likely than Irish citizens to experience discrimination when seeking employment in Ireland (IHREC/ESRI (2019). While, on the one hand, Irish people suffered extreme forms of exploitation by the British, on the other, Irish soldiers also constituted a regular part of the imperial army (Beatty, 2016). Similarly, Irish universities paradoxically operated in both service and in opposition to colonialism, although more often the former than the latter. As O’Neill (2020) notes ‘Trinity [College Dublin] has produced many more ideas and graduates in the service of empire than it has people who have publicly criticised it… [yet] it is not difficult to discern a coyness about empire in Irish institutions like Trinity, or the former Queens Colleges at Cork and Galway, or indeed University College Dublin, each of which has produced generations of imperial graduates’. More broadly, scholars such as McVeigh (1995) and Walsh (2018) highlight the exclusionary, elitist and discriminatory nature of Irish universities in the post-colonial period, features which persist to the present day. While, as noted already, systematic data is not available on the experiences of migrant minorities in Irish universities, a broad body of research does reveal the stark gender and social inequalities which underpin the contemporary Irish academe (see, for example, Grummell et al., 2009; Morley, 2014; O’Connor, 2014). While, to some extent, this is reflective of international trends, it also reflects particular socio-cultural norms unique to the Irish context. Harford (2020) provides a detailed historical overview of these. Including, although by no means limited to, the power of the Catholic Church in controlling key institutional structures including education following the retreat of the colonising power, she notes that men, predominantly Irish-born, Catholic and educated in single-sex schools, have dominated all levels of leadership across Irish universities since the emergence of a university framework during the colonial period in the early years of the twentieth century. As she states (2020), ‘From their inception, universities in Ireland have been bastions of male and middle-class privilege…, and while a discourse of equality permeates the policy spaces in which universities must interact, the data on both gender and class inequalities is clear’ (p. 195). This clearly has implications for racialised minorities also as evidenced in recent survey data. The failure of the Irish university system to acknowledge, engage and transform the ongoing racialised, gendered and exclusionary legacies of its complex colonial past can only fuel such discrimination.
Coming from the context established above, we use feminist standpoint as a methodology which recognises the value of subjective lived experiences. This school of thought started off in the 1980s when the gaps ‘between actual and ideal relations between knowledge and power’ (Harding, 2007) were challenged by the likes of Sandra Harding, Nancy Hartsock, Dorothy Smith and others by introducing the idea of ‘strong objectivity’. Standpoint theory comes from the belief that the location of the subjective experience can lead to a unique understanding of the society. Standpoint theorists like Sandra Harding (1983, 2003), Donna Haraway (1988), Nancy Hartsock (1983, 1998), Dorothy Smith (1987, 1990a, 1990b, 1999) and Alison Jagger (1983) critiqued the blind pursue of ‘objectivity’ among science practices for reinforcing gendered and hierarchical stereotypes in the society, and naturalising them to the extent of being considered ‘objective’ and thus producing sexist and androcentric results in research in biology and other branches of science.
What started off as a critique of the androcentric nature of various disciplines of science led the way to critique the very concept of objectivity and what it means. As one of us has written elsewhere, if we take the critique of standpoint theory beyond its gender analysis to other forms of biases in research practices, we will be led to the conclusion that eurocentrism and racism are some of the principal biases within the ‘objective’ realms of research (name removed, 2021). In this paper, we will use our respective standpoints and show how barriers in various forms are faced by various positionalities while working towards a more decolonial university space. In order to be able to make the pedagogical and infrastructural advancements necessary to make Western university spaces truly global and accessible, the roadblocks brought to light through these situational experiences must be addressed.
In this paper, we have used feminist standpoint as our methodology in order to use our subjective experiences as a feminist SoC and a white feminist pedagogical practitioner located within the same Western educational institutional framework. There are variations of power, access to resources, as well as a fundamental difference in the life experiences through which we both have come to reach this particular university space. However, our common feminist politics has meant that through research and pedagogy, both of us have been trying to effectively engage this space with a politics of inclusion. Following Lugones (2010) and others, we both adhere to a decolonial feminism which emphasises communal resistance, relationality, and coalition-building among marginalised groups and their allies. The following section will discuss in detail what that means, and what our experiences can tell us about the challenges of universalisation of Western education in the Irish context.
