The Decolonial Turn at UCT: Resistance and Reform - Professor Shose Kessi

Location: Priory Road A BLK 0A1

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This talk will both recount and critically examine my experience of decolonial reform at the University of Cape Town (UCT), focusing on my experience of leadership at UCT first as Chair of the UCT Black Academic Caucus (BAC) and then as Dean of the Faculty of Humanities with multiple tasks of undoing the past, upholding the new, and building a legacy for future generations of scholars. I will discuss how colonial relations of power circulate in the daily realities of staff and students and the complex ways in which they are upheld, resisted, hidden, and reproduced; with particular reference to the circumstances surrounding the calls to decolonize the university emerging from the Rhodes Must Fall student protests in 2015. I conclude with a theory of change framework for higher education institutions.

Shose Kessi is Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cape Town and Professor in the Department of Psychology. Her work in the field of political psychology explores the complex ways in which individuals construct their identities and shape their behaviours within society, and how they join forces to drive change—whether through institutional reforms, social movements, or other forms of individual and collective action. She is co-founder of the Hub for Decolonial Feminist Psychologies in Africa, a space for research and academic work that embraces a decolonial and feminist aesthetic and praxis for psychological work in South Africa, Africa, and the diaspora. She is also the co-founder and first chairperson of the UCT Black Academic Caucus. Shose has published on the psychology of racism in higher education and other decolonial and African-centered approaches to psychology.

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Host or Publisher Perivoli Africa Research Centre, Univ. of Bristol