The money and ideologies upon which these institutions are built on are so closely linked to colonialism, oppression, genocidal regimes, and economic policies of violence and exploitation.
Representation politics become tokenistic.
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"Stormzy effect" relating to appalling statistics of new Black students in Cambridge does a massive disservice to those who have been doing work for years regarding access. Students lay the framework which is going to be erased once they leave.
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Black students finding admission statistics and naming the issue did the work, not just the existence of Stormzy. Support campaigns who are doing radical work on campus. Huge burden falling on students of colour to do this work.
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Message to prospective students: come and continue the work but you'll have to endure hostility? How do we frame this in an 'appealing' way? Legacy work is important. People need to come and carry on the work. There are communities here to find for students of colour.
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Students of colour have to decide what kind of student they want to be: will they choose to assimilate to move through with minor resistance, or will they pick up the baton and face kickback by doing radical work? There is a possibility to recalibrate what university is.
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We shape the knowledge produced at university. Coming here isn't the end of a journey in itself but a chance to educate ourselves on wider social issues; the violence of The Border, policing, PREVENT policy are all visible at the university.
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The University isn't a special space, the issues we face within it we will also face without. The vantage point that the margin offers - we can see things that some other people can't. It's not what we can get out of it, it's what we can do within it.
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Question on whether the aim of decolonising is more numbers. No, what happens after students of colour get in? What good is an untransformed university full of students of colour? University hides behind terms like "BME" which conflates different experiences.
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The reason these movements aren't translating into new academics of colour is because the conversations aren't going far enough. How do we translate this somewhat complex discourse into a somewhat basic society? (Racism is bad - empire, not good
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Education of wider public is important, but we do the work by doing the work; we'll never be able to get everyone to do the work, but the important focus is sparking these conversations.
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Where are we at with decolonising our curriculums? Decolonise has become a buzzword, the problem is it's seen as a project which can be completed. It's actually a continuous process of unsettling, not just adding Franz Fanon to the reading list.
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Power has always shaped what is worth studying, what is seen as legitimate or a valid body of knowledge. Just adding people to reading lists doesn't do anything to disrupt how we see European knowledge as the universal. The world has been misunderstood.
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We have to rethink who is an expert. How do we educate people in the high up places in these institutions? People who do not go through these insitutions have a better understanding on how the world works.
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The university is ghettoised, it's not in touch with the world. Calling the police force racist seems a given to most people "outside" of these institutions but saying that here is seen as controversial. Oral histories devalued in the face of archival histories.
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Students of colour are forced into defending their position as legitimate in the contexts of debate. It's not about mutual aid, sharing or learning, and debate is not a good use of our time. Debates depend that one side (that of students of colour) is invalid.
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How has my location in this university blinded me or prevented me from seeing how knowledge is shaped or shared? European knowledge depends on the "individual genius". Decolonising is a lifelong project! There is so much potential in vocational subjects to deconstruct.
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For example, law students within the decolonise movements would be incredible going out into the world questioning how to dismantle the legal system. The universities could equip these students to be agents of change.
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The sciences also need decolonising! Deconolising asks us to think about education holistically: are we training engineers to build drones to kill people and then training humanity students to justify that killing? Science is underpinned by "truth and fact".
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When we understand our ideas are not absolute, we can properly challenge these links. Decolonise is disruptive. It SHOULD be disruptive. We have to rethink how we study these subjects. Funding should not allow our continued complicity.
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Groups like
@ZeroCarbonSoc have been bringing these issues to the frontline for so long, exposing the university for the many fingers it has in different violent and terrible pies. External funding means unis cannot be objective. Our own complicity can be terrifying.#CCWShow this thread -
We can refuse to turn a blind eye, we can refuse to allow this continued complicity. We can refuse to accept what is seen as the "norm".
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The fallacy of free speech is the PREVENT policy. What it asks of public servants to "look out for signs of radicalisation" - which often means what turns a "good" Muslim into a "bad violent one". This asks the monitoring of Muslim students. How free are THEY to speak?
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Muslim students are less likely to speak in certain spaces and subjects, because there is a punitive punishment. 30% of those being reported to prevent are under the age of 15. Free speech is not universally applied. Whose speech is free? It's a counterinsurgency tool.
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Power underlies whose speech is free. Far right rhetoric stems from ethno-nationalism of the government and state. This is not the same as surveilling Muslims because they've been historically viewed as threats.
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People who say their speech is being restricted are in other spaces allowed huge platforms of their views. This covers up allegiance of conservative forces marketising education. This obscures wider conversations of things like PREVENT, racism, campus violence of any kind.
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Now we're thinking beyond metrics of assimilation which terrifies gatekeepers of these institutions. How TERFs have taken hold of mainstream newspapers and have openly debate the right of trans people to exist are the same people who claim their free speech is being taken.
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1. "How do white-passing people negotiate the role of being a person of colour without taking up the space of those who are visibily and culturally discriminated again? What is our role as 'in-between'?"
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2. "Do you think lecturers should be taking an active effort to set ground rules, what are the procedures which should be in place? How do we get lecturers involved in this question?"
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3. "What type of initiatives or programs do you propose would allow us to further challenge the inferiority of the body politics, not only forms of being but forms of becoming? How does this change knowledge production and consumption?"
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1. You don't need a personal experience of oppression to work towards ending it. Less about thinking individually about our own position, we get caught up in not wanting to take up too much space that we don't take up any space at all. "Guilt leads to inaction."
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We support, represent & empower BME students at Cambridge University.