The brown female scholar in the West as a site of Saidian conflict: Author A
I migrated from India to join this university as a PhD with a fully funded scholarship. After successfully submitting my thesis, since then I have been able to win two subsequent prestigious postdoctoral grants. It can be said that the decision to migrate to Ireland has given me the professional tools to continue a career in academia. My experience of the Irish university space as a globalised space for more than 8 years is useful for this paper not only in terms of educational means but also socio-cultural means available for an internationally migrant student to thrive. I am a woman of colour not only because of how the Other imagines me, but because of how I imagined myself in this new space. And the mutation of that imagination from a self-identification as a middle class, upper caste woman who has benefitted from the discriminatory caste system, to the one of a Brown woman is one from a position of power to a position of hierarchy. It is a transition hard to accept, when popular discourse confirms repeatedly the glory of democracy and secularism of the Other that is the West.
Said (1979), while defining the scope of scholarly works that constitute the Orientalist discourse, said, The determining impingement on most knowledge produced in the contemporary West (and here I speak mainly about the United States) is that it be non-political, that is, scholarly, academic, impartial, above partisan or small-minded doctrinal belief. One can have no quarrel with such an ambition in theory, perhaps, but in practice the reality is much more problematic. No one has ever devised a method for detaching the scholar from the circumstances of life, from the fact of his involvement (conscious or unconscious) with a class, a set of beliefs, a social position, or from the mere activity of being a member of a society (p.17)
So what are these circumstances in life in which a migrant international scholar finds themselves in the white university space? Anne Mulhall (2020), when talking about the inherent structural biases and inequalities caused by whiteness in Irish academia, notes: The “political” is perhaps difficult to escape if your existence is itself politicized. There is an expectation that the BAME [Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic] writer or writer of migrant background will or should write on particular themes and experiences, or that the writer is happy to be categorised as a representative of a particular community (p.97).
SoCs in Western academic spaces are not a homogenous group in themselves. There are those who are citizens and thus have some access to privileges from state resources. Immigrant SoCs are on the other hand mostly at risk of facing the brutal bureaucratic visa and immigration procedures of the same state. Racial and gender discriminations are often common experiences shared by both these groups, as reflected in the prevalent body of literature on diversity, racial and gender politics (Begum and Saini, 2019; Das, Dey, Khoo and Amoo-Adare, 2024; Kidman, 2020). However, experiences of immigrant SoC have significant differences – complicated by layers of isolation and distress which need to be reflected in this post-racial world of celebration of diversity (Asmar, 2005).
The experience of migration across countries and continents has social, political and cultural ramifications on academic experiences which are thus not reflected in their works. The geographical isolation that these migrant students experience also leads to social and cultural isolation – and issues of assimilation which are different from those of minorities from the same country. I draw on my experience in the Irish academy since 2014 and Nirmal Puwar's concept of ‘space invaders’ (2004) to focus on the centuries of religious, racial and colonial history that the students of colour signify for the settled population in Ireland.
There are three significant points of difference which separate the experience of the immigrant transnational SoC from those who are citizens in that country: access to state resources by lieu of citizenship, shared socio-cultural and political habitus, and existence of support systems in the form of family and communal ties within the same country. These have profound implications on the enrichment of social capital, and separation from the family support system 4 results not only in further social isolation, but also in the effect their academic capital has on their lives. Any university aspiring for an internationalisation must address this difference and take measures to address these issues. However, most Irish EDI units and ISOs are operating in a mental-health and global racial discourse that fail to acknowledge this.
