Recent worldwide trends in student mobility, as well as increasing recognition of racial and ethnic inequalities, have prompted urgent and sometimes uncomfortable questions about university curricula. How have these been shaped, and who do they serve? It’s also clear that these questions have been simmering for decades, perhaps most visibly in the Humanities.

This event organised by REC champions, Caroline Sumpter and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, brought together colleagues and a number of students from across AEL to reflect on their offerings and experiences. Brief presentations by Jasbeer Musthafa Mamalipurath, Kim-Marie Spence, Tori Holmes, Maeve McCusker, Justin Livingstone, Taarini Mookherjee, Emily Byers-Ferrian and Daniel demonstrated long-standing as well as recent engagements within the School across Arts Management, Broadcasting Studies, Languages, English, Creative Writing, and Film and Drama.

Jasbeer spoke of the importance of critical disinformation studies beyond the Anglocentric world; Kim emphasised the importance of collective action in the decolonizing endeavour; Justin and Daniel spoke about their modules on African and Indian literatures in English respectively, while Maeve and Tori spoke of their efforts at including Caribbean-Francophone and Brazilian-Lusophone literatures and topics into their teaching within Languages. Maeve reminded us that her engagement with French literary theories of negritude and black Francophone literature date from her days as a student at QUB in the early 1990s when such topics were hardly on the horizon! Newton International Fellow Taarini and doctoral student Emily brought in valuable perspectives of decolonizing work at Columbia University and in the creative industries respectively.

The morning ended with a discussion exploring internationalisation trends, differences of approach, and pressures within the university sector. While there are no easy answers to such questions, it seemed worthwhile to take stock of what we’ve achieved and the significant challenges that remain.

Feedback from students who attended noted that they particularly appreciated the cross-disciplinary approach. Thanks are due to Bebe Ashley and the SHC team and to Aine Egan and the AEL-Finance team for help with the arrangements and financing of this event.

This is the beginning rather than the end of our cross-school discussions on this issue. Going forward, finding ways of making all our curricula more diverse and inclusive (at all three levels) will be key in attracting a more diverse student body. Consistently recognising the importance of these issues in curricula design in all subject areas of AEL is an important part of this process.