The Global South is inhabited by roughly 75 per cent of the world’s population; it is expected that this number will increase to almost 88 per cent by the year 2100 (Solarz & Wojtaszczyk, 2015). The Global North by way of Europe and North America gave us Greek and Roman civilisations, capitalism and Marx; the Global South has given us the Chinese, Japanese and Mughal empires, ancient religions and the richness of indigenous knowledge present in Africa and the Americas. And yet, in British graduate programmes in education this representation and diversity is largely absent.
For all the tokenistic conversation in the academic world about the need for decolonising the curriculum in Western universities, an in-depth look at the reading lists from graduate programmes in education within the UK reveals that there is a sizeable chasm between the expressed intention of repositioning non-Western knowledge and actually bringing that into action (see Batty, 2020), which begs the question: How much of that intention is real and how much is symbolic (see Liyanage, 2020)?
