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Unsettling the University: Confronting the Colonial Foundations of US Higher Education is not only a critique of higher education but rather a grounded approach to critique hegemonic systems that reproduce colonial foundations and white supremacy....This call to action by Stein urges not only higher education institutions and individuals to move beyond superficial gestures but also to take concrete steps toward decolonization and a social transformation.
In a research field like higher education studies, from time to time, a new work comes along that is so cogent and persuasive, while speaking to the felt realities of a key issue in the sector, that it has the potential to upend the core assumptions of the field and move it to a different place. Sharon Stein's wonderfully written Unsettling the University is such a work
Stein's Unsettling the University offers a robust decolonial framework through which to consider current issues—student debt, labor precarity, academic freedom—not only as problems of distribution or inequity but as manifestations of North American higher education's colonial foundations. This book needs to be on the required reading list of every educator and movement builder concerned about life beyond colonialist logics, the future of the university, and planetary well-being.
Sharon Stein dismantles entrenched mythologies on the origins, advancement, and promise of higher education in the United States. She wields decolonial tools for counterhistories, critiques, and disinvestments to unlearn the present and imagine possibilities for futures otherwise. A paradigm-shifting treatise, Unsettling the University compels fundamental transformation of academic institutions, relations, and praxis.
Stein offers readers a framework for understanding critiques of the colonial promises of higher education and for applying these critiques in relation to studying, teaching, and organizing. I was blown away by her writing on universities' attempts to reckon with colonial legacies of violence. A brilliant, decolonial critique of how liberal, inclusion-focused, knowledge-focused approaches tend to reproduce colonial patterns, this book presents alternative approaches to justice in higher education and calls for developing capacities for engaging in the messy, difficult, collective work of grappling with complicity and accountability around colonial violence.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5
x 8
Pages
336
ISBN
9781421445045
Series
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Colonial History of the Higher Education Present
Chapter 2. The Violent Origins of US Higher Education in the Colonial and Antebellum Eras
Chapter 3. Dispossession at the Roots
Introduction
Chapter 1. A Colonial History of the Higher Education Present
Chapter 2. The Violent Origins of US Higher Education in the Colonial and Antebellum Eras
Chapter 3. Dispossession at the Roots of "Democracy's Colleges": The Colonial Legacy of Land-Grant Institutions
Chapter 4. The "Golden Age" of Higher Education and the Underside of the American Dream
Chapter 5. Inclusion is Not Reparation: Reckoning with Violence or Reproducing Higher Education Exceptionalism?
Chapter 6. Imagining Higher Education Otherwise
Acknowledgements
Works Cited
Notes
Index
Featured Contributor
Sharon Stein
Sharon Stein (VANCOUVER, BC / MUSQUEAM TERRITORY) is an assistant professor of higher education at the University of British Columbia and a visiting professor with the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University. She is the founder of the Critical Internationalization Studies Network and a founding member of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures...Resources
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