Calls for decolonising the university and the teaching curricula have become part of our daily reality as teachers, academics, staff and students in universities, and with them, more and more colleagues have committed to streamline the questions of gender, race and racism in their teaching agenda. The commitment to do anti-racist work in the classrooms is ever more urgent considering the persistence of racism on campus.
Co-organised by the Irish Network for Middle East and North African Studies (INMENAS), Women in Research Ireland (WIRI) and the Gender Study Group of the Development Studies Association of Ireland (DSAI), this session took place on 27th January 2022 and had two goals. First, it aimed to offer a forum where educators, teachers and lecturers can exchange ideas about and experiences of integrating race, racism and gender in their teaching activities. Second, the session creates a space where to discuss how to hold institutions and colleagues accountable when structural racism becomes obvious to make universities and schools safe for everyone.
Dr Nita Mishra is a Researcher on an IRC Coalesece project on Social Inclusion of rural to urban migrants in Hanoi, in the dept of Food Business and Development, University College Cork. She is the Chair of the Development Studies Association Ireland, and Convenor of its Gender Study Group. She worked with international organisations and non-governmental bodies in India. Her research is well-published in peer-reviewed journals. Her poetry reflects and merges with the experiences of women she has met across different continents as a migrant. Her research interests are on feminist methodologies, inclusion matters, rightsbased approaches to development, environmental movements.
Dr Krisna Ruette-Orihuela is a Lecturer at the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice, at University College Dublin. Her academic and community engaged research focuses on the intersection of racial, ethnic, and gender identities, racism and anti-racism, transformative peacebuilding, and social movements. Drawing on political ethnography and decolonial approaches she has conducted collaborative research projects and popular education workshops with indigenous, Afro-descendant, ex-combatant, peasant and women organisations in Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico and Colombia. She has interrogated how ethnoracial inequalities are shaped and contested through territorial, political, emotional, bodily, and legal strategies.