The discourse around systemic racism and the decolonising of the curriculum has recently intensified alongside the Black Lives Matter movement that is gaining momentum following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor as well as countless other black Americans (read the full list of victims and their petitions here).

Decolonising the curriculum is the endeavour to include more black and ethnic minority authors with the pedagogy. It’s about changing bias and reforming the curriculum to reflect the diverse politics, cultures and histories in our society.

Advocates of this movement want to include authors that are underrepresented in the curriculum especially at university level. Some institutions include modules that centre on decolonising the curriculum or black American literature or Systemic racism, but for a full education there needs to be a diverse list of texts and authors in each module of every university degree course.

What does Cambridge University Press offer?

Cambridge University Press is dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion in the canon, our business and the wider academic sphere. We have a Hot Topics collection specifically designed for ‘Decolonising the curriculum’ that any university can purchase in full for students to access online and use for any higher education course.

This collection brings together reference texts that challenge mainstream narratives, explore fresh, unusual, and unseen sources, and provide a rethinking of history, politics, literature and language.

Some of the topics covered in Decolonising the Curriculum collection:

• Soldiers in a transnational context and critiques of the ‘Western way of war’
• The social function of literature in the context of global social change
• Challenges to the idea of ‘minor literature’
• Narratives of global history that challenge the ethnocentric bias of mainstream accounts

There are also Hot Topic collections on Race, Racism and US Politics as well as an upcoming Cambridge Element series on Race, Ethnicity and Politics. Equally this collection of Journals about Protests, Policing and Race has been made free to access for a short period of time.

What else can your institution do?

The first step is to identify areas in the curriculum that need decolonising, this can be in all levels of education from the library, course, down to the module reading list. Once the gaps within the canon have been found, it’s time to research and find the authors that haven’t been included in the original curriculum reading list and make room for them in the course and library.

Purchase a collection, such as the one we offer, to ensure that students, staff and librarians can access texts that are both about and written by Black and Ethnic minorities on a wide-range of different topics.

We also have much to learn and improve upon. If you would like to get in touch please contact us at library.marketing@cambridge.org.