Black Feminist Interventions to Decolonize the Westernized University

Assata Zerai reflects on three decades of scholarship and examines ways in which scholars and professors have begun to move their disciplines from a focus on traditional canons of the modernist era to embrace decolonial sensibilities in research, teaching, and institutional transformation, bringing about change within higher education.

Decoloniality is a perspective that challenges the colonial foundation and neoliberal operations of the westernized university today. In Black Feminist Interventions to Decolonize the Westernized University: Epistemology, Research Methodology, and Pedagogy Assata Zerai highlights feminist decoloniality as a tool to promote institutional transformation, indirectly through changes in research and teaching in the social sciences, directly by centering social justice within higher education. Reflecting on three decades of scholarship, Zerai adapts principles of decolonial theory to scholarship, pedagogy, and praxis transnationally, focusing on higher education in the USA and South Africa. She intentionally centers students who have been racially and culturally excluded in these contexts and provides evidence of university students experiencing intersectional microaggressions, including gendered, ableist, and queerphobic anti-Blackness. Zerai argues that faculty must appreciate such realities in order to affirm students and create learning environments in which all may thrive. Further, this book argues that ethical commitments to minoritized students and their communities must be reflected in humanizing research practices. Finally, Zerai reviews ways in which scholars have begun to move their disciplines from a focus on traditional canons of the modernist era to embrace decolonial sensibilities in their academic work. This book highlights these new approaches within the social sciences, to promote justice, equity, accessibility, diversity, and inclusion (JEADI) within higher education.