Decolonising Sociological Studies: The seminar series

Written by Dr Briony Hannell, Dr Julie Walsh and Dr Joanne Britton

In November 2022, the Everyday Life and Critical Diversities Research Theme invited colleagues to discuss Ali Meghji’s (2021) Decolonizing Sociology: An Introduction (Polity). The event prompted a lively exchange between academic staff, Professional Services staff, and PGR students who were keen for us to find ways to continue the discussion and help them decolonise their research and teaching. 

In response, in January 2023 we – Jo Britton as the Director of One University, Julie Walsh as the Athena Swan Champion and Briony Hannell as the Decolonising the Curriculum lead – successfully applied to the Department of Sociological Studies Strategic Research Fund to deliver a Decolonising Sociological Studies seminar series. The series aimed to critically build on the momentum from the Decolonising Sociology event and, for us, our collaboration offered an exciting opportunity to consolidate previous work relating to the decolonising agenda, whilst building on the momentum of the seminar. We also wanted the series to enable a wider range of voices to contribute to the energy created; we opened-up the seminar series to our colleagues in the wider local and international community, inviting those beyond the Department to attend and offering hybrid format sessions. 

The seminar series featured three esteemed external speakers with distinct interests, but a shared focus on, and passion for, decolonising our discipline, and we wanted to foster this in and across the seminars. We wanted the series to push back against the silences and erasures which continue to bear upon higher education, and engage with enduring challenges of under-representation, inequality, and systemic barriers to inclusion. To do this, we invited our speakers to broadly consider: how their research and wider scholarship contributes to racial equity and justice; and how racialised hierarchies and the politics of knowledge production have impacted on their own career development and scholarship. 

The first of the three seminars featured Professor Mark Christian, Chair of Africana Studies at Lehman College, City University of New York, United States. Mark – also a doctoral Alumni of the department – has been based in the United States since the early 2000s and joined us remotely from his home in New York to discuss his recent book Transatlantic Liverpool: Shades of the Black Atlantic (2022, Lexington Books). Mark offered a semi-autoethnographic account of the context shaping his study of Liverpool’s Black British heritage. Drawing upon Paul Gilroy’s sociological and cultural studies’ theories related to the Black Atlantic, Mark offered an account of the British slave port’s often overlooked history. Moving between his own personal history as a ‘Liverpool Born Black’ and archival documents, Mark argued that the longevity of Black presence in the city invokes a history of discrimination and stigma. Providing an overview of Transatlantic Liverpool, he explained how the book provides the reader with deeper insight into the transatlantic in regard to the ‘movement of Black souls’ and their struggle for acceptance in a hostile environment. He also reflected on his personal experiences within the academy in the UK compared to the US, his decision to build his career in the US in Africana Studies and Black Studies, and his perspective on Pan-African solidarities.

The second seminar was led by Professor Mary Boatemaa Setrana, Director of the Centre for Migration Studies (CMS) at the University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana. This contributed to a busy week of seminars and masterclasses that Mary delivered as part of the Erasmus+ teaching and training mobility scheme (partnered with the Department’s Dr Rebecca Murray). In addition to a seminar for the Migration Research Group and a PhD Migration Masterclass, Mary delivered our seminar, entitled “Decolonising knowledge production on South-South migration”. Within this, she spoke about her collaborative work with the UKRI-funded Centre for Migration for Development and Equality (MIDEQ), interrogated colonial legacies and inequalities in knowledge production, and problematised normative assumptions about the production of knowledge on south-south migration. As the seminar came to a close, Mary spoke about how colonial legacies continue to materially and epistemically restrict Southern scholarship – for instance in terms of access to funding, academic publishing infrastructures, and the dominance of Eurocentric theoretical frameworks – and she emphasised the need to consider alternative ways of producing knowledge that better capture the diversity of doing, being, and knowing in the Global South. Drawing upon her own experiences in the field, she positioned oral histories, indigenous knowledge systems, and the creative arts as particularly useful epistemological and methodological approaches to decolonising knowledge dynamics in and from the Global South. 

The final seminar brought together much of the discussion from the previous two sessions by welcoming Dr Roda Madziva, Associate Professor and Global Engagement Officer at the School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Drawing on her experience of conducting migration research in both the Global South and Global North, Roda emphasised a need to work ‘with’ communities, offering a critical interrogation of enduring dominant colonialist assumptions underpinning notions of ‘harm’, ‘giving a voice’ and ‘capacity building’. Roda also gave examples from her research in the UK and Zimbabwe, particularly through the Combating Human Trafficking Project: The Role of NGOs in the Fight Against Human Trafficking in Zimbabwe. Like Mary, Roda also emphasised the importance of methodological innovation to the ongoing project of decolonising sociology and she demonstrated how participatory and co-produced methods provide opportunities to challenge racialised hierarchies in knowledge production. These demonstrated her deep commitment to pursuing social justice through locally co-created knowledge.

Overall, the Decolonising Sociological Studies series critically engaged with the decolonising agenda and, for us, a commitment to advancing racial equity and justice. Each of the speakers did this in different but connected ways, bridging issues related to migration, research methodologies, social change, racialised hierarchies, and the politics of knowledge production. Looking forward to the coming year, we are eager to sustain the momentum we have built in ways that attend to wider departmental and institutional priorities. These include our collective ongoing work on our Athena Swan Bronze Award action plan, the University’s Race Equality Strategy and Action Plan, and the One University commitment to building a diverse and inclusive community of staff and students.