Decolonising the Heart and Mind of the 21st Century University

Significant physical and mental space is created through the IAS Fellowship for academics exhausted by the frenetic demands of the neoliberal university. The chance to experience life in a Durham College and to spend three-months dedicated to research provides a rare opportunity to renew our commitment to ideas and to the pleasures of interdisciplinary research. There are also fabulous connections to be made with other international fellows and Durham colleagues and students.

My research focuses on decolonising the 21^st century university. In addition to working on our project on the EThOS collection of UK digital theses going back to 1650, I have also been writing a book for the Routledge Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education series. This book seeks to [re]imagine the 21^st century university as a public institution committed to decolonising the hearts and minds of academics, students and the wider society. My research presents a case for the emergence of decolonial, transcultural, and multilingual universities driven by epistemic and social justice. Higher education requires new philosophical and practical resources to address colonisation’s lingering legacies. Using life histories and time mapping and a multisensory format (including photos, original artwork, poetry and sound files), my book traces the philosophies and theories of eight First Nations and transcultural theorists across time (14^th century CE to the present); and across place incorporating the lands of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand as well as locations in the Middle East/North Africa, South America, Africa and Asia.

I presented my IAS seminar on this work-in-progress book in November 2025, just after I had returned from a cultural ambience research trip through Morocco, where one of the philosophers I am including in my book, Ibn Khaldun, was a senior minister to the Sultan of Fes in the 14^th century C.E. Serendipitously, many of the other IAS Fellows this Michaelmas term were also researching decolonisation.

I am immensely grateful to the IAS audience for their thoughtful engagement with my seminar. We talked about reading the archives against the grain; about how we construct imagined dialogues with ancient scholars when we grapple with their written ideas; about how to produce time maps (a visual methodology my colleagues and I developed) and about alternative universities like Visva-Bharati University and politically conscious institutions like Jawaharlal Nehru University in India.

My husband, Chris, and I were so lucky to be housed in St Cuthbert’s Society during our Durham stay. This College toasts friendship at each of its formal dinners and has been an inspiring place to stay. My public lecture for St Cuth’s was on turning rhetoric about decolonising the university into reality and I’ve also had the opportunity to work with St Cuth’s first Student President of Colour, Thea Cave. Together, we led a group of students on the Black History Audio Tour of Durham developed by Professor Nayanika Mookherjee and colleagues. The students found the tour profoundly eye-opening and plan to encourage other students and family members to complete the tour. Some Sociology students were also planning to recommend the tour to their lecturers as an important field experience.

I am immensely grateful to the IAS, to all of the Michaelmas 2025 IAS Fellows and to Durham University for reigniting my passion for ideas, for interdisciplinarity and for academic conviviality.

Professor Catherine Manathunga, IAS Fellow Michaelmas Term, 2025 and Co-Director of UniSC Indigenous and Transcultural Research Centre and Professor of Education Research, University of the Sunshine Coast Australia.