As agreed by Academic Board, November 2017
Vision
SOAS will continue to address the need for decolonisation by:
- Supporting further recognition and debate about the wide, complex and varied impacts of colonialism, imperialism and racism in shaping our university,
- Embedding within our policies and practices a deeper understanding that these impacts produce and reproduce injustices and inequalities within education,
- A stronger commitment to actively make redress for such impacts through ongoing collective dialogue within the university and through our public obligations,
- The provision of institution-level support to embed this understanding in SOAS’s contribution as a public university in the service of the wider world.
This entails a commitment to:
- A curriculum review process that addresses the preceding bullet points, challenges Eurocentrism and develops a toolkit to support further critical, nuanced and ongoing review of our teaching.
- Student systems and pedagogy that seek to redress access, engagement and attainment gaps caused by structural inequalities at all levels of study.
- Human Resources policies which seek to redress pay, workload, status and career path differentials for groups of staff subject to structural inequalities.
- A research agenda which enables us to take forward a range of questions related to decolonisation.
- Practices of reflective intellectual collaboration with institutions and researchers from the Global South as co-producers of knowledge.
- Forms of public engagement within London, the UK and the world which support ongoing conversations about the past, present and future significance of imperialism and colonialism.