Decolonising Sustainability (983N1)

15 credits, Level 7 (Masters)

Spring teaching

How are currently dominant institutions, discourses and practices of sustainability tied to colonialisms that have made the modern world over the last five centuries?

How do entrenched colonial relations constrain imaginations of ‘sustainable development’ in the Global South and North?

How do colonial relations entangle gender, race, class, ethnicity and nationality?

How do they enact superiority, supremacy, appropriation, extraction, control and domination over specific countries, regions, ecologies, peoples and their ways of knowing/being?

How are colonial relations resisted?

Despite centuries of resistance, how do power and privilege still concentrate and accumulate in modern metropoles?

How can decolonial transformations of such relations help realise just and egalitarian sustainabilities in the North and South?

Addressing these questions, this module will focus on a range of activities from food to conservation – for scrutinising modern institutions and practices where innovations and businesses are developed – and of decolonial movements that build and nurture a world in which many different worlds can flourish together.

Contact hours and workload

This module is approximately 150 hours of work. This breaks down into about 33 hours of contact time and about 117 hours of independent study. The University may make minor variations to the contact hours for operational reasons, including timetabling requirements.

We regularly review our modules to incorporate student feedback, staff expertise, as well as the latest research and teaching methodology. We’re planning to run these modules in the academic year 2025/26. However, there may be changes to these modules in response to feedback, staff availability, student demand or updates to our curriculum.

We’ll make sure to let you know of any material changes to modules at the earliest opportunity.