Despite high levels of informality, Africa’s statistics on COVID-19 mortality have been paradoxically low in comparison to countries in the Global North. Examining studies that attribute low counts to poor statistical reporting, Kate Meagher argues tha…
Category: Decolonisation
The Possibilities of Nostalgia for Academic Freedom
The word nostalgia connects a sense return and homecoming with sadness, and was originally used in a medical sense to describe the melancholy felt by soldiers fighting away from home. In this post Mary Evans considers how nostalgia for a past academy p…
We need to interrogate the North-South dichotomy in African Studies publishing
Relations between Namibia and its former coloniser, Germany, are impacted by ongoing negotiations about reparations for a brutal and violent past. The 1904-8 genocide that decimated large parts of the indigenous population continues to cast a shadow in…
3 Challenges for a reparatory social science
Reflecting on work uncovering the colonial genealogies of foundational works in the social sciences, Gurminder K Bhambra argues for a reparatory social science and highlights three challenges that any reparatory project must face in order to be success…
Book Review: Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries edited by Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt
In Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries, editors Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt bring together contributors to explore the variety of creative initiatives undertaken by academic libraries and archives to open their do…
Expanding the narrative in libraries and archives
Jess Crilly introduces the new collection Narrative Expansions (Facet Publishing), co-edited with Regina Everitt, which brings together contributors to document recent work to decolonise the library and archive. This blogpost originally appeared on LS…
Book Review: Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation by Fadi A. Bardawil
In Revolution and Disenchantment: Arab Marxism and the Binds of Emancipation, Fadi A. Bardawil uncovers the archives of the Marxist Lebanese Left from the 1950s to the start of the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, taking this history of revolutionary thought as a premise to explore the relation between theory and practice, the making of intellectuals and the … Continued
Moving beyond the talk: Universities must become anti-racist
In 2016, Dr Akile Ahmet wrote a piece for the LSE Impact Blog entitled ‘We need to speak about race’: Examining the barriers to full and equal participation in university life’. Nearly five years on, she reflects on the state of Black and minority ethnic representation and inclusion in Higher Education. She finds that whilst … Continued
The COVID-19 crisis has confirmed that a strong knowledge system is key to a just, peaceful and sustainable world
COVID-19 has highlighted the need to work with researchers all around the world at the same time that it has also exposed the inequalities in the global research and knowledge system. In this piece, John Young from the International Network for Advancing Science and Policy (INASP) reflects on the importance of an equitable knowledge system as … Continued
How to research policing? Talk to people who have been arrested. 4 insights from 150 arrested individuals on the role and reform of the police.
Over past months, the Black Lives Matter movement’s denunciation of police violence has been spotlighted in the wake of high-profile police killings of Black men in the United States. Over the past five years, the cities of Cleveland and Baltimore entered “consent decrees” to undertake civil rights improvements in their police forces after Federal Government … Continued