Decolonizing the Housing Studies Curriculum
Published: 7 March 2025
Commentary
Dr Madhu Satsangi writes for the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE) in a new published paper examining how to create a more inclusive and student-led approach to decolonising the Housing Studies curriculum.
This paper reports on a study-leave project in the School of Social and Political Sciences (hereafter simply School), undertaken by Madhu Satsangi. The project followed two student internship projects I co-led in 2021-22 and 2022-23. These addressed student understandings of, and priorities in, decolonizing the MA Soc Sci curriculum. This paper looks at making a decolonized curriculum for Housing Studies.
Madhu Satsangi addresses a key priority area for the School, College and University in tackling the micro-aggressions of racism revealed in research on the student community’s experiences of racism. Its starting point was a commitment to a progressive decolonization of the curriculum: allowing it to be led by students and undertaken in a way that prioritizes their needs, interests, and experiences in a way that is reflective, responsive, transparent, and collectively owned, as doing so is the only way to ensure that it rests on a firm foundation of equality and empowerment. Much previous research has discussed the rationales and principles of curriculum decolonization: a rather smaller component applies it to specific disciplines. This report is addressed at the curriculum in Housing Studies, recognizing that there are different views on the extent to which this can be defined as a discipline in its own right and acknowledging that disciplines and curricula are not fixed and objective but are evolving social constructs .
Read the full report on the CaCHE website.
First published: 7 March 2025