Masterclass | Shirley Anne Tate in conversation with Dennis Francis

In this instalment of the masterclass, Professor Dennis Francis is in conversation with Professor Shirley Anne Tate discussing decoloniality, intersectionality as a framework, and anti-racist interventions in higher education. Prof Tate shares an extract from an upcoming edited volume on decolonization and anti-racism in settler colonial states of which South Africa is a part of. She positions the discussion within the context of absolute exhaustion from the violence that we saw during Black Lives Matter, and other incidences, within and outside of the University. These are events, she states, that brought us face to face with the horror of black and indigenous death on a virtual loop, unbridled white supremacy and conceptualizations of freedom by black and indigenous people. This brought about the question of what she(we) could do, as somebody who wants to develop, what she calls ‘the decolonial intersectional anti-racist interventions’, that are long overdue in universities. Furthermore, she also discussed how this decolonial intersectional ani-racism requires acknowledgment of white domination, implication, and complicity, by white people, but also by black people, people of colour and indigenous people. In addition, Prof Tate also ponders upon the question of whether ‘white feminist allyship’ can be trusted in delivering decolonial intersectional ani-racist change and what would this look like institutionally? Shirley Anne Tate Shirley Anne Tate is a Jamaican descendant of African enslaved people. She is Professor and Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Feminism and Intersectionality, Sociology Department, University of Alberta, Canada, and an Honorary Professor in the Chair for Critical Studies in Higher Education Transformation (CriSHET) at Nelson Mandela University. Previously, she was a Professor of Race and Education, the first appointment of its kind in the UK, and founding Director of the Centre for Race, Education, and Decoloniality (CRED) at Leeds Beckett University. She is a qualitative researcher interested in intersectional thinking, drawing on Black feminist, gender, critical ‘race’, and Caribbean decolonial theory within her focus on Black Atlantic Diaspora Studies. Dennis Francis Professor Dennis Francis is a South African-based scholar and activist whose work engages with questions related to gender, sexualities and schooling. Dennis is a former Dean of Education and currently a Professor of Sociology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Their research, located in the sociology of education, focuses on how educational structures, discourses and practices reproduce cisheteronormativity and social inequality in schools and how these are also resisted and challenged. Their most recent books are Troubling the Teaching and Learning of Gender and Sexuality Diversity in South African Education (PalgraveMacmillan, 2017) and Queer Activism in South African Education: Disrupting Cis(hetero)normativity in Schools (Routledge 2022). Professor Francis is also the recipient of several distinguished teaching and researcher awards, including the South African Education Research Association (ERASA) and the Stellenbosch Distinguished Teacher Award.

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