The project of learning is not only limited to educational courses, but familiarising oneself with the habitus and one's place within it. This place is one fraught with recontextualising one's cultural capital within the field, often in a racial/gender/class hierarchy distinctly different from one's previous self-identity. The effort to familiarise oneself is a never-ending project requiring physical, intellectual and emotional labour. The choice of attending a Western academic space – either in search of access to better facilities or to improved fellowships – for the female SoC thus comes with the hidden labour of pursuing cultural and symbolic capital in order to situate oneself. The female SoC embodies the site of a conflict between ‘performing diversity’ (Bannerji, 1995) and eliminating the same diversity. This hidden labour of joining the Western academia remains unacknowledged to date. The SoC finds themselves alone in this journey, with no EDI or International Student's Office offering an orientation beyond the physical space of the university. The unique individuality of the PhD process with no classmates ensures that the first year becomes one of the hardest times for these scholars. With no friends, family, or visa or financial means to frequently travel back to their home countries, PhD SoCs often accept anxiety and loneliness as one of the costs of internationalised education.
This also brings us to the professional opportunities of socialisation such as academic conferences. In academic spaces like conferences or summer schools, SoCs mostly find themselves sitting in front of an overwhelmingly white audience in Western universities. Clothes, accent, skin colour, pronunciation are all markers that influence these interactions. As the social conditioning for a woman requires, our appearance as minority persons of colour, as women of colour, is always visible. You are visible in a room by virtue of that difference, even before you have opened your mouth. You feel visible. The process of knowledge production constantly juggles with the process of identity confirmation, process of personality amplification, and the constant process of negotiating unfamiliar spaces. The bodies do not belong – they are ‘space invaders’. As Nirmal Puwar (2004) said, Social spaces are not blank and open for anybody to occupy. There is a connection between bodies and space, which is built, repeated and contested over time. While all can, in theory, enter, it is certain types of bodies that are tacitly designated as being the “natural” occupants of specific positions. Some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked out as trespassers, who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually), circumscribed as being “out of place”. Not being the somatic norm, they are space invaders (p.8).
We are prone to segregating academia as one part of life and, in state policies, it is clearly reflected by the almost exclusive focus on the university both as a physical as well as intellectual space. They are, unfortunately, not independent of each other. Here, I find Bourdieu's (1993) concept of field and habitus useful in how different fields simultaneously influence and reinforce each other. As a human being, staying far away from the few other humans you feel close to can be really trying. In reflecting on the experiences of a migrant woman SoC, appreciation of this factor can singularly shift that focus from the university to all aspects of life 5 . Our generation is seeing the largest number of women coming to the West for education, and the issues that we face remain largely unexplored. These issues are not only in the academic scholarly arena but also in the domestic quotidian challenges. Yet, somehow ironically, our training to explore the unseen in the everyday fails to make us inspect our own every day.
We are committing epistemic violence while physically being subjected to direct forms of symbolic violence 6 . There are multiple identities negotiated in the process of my subject formation – Indian, upper caste, woman, woman of colour, upper caste woman, woman with cultural capital, woman with a white partner. None of these is either exclusive, or complementary. They slip into their roles at various points of my academic interactions, creating a fragile space of constantly interactive identities fraught with tension. Are theoretical projects considered too ambitious? Are empirical works more conducive to be funded in this globalised, neoliberal era where information rather than theorisation is appreciated? Or is it, just maybe, that we are seen as able to produce only a certain form of knowledge? This may not be a consciously inculcated and furthered trend, but may be a subversive train of thought inside both the Western academia as well as within non-Western students (it will be worth here to remember that due to colonial history, most of us have gone through a Western education system which, to this day, promulgates the Oriental conceptions of knowledge and knowledge building processes).
My own experience as a migrant scholar in Ireland highlights some of the specific forms of ‘othering’ that take place here – a restriction and localisation of intellectual work; the added responsibilities of decolonisation work; and the emotional and ongoing, never-ending intellectual work to familiarise oneself with the socio-political habitus of the host country. Decolonisation of academic practices, discourses and policies is very much needed as a structural response towards engaging with my experiences and moving towards building a more inclusive academic structure.
