This workshop brings together relevant scholars from Nordic universities in a bid to stimulate intra-Nordic collaboration on research, action-plans and best-practice recommendations relating to decolonization processes in higher education in the Nordic countries. The workshop is funded by Nordforsk through the ReNEW research hub and is a collaboration between Södertörn University and GRÓ-GEST at the University of Iceland.
In the Nordic countries colonial history is not taught in universities as mandatory subjects, nor are there any significant engagement with processes of decolonisation across academic disciplines. The hundreds of years of colonisation that had an instrumental role in the industrial revolution, world wars, and the so-called ‘developed’ Nordic economies, are absent from most schools and universities. Such an enormous gap in the knowledge base of students and knowledge workers in higher education can and does have grievous consequences for our understanding of knowledge production and our negotiation of a world which continues to bear out the impact of colonial legacy.
The workshop will include keynote sessions by two internationally recognized scholars in the field of decolonisation:
Rauna Kuokkanen is Research Professor of Arctic Indigenous Studies at the University of Lapland and Adjunct Professor of Indigenous Studies and Political Science at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on comparative Indigenous politics, Indigenous feminist theory, Arctic governance and settler colonialism.
Preliminary title: Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift
Madina Tlostanova is a decolonial thinker and writer, and a chaired professor of postcolonial feminisms at the Gender Studies Unit of the Department of Thematic Studies (TEMA), Linköping University.
Preliminary title: From "learning to unlearn" to "relearning to learn" - pluriversity, urmadic university and other epistemic decolonial options.
Event page: Towards the Decolonisation of Research and Curricula in Nordic Higher Education
Institute of Contemporary History is the host for workshop in Södertörn University. The workshop will take place throughout both days from 09.30am (CEST). In-person participation is limited, but if you are interested in participating on-line, please contact Yulia Gradskova, yulia.gradskova@sh.se or Thomas Brorsen Smidt, tbs@hi.is. The official workshop program will be sent to registered participants ahead of the workshop.