title: Doing Unsettling Work: An Autoethnographic Study of Decolonising the University Rooted in the Thought of Sylvia Wynter
Creators: name: Amara, Sheneez
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2023

description: The aim of this thesis is to systematically apply the thought Sylvia Wynter to the question of decolonising the university. While decolonising the university scholarly literature has proliferated in the last decade, and engagements with the work of Sylvia Wynter have also increased, there has yet to be a study that brings the two together in a systematic fashion. As such, this thesis addresses this gap in the literature where Wynter’s contributions, which are deemed highly relevant to discussions of decolonisation in universities, are absent from reflections on decolonising the university. As such, the research questions asked are: how can the work of Sylvia Wynter help us to situate and orient attempts to address the continued coloniality of the university today? How can thinking through a Wynterian lens help me to understand my own experiences within the university as a postgraduate student whose work attempts to unsettle this coloniality? What do my own experiences, understood through a Wynterian theoretical lens, reflect about the reception of unsettling work and its potential to create change within higher education in the UK, with special reference to my own area of study, Latin American studies? These are open-ended research questions that do not lead to concrete answers, but rather encourage continued debate. The aim, therefore, is to incorporate Wynter’s thinking into the areas of debate and experience noted above.

The first question is addressed through a critical literature review, which reviews literature on decolonising the university through a Wynterian theoretical lens. Then, an epistemically disobedient autoethnographic methodology is employed to tackle the second and third research questions, which focus on my process of coming to critical consciousness during my early postgraduate studies, my involvement as a consultant on the development of a ‘Module on Race’ at my university, and the reactions I received to my attempts to unsettle the coloniality of Latin American studies at academic conferences.

This thesis finds that Wynter’s thinking serves as an expansive theoretical resource that supports and encourages continued efforts to unsettle the coloniality of university-based education and knowledge production. Her argument for centring the Caribbean in an analysis of modernity/coloniality, her development of the concept of the ‘descriptive statement’, and her approach of ‘disenchanting discourses’ are found to be particularly useful. This thesis also finds that a Wynterian theoretical lens highlights areas of debate around decolonising universities that might benefit from an incorporation of Wynter’s thought in order to link efforts to decolonise the university to Wynter’s onto-epistemological project of re-writing our contemporary order of knowledge. Finally, it finds that Wynter’s notions of ‘disenchanting discourse’, ‘theoretical heresy’ and ‘expecting blows’ are useful concepts through which to make sense of my own attempts to unsettle coloniality within academic settings.

This thesis concludes that an incorporation of the work of Sylvia Wynter into debates on decolonising the university encourages scholars in this field not to focus inward on the university and maintaining its wellbeing as an institution, but rather on the struggle to re-write and re-imagine new ways of knowing in spite of and beyond the coloniality of higher education institutions. It also concludes that institutional initiatives to decolonise or unsettle coloniality cannot be relied upon to cultivate conducive environments for doing decolonial/unsettling work, but rather individuals and groups can do this work on the grounds and in the margins of the university. Finally, it concludes that those engaged in decolonial/unsettling work would do well to ‘expect blows’ (Wynter, 2006) when sharing their challenging and important intellectual interventions or theoretical heresies.