The white female academic in the university as a site of pedagogical-entrepreneurial conflict: Author B
But how does the work of decolonisation look for someone who is Irish, white, is socio-politically ensconced within the society and long engaged with praxis as a teacher? As I (Author B) have found, structural hindrances exacerbated by the relentless pursuit of profits and markets and the commodification of education which characterises the modern, neoliberal university (Connell, 2022; Giroux, 2009) make such attempts fraught with frustration. As a privileged, white female academic researching and teaching in the field of global development studies, the double hypocrisy of my problematic positionality is not lost on me. It was, of course, my chosen place of work – the university – where colonial intellectuals developed the theories of racism and popularised discourses, norms and practices that bolstered support for colonial endeavours and provided the necessary ethical and intellectual grounds for the dispossession, oppression and domination of colonised subjects (see, for example, Bhambra et al., 2018). And it was, of course, my chosen disciplinary specialisation which drew on these racist theories, norms and discourses to develop an industry devoted, in its incarnation at least, to policies, programmes and practices of dispossession, oppression and domination all in the name of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ 7 . However, it was also within this industry where, working as a young, naïve and most ineffective ‘technical advisor’ on a large European-funded development project in West Africa in the mid-1990s, the importance of decolonisation work first became apparent to me. More recently, in 2019–2020, my involvement in a collaborative project which aimed at promoting social justice within universities provided me with some intellectual space to (re-)consider this position of privilege and the potentially transformative power it affords to engage in decolonisation work 8 . It is in this context that the specific experiences and challenges I set out below emerged.
The collaborative project (entitled ‘Disciplines Inquiring into Social Challenges - DISCs’) focused on the professional development of teaching and learning capacities across disciplines in the themes of ‘gender consciousness, interculturalism, and community’. However, as we, as participants, met to discuss our experiences, plans and ambitions for both the project and our own teaching, it immediately became apparent that these could not be divorced from the broader institutional context in which they are embedded. While, as I discuss below, we manage to retain some control over our respective curricula, the broader institutional environment of the market-oriented, neoliberal, entrepreneurial university focused on fostering individual, skills, achievements and self-investment mitigates against both pedagogical practices which seek to promotes deliberative processes of shared empathy, exchange, understanding and knowledge and the broader political and cultural context which shape and inform students’ everyday lives.
Decolonisation through curriculum
As bell hooks (1984: 12) states, ‘The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy… urging all of us to open our minds and hearts so that we can know beyond the boundaries of what is acceptable, so that we can think and rethink, so that we can create new visions…’. With this in mind, the DISCs project encouraged us to develop specific innovations within one of our modules over the course of the project. I chose my first-year undergraduate module ‘Introduction to Development’ which I have taught for 6 years. One of my main goals was to decolonise this curriculum as much as possible while still emphasising the need for students to draw on peer-reviewed material while developing their understanding. As Bhambra et al. (2018) have noted, ‘Subjects of Western scholarship are enduringly pale, male (and often stale); where people of colour do appear, they are all too often tokenistically represented’ (p. 6). Both post-colonial scholars and anti-racist activists have made significant strides in highlighting this colonial, Western bias and have emphasised the need to decolonise and diversify curricula to address what de Souza Santos (2017), referring to the Western colonial appropriation or attempt at ‘killing’ of knowledge embraced and propounded by subaltern groups, terms ‘epistemicide’ and to work towards ‘global cognitive justice’. This involves an acceptance of diverse forms of knowledge of matter, society, life and spirit, along with diverse concepts of what counts as knowledge or, going back to my seminal experiences in West Africa, to paraphrase Robert Chambers (1997) ‘whose knowledge counts’.
