Decolonization of education from the perspective of a Norwegian solidarity organisation for students and academics

Abstract

For us in SAIH it’s not the daily fare that one of our policy papers becomes the centre of a huge public debate. That was the case in the summer and fall of 2018 when we adopted a resolution calling for decolonization of higher education, questioning the exceptionality of Western academia. Along with a seminar held at PRIO (the Peace Research Institute in Oslo), this sparked a debate with quite harsh criticism from parts of Norwegian academia (Lie, 2018). We called for more visibility of perspectives that are overlooked due to colonial structures still present in academia, and by many this was perceived as a threat to the status quo (Nilsen, 2018). We experienced being ascribed opinions that lay far from SAIH’s work and policies ranging from populism, anti-science, political correctness, and being compared with anti-vaxxers (Solberg, 2018). One thing was the criticisms that were built on straw man arguments (Sæbø, 2018) or misinterpretations, but what also took us by surprise was the scepticism, and fear that decolonization would harm the quality of education and research (Saugstad et al., 2018). To us, this seemed like a paradox, as decolonial perspectives could in our opinion open up for a chance to critically revisit curricula and teaching practices, and by that strengthen academia as a consequence. Another argument brought forward in the debate was that decolonization is an imported trend, but that it is not relevant in Norway, and that SAIH and others were calling for decolonization to be fashionable. While it is true that decolonization of education in a Norwegian context was new for SAIH in 2018, many scholars and students had already been engaged in the topic for a long time and had been making tremendous efforts when the debate came up in 2018. As for SAIH, we