I’m Jennifer Doveton, a doctoral researcher in Film, TV and Sociology here at Brunel. While writing my PhD, I’ve taken on a part time role as a project officer for the Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project. Funded by the Sociological Review Foundation, the project was established with a view to providing resources to members of the public interested in navigating through a ‘decolonised’ Sociology curriculum.
It has gone on to produce resources for academics, students and educators in Sociology and Criminology, Politics, Anthropology and History – in particular, lesson plans suited to A level or early undergraduate classes. These lesson plans, reading lists and video lectures engage with global colonial histories and their significance in developing a fuller picture of the emergence of modernity and the West.
The project started life as a book by its founder, Professor Gurminder K. Bhambra. In Connected Sociologies (2014), Bhambra argues for the reintegration of fragmented sociologies, ‘connecting up’ histories made remote by the hegemony of Western, Eurocentric sociology. Central to this is an interdisciplinary sociology that is engaged with politics, history and anthropology.
In a British context this means challenging insular narratives of nation which look away from the empire. Professor Bhambra points to Britain’s colonial and imperial past as inextricable from how we think about British society today. Despite this, the Social Science curricula in schools fails to directly address the history of colonialism and modernity in a truly ‘joined up’ way.
The Connected Sociologies Curriculum Project has sought collaboration from lecturers in the UK and beyond to pull together broader issues of colonialism and empire into an alternative curriculum of video lectures, slides, lesson plans and reading lists – all available for free online. “The Making of the Modern World”, the first module of the curriculum, challenges narrow conceptualisations of modernity through an exploration of topics such as: the intersection of gendering (and ungendering) and racialisation in colonial processes (“Gendering Modernity: Black Feminist Perspectives” by Dr Lisa Palmer); and the hidden histories of indentured labourers, displaced from India by the British Empire (“Indian Indenture in the British Empire” by Dr Maria del Pilar Kaladeen). Each lecture draws on histories of colonial domination and expansion with an emphasis on the influence these processes have had on the modern world, both conceptually and materially.
Dr Palmer’s lecture explores how racialisation and dehumanisation under colonialism engaged with social constructions of gender (in particular womanhood and femininity). The ‘ungendering’ of those held captive on slave ships is presented as a counterpart to the ‘gendering’ of white women in the domestic sphere. In under 16 minutes, Palmer draws a connection between the Western imposition of categories of gender and race on colonised peoples and the racialised and gendered sexual violence that Black women continue to face today.
Dr Kaladeen’s lecture discusses the displacement of two million indentured labourers from India between 1834 and 1920. Kaladeen argues that the history of indenture constitutes a ‘hidden history’, one that may contradict preferred tellings of the history of abolition. She leads us to reflect on the nature of ‘social facts’, encouraging us to interrogate the tension between how history is written and how it was experienced. The video concludes with Kaladeen referring viewers to contemporary novels, short stories and poems by descendents of indentured labourers which “function as a challenge to [the] dehumanising language” found in archival histories of Indian indenture.
Other modules include: “British Citizenship, Race and Rights”, “Policing ‘Crime’ and ‘Violence’” and “The Environment and Climate Change”. We completed the curriculum with the “Empires and Colonialism” module which illuminates processes of domination and expansion. Professor Bhambra opens the module by problematising the distinction between ‘empires’ and ‘nation states’, often conceptualised as ‘pre-modern’ and ‘modern’ societies, respectively. Bhambra challenges the notion that modern nation states come to replace or develop out of pre-modern empires. She posits that many of these so-called ‘nation states’ are in fact nations that have empires and should be reconceptualised as ‘colonial states’. This lecture encapsulates Bhambra’s insistence throughout the project that colonial processes should be theorised as central to histories of modernity. Central to this is understanding the distinction between substantively different types of empire, and reasserting connections between histories of ‘colonised’ and ‘colonial’ entities.
Contributors to this module offer diverse and nuanced understandings of empires and colonial processes, beyond the ‘European mode’ of empire, and beyond domination on land. Topics include: the law of the sea through anticolonial struggle (“Ocean Legalities” by Professor Renisa Mawani) and Western influence on the Ottoman Empire (“The Case of the Ottoman Empire” by Professor Fatma Müge Göçek).
Fellow Brunel doctoral researcher, Izzy Sykes, shares my passion for teaching and social justice. She joined the project to convert these lectures into brilliant PDF lesson plans for use by A level or Undergraduate teachers looking to ‘decolonise’ existing curricula (available here). In our liaisons with schools, we have heard from teachers who have integrated these lectures into their teaching as supplementary material. The lesson plans link lectures to topics within Social Sciences A level curricula as well as the Revise Sociology online curriculum, reframing and connecting up familiar and ‘hidden’ histories and perspectives.
The lectures and reading lists may be of particular interest to curious A level students who wish to expand their learning before they move on to a Social Sciences degree. Undergraduate students may find the resources overlap with and supplement theories and histories of colonialism taught in the first year of a Social Sciences degree. Students at Brunel may find the materials provide a background to topics covered in Economics; International Development and Humanitarianism; Global Challenges; Children, Youth and International Development; Global Public Health & Social Justice. Those considering participating in Brunel’s READY programme may find these resources useful in grappling with the colonial implications of such an enterprise.
As the project draws to a close, I’m pleased to share that we’ve compiled these resources into a short booklet which is available in PDF and hard copy.
If you’d like to download this booklet in PDF form, it’s available on the Connected Sociologies webpage here.
If you’d like a larger delivery for a class or event contact the Sociological Review Foundation here. Please share this resource with school students, teachers, university students, academics, and members of the public interested in a reconceptualisation of the grand narratives that underpin the Social Sciences.