Happily, this is not as difficult an endeavour within the field of ‘Development’ as one might think. While the hegemonic view of development remains rooted (implicitly if not explicitly) in Western ideals and theories of modernisation, these have been strongly critiqued by scholars from the global South. Two alternative theoretical positions have emerged, together with a broad range of alternative approaches and practices which emphasise the agency and voice of the hitherto subaltern ‘other’. Clearly labelling these contrasting theories, epistemologies and approaches as ‘Views from the Global South’ – in the course handbook; on the online platform; and, possibly most memorably for students, in assignments, I managed to highlight the diversity and multiplicity of knowledges to be engaged with when considering ‘development’. Moreover, locating the key thinkers and scholars within their socio-political context rather than allowing them to speak from a place which is just there, ‘that place which is no place’ as Dennis (2018, p.190) puts it, as well as highlighting the many contests have taken place in challenging and resisting the hegemony of Western knowledge, I exposed the field of knowledge generation as one of political activism and contestation.
Decolonisation through pedagogy
Somewhat less happily, the ever-increasing exigencies of the neoliberal university render attempts at decolonisation through teaching practices and methods in the classroom rather more difficult. The dearth of opportunities for students in Irish higher education institutions to discuss or learn about the similarities and differences of their lived experiences to those of their peers from ethnic minority backgrounds has been noted. As the RIA/BC (2020) note, ‘Cultural norms in both Ireland and the UK within higher education are largely based upon traditional white Irish or white UK mainstream values… very limited accommodation is being made at present to understand and accommodate a wider range of values’ (p.4)
As Bryan (2021) cogently argues, emotions and feeling are central to approaches to teaching for social justice. While her work does not explicitly address issues of racism, epistemic hierarchies and/or the need for decolonisation specifically within academia, her particular emphasis on forms of knowledge that are ‘difficult’ or in some way traumatic or destabilising for learners makes her work very useful when thinking about what is required to decolonise the classroom. One of the central requirements for this is, of course, time. Time for facilitated debate and exchange within small groups; time to engage with feelings of anger, disbelief, rejection, revolt; time to debrief and reflect together on what all this means for the group and for society more broadly; and time to think about and agree on how the shared space of the classroom might be rendered more inclusive and welcoming to all. But time is at a premium in the profit driven neoliberal university. And so too is space. As Connell (2022) has cogently argued, the shift within neoliberal universities from institutions of knowledge and public good to market-driven entities focused on profit, rankings, and managerial control, exacts a significant toll on students and staff alike. Ever-increasing class sizes; loss of control over timetabling; the architectural impediments of tiered, fixed seating all mitigate against any efforts to engage in effective pedagogies to help decolonise the classroom. In the context of my own module which, ever increasing, last year had 160 diverse students 10 , my requests for both a timetable change and room changes were denied. The module is timetabled for two, separate 50-minute slots in the week. When I requested one 2-hour session instead as was the case some years ago, I was informed (by our faculty administrator who is responsible for timetabling) that this is ‘not good pedagogical practice’. My two allocated classrooms had closely packed fixed seating in tiered rows rendering any group work next to impossible. With ever-increasing student numbers, this is now the preferred architecture in my department and all larger classrooms have been ‘renovated’ in this way to allow for larger class sizes.
The university as a site of pedagogical-entrepreneurial conflict
The above experiences highlight some of the immediate conflicts between the pedagogical and entrepreneurial imperatives of the contemporary, neoliberal, market-oriented internationalising university, notably in the context of the necessary decolonising work discussed earlier. Two broader issues also merit consideration within this context. The first is the neoliberal individualisation of responsibility and agency, thereby averting the focus from broader institutional structures, policies and practices. As Holmwood (2018) has argued, higher education is no longer regarded as a social right, but rather, something that is seen as the personal responsibility of individuals. Seeing the students as consumers automatically brings the focus on which group is the biggest in terms of ability to pay the course fees and where their interest lies – thus making decolonisation and diversification of the curriculum not a central issue but rather a cosmetic addition. In this context, calls to decolonise universities are destined to fall on deaf ears as the entrepreneurial university is race-blind, being only interested in the differences between individuals and not those between groups. The second is the danger posed by consumerist forms of diversity initiatives as highlighted by Scarritt (2019) in a US context. As he argues, the focus on the profitability of diversity in terms of marketing and student recruitment rather than on any efforts at promoting meaningful inclusion and multiplicity can actually promote rather than challenge racism as ‘universities’ heightened revenue-generating functions inspire them to sell diversity as an attractive quality, divorced from its association with race and social justice’ (p.188). Chakravarty et al. (2020) highlight this same tendency of promoting diversification without actually doing anything to mitigate potential downsides in Irish academia as well.
