The PhD Diaries: Imogen Eve & the Dermot McAleese Teaching Assistant Awards

Not-Quite-Decoloniality: A Day in the Life of a PhDing TA 

A Day in the Life

I’m sitting at the edge of class watching a student deliver a presentation on Durkheim, and there it is: ‘Durkheim is the father of sociology’. I find myself smiling a little. After the presentation, I thank the student and then ask the class if they’d be cool with me giving a mini introduction to Du Bois; ‘has anyone heard of him?’ In this tutorial one or two raise their hands. In the previous one, no one did. I ask if they want to share but they just shuffle in their seats and mumble into their scarfs something along the lines of ‘..don’t know’.

‘It’s okay,’ I smile at them. ‘I don’t know loads about Du Bois either. But I studied him a little during my own degree and he’s pretty cool. It’s a shame we’re looking at Durkheim but don’t talk about Du Bois as they worked around a similar time but had very different approaches. Du Bois would have called Durkheim a bit of an “armchair sociologist” because he just sat at home and never did leg work in the field.’

A few smirks.

(Note to self: mini slagging of Durkheim may elicit humorous complicity.) So I share what I know of Du Bois, the amazing fieldwork he did, and his erasure from the sociological canon. I also flag that, given my research, I might have something of a decolonial agenda.. (Sorry peeps, you got landed with me.)

Why do I do this? It’s not part of the curriculum. But I find myself a little irked by the whole ‘father of sociology’ thing. I want them to think about what such phrases mean. I want them to have at least heard of Du Bois. And tutorials are spaces for critical engagement, right?

There are other examples I could have drawn on, beyond Du Bois. I’m coming across new stuff constantly. I’m having to encounter and critically expand my own knowledge, which can be unsettling at times. (Decoloniality takes imposter syndrome to a whole new level.) But I’m learning that to embrace this vulnerability is crucial. So, part of my tutorial approach is to share my own ignorance with the class – my ignorance and my curiosity – and to practice reflexivity with them, alongside them. As each new term progresses, I find students seem increasingly more okay with stating what they don’t know, and speaking up about what they do. In a small way, this practice is a crucial state of mind from which to approach, or rather, think from and through decoloniality.

Decoloniality & ‘Critical Encompassing’

In a reductive nutshell: Decoloniality, or epistemic decolonisation, is about recentring marginalised knowledge(s) that have been subjected to violence or erasure through colonial processes (Bhambra et al. 2018; Mignolo 2011). Epistemic decolonisation fundamentally questions how knowledge is valued; in particular, how western/European knowledge has been valued and made dominant whilst ‘othering’ non-Western (often non-white) knowledge producers.

When approaching decoloniality within the limits of a module tutorial I did not design, I find myself practicing something I refer to as ‘critical encompassing’. By this I mean I try to critically examine wider contexts and connections of/beyond a dominant narrative, by bringing in multiple (often marginalised) standpoints, by questioning how a narrative becomes dominant. I try, essentially, to map out a more encompassing and critical picture.

Recognising Du Bois is an example of this. Doing so expands our understanding of the history of sociology; it critiques how we have, and continue to, define the discipline; it illustrates the powers behind the production, classification and evaluation of knowledge.

This practice of ‘critical encompassing’ utilises elements from both decolonial and postcolonial theorists. It draws on the idea of ‘connected histories’ (coined by Subrahmanyam 1997, and that I found through Bhambra 2007), and seeks to avoid ‘metrocentrism’, i.e. assuming European/Western knowledge as universal (Go 2016); it relates with issues around Orientalism (Said 1978) and seeks to re-centre Subaltern perspectives (Spivak 1988). (Mind you, without including forms of ‘indigenisation’ that have been argued for as far back as Akiwowo in 1980s, I wouldn’t say this practice is all that decolonial..)

But what about the specifics of social science? What about methodology? Decoloniality, at the very least, implies thinking through, and taking seriously, different standpoints. As a fundamentally interpretive practice, it’s well-matched with qualitative methodologies, but it can feel at odds with the objectivity implied by quantitative statistics. However, I don’t want students to demonise quantitative work, which is fairly dominant in sociology. I do ask them to critically reflect on methods (how are categories made through surveys? how does this frame people in society?), but I also stress the value of generalisation that statistics can bring. Perhaps the quantitative can be viewed as just another standpoint; another lens.

This kind of approach – this critical, multiple-angle approach – is something I believe in strongly. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy. The composition of my tutorials is pretty varied; I know I have students who lean conservative or who are, at least, unfamiliar with decolonial angles. This doesn’t bother me though. I try to speak to the whole class, and looking at multiple standpoints helps with that. This means I want students to express their perspectives during discussions (including conservative ones). But this also means illustrating how some perspectives have been marginalised. This means I try to make whiteness visible, including my own whiteness (including laughing at it on occasion because, as I tell them, talking about whiteness can be pretty awkward, but what can you do). We all have limited perspectives, so it’s crucial to try and understand what might be missed when we read and analyse, and what authors themselves might have missed. I do this because I’m aware that multiple (politicised) perspectives exist; they exist in my classes. I do this because I want students to listen to, and learn from, multiple angles – and from each other.

Not-Quite-Decoloniality: A Work in Progress

So I suppose this is my much-in-progress not-quite-decolonial teaching approach.

But you know, I’m in a funny position.

I came to Trinity in 2022 to research ‘university decolonisation’ whilst working as a TA for undergraduate sociology modules. This is work I truly love; leading tutorials, drawing on research whilst doing so, is the best job I know.

But it’s all a little bit meta.

I essentially teach within a university whilst researching how universities decolonise their teaching. As a TA, I do my job and teach the curriculum. However, my decolonial lens does imply a certain critique. Given my precarious position as a TA, maybe I should be more careful with critiquing texts and ideas, but for some reason I’m not too worried. I mean, my peers and senior lecturers don’t seem to mind. But also I don’t think I could TA in another way. And to be fair, it’s not like my tutorials are radically decolonial; there are plenty of gaps, plenty of my own failings. But asking critical questions – asking students what they know, how something is known, how that knowledge is valued or deemed knowledge at all, and by whom – is just a way of thinking I’m now in the habit of. I suppose I consider it something of a pedagogical (even moral) obligation to keep it up. I mean there’s plenty I need to improve, I can hardly stop now.

So I figure I’ll keep ploughing on. The students seem cool with it.

Pictured are three of the award winners with Dermot McAleese.