Getting decolonial praxis right!

There is a wide acknowledgment of the need to decolonise higher education (HE). There are many definitions of what it means to decolonise, but most analyses agree that to decolonise means to challenge how colonial systems and relationships create the logic of cultural, social, political and intellectual domination in an education system that maintain hierarchical relationships between different ways of knowing and how these ways are framed.

In response to the need to decolonise, scholarly work has applied decolonial and postcolonial theories to HE, focusing on unjust and unequal power relations with regard to knowledge production, cultural, institutional and policy relations, curriculum and pedagogy. Yet, little has been written in HE journals on how and to what extent the Western mono-version of universities is actually being challenged in curricula, pedagogic, cultural and linguistic practices on the ground in university classrooms. Hence, the need for the special issue in Teaching in Higher Education, titled: Possibilities and complexities of decolonising higher education: critical perspectives on praxis that myself and my colleagues (Kathy Luckett and Greg Misiaczek) were very pleased to curate.