My experiences as a lecturer attempting to carve out some space for students to critically engage with the racialised narratives embodied in the single story and to reflect upon the resultant implications for power, privilege and change highlight some of the fundamental incompatibilities between the neoliberal, entrepreneurial, ‘internationalising’ university and necessary decolonisation work this demands.
Conclusion
Our respective experiences highlight the urgent need for meaningful engagement with the growing calls for decolonisation within academia. While our own experiences are particular to the Irish case (and, indeed, just one university in this regard), both the exclusionary colonial roots and the ‘internationalisation’ missions of contemporary, neoliberal universities which form the backdrop to our experiences are common to many higher education institutions globally. Scholars such as Giroux (2009) and Connell (2022) have detailed the many fundamental systemic problems of neoliberal universities worldwide. As Connell (2022) notes, neoliberal transformations such as the casualisation of labour, overworking of staff, and precarity of employment particularly affect adjunct academics, women and scholars from marginalised backgrounds.
Decolonisation work is therefore a broader imperative than just the case described here. The specific form that such decolonisation work should take will necessarily vary from context to context. It is imperative that initiatives and activities in this regard do not just ape those of other countries, but that they be rooted in each region's specific historic and socio-cultural context.
In an Irish context, while there are indications that universities’ recent experiences in attempting to tackle gendered inequalities (necessitated by several high profile legal challenges) will inform attempts to address EDI issues, (RIA/BC, 2020), as we hope we have convincingly argued, efforts need to move far beyond the ‘audit culture’ of such efforts (Ahmed, 2017) coupled with individualised, apolitical approaches such as networking, mentoring, invited lectures and lunchtime mindfulness sessions. At a practical level, Irish universities need to match their ambitions for revenue generation through international student recruitment with their responsibilities for their broader duty of care. It is not acceptable for students to be left to deal with their immediate domestic issues once they arrive. The acute housing crisis faced by students, especially students of colour and students from developing countries, need to be addressed. Visa processes should not remain traumatic and expensive bureaucratic hassles, but rather processes that ensure the dignity of transnational immigrant SoCs. Initiatives like added financial support for immigrant students can prove to be a major support system. For example, DCU's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences has, for the past few years, successfully put such an effort into practice. Under this scheme, postgraduate students who had to pay €400 in immigration and visa fees could claim a refund from the Faculty. University EDI efforts need to focus on the needs of these students rather than their marketability alone. At a pedagogical level, EDI initiatives need to engage with the contradictions which arise from the neoliberal commodification of education which leave overburdened staff ill-equipped to engage in any meaningful way with equality, diversity and inclusion. Teaching staff and the classrooms in which they teach need to be adequately resourced to allow for engagement in affective pedagogies which facilitate students to engage with both the country's complex histories and contemporary dynamics of exclusion, discrimination and racism.
It is not difficult to make the connections between broader political, racialised and gendered discriminations in Irish society and Author A's personal experiences as a student in Irish academia. However, to vocalise and theorise such connections can have negative ramifications on their relationships within academia, as well as their future prospects in this sector. To take such a risk becomes more possible with a support structure. One grows with a job and a secure visa status, not when your visa needs to be renewed every year. And one grows in a context where the hidden labour of performing diversity while simultaneously attempting to eliminate it is reduced. It is perhaps one of the most significant reasons why more work on the experiences of migrant students have not emerged, and hopefully this article will bridge that gap to some extent.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Science Foundation Ireland, (grant number 21/PATH-A/9508).
