CICC School – Book Launch: Decolonizing Knowledge

Book Launch: Decolonizing Knowledge: Looking Back, Moving Forward, edited by Radha D'Souza and Sunera Thobani (Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2025).

Decolonising knowledge is becoming a buzz word inside and outside the academia. What does decolonising mean? How did intellectuals in the anti-colonial movements of the past conceptualise decolonisation? Are their ideas relevant for decolonisation today? What can we learn from past thinkers to move forward?

Decolonizing Knowledge draws on intellectual histories of anti-colonial thinkers who developed their ideas of decolonization through practical engagement with struggles for freedom from colonialism. Reading works by J.P.S Uberoi, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, C.L.R. James and Andaiye, among others, interdisciplinary activist scholars reflect on the meaning of decolonization that emerged from anti-colonial struggles of the past and its relevance today.

Decolonizing Knowledge is an intervention into contemporary debates on decolonizing curricula and universities, arguing that these calls need to be firmly engaged in wider social practices for justice, and that they can learn much from those who wrote on the topic amid the 20th century’s many struggles for freedom.

“In a time when the practice of decoloniality is getting increasingly distracted by superficial propositions, neocolonial appropriations and banal jargon, this edited volume brings in fresh air of hope that there is still a possibility to revive the practical intentions with which decolonial movements were born” Professor Sayan Dey

Roshini Kempadoo in conversation with the contributors to the volume Andy Higginbottom, Amanda Latimer, Tanroop Sandhu and Radha D’Souza.

Roshini Kempadoo works as a photographer, media artist and scholar at the University of Westminster. Her artworks are ‘factual and fictional re-imaginings of everyday experiences, histories and memories by Caribbean persons and its diaspora’. Current/recent exhibitions and writing include: The 80s: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain, London, November – May 2025; Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970 – 1990, The Whitworth, Manchester, March – June 2025; The World that Belongs to Us, New Art Gallery, Walsall, November — June 2024; Fragments of Epic Memory, AGO, Toronto (2021); ‘Imagining Activism, Black, Gold, Dust,’ The Worldliness of Oil, 2021; the monograph Creole in the Archive: Imagery, Presence and Location of the Caribbean Figure, (2016).

Radha D’Souza is a critical scholar, social justice activist, barrister and writer, from India. She is Professor of Law Development and Conflict Studies at the University of Westminster in London. She has published extensively across disciplines on a range of subjects and written for activist and artist platforms. Her work focuses on justice in and for the Global South. Together with Dutch artist Jonas Staal, she is co-founder of the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC) which is based on her critique of liberalism in her book What’s Wrong With Rights? Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations (Pluto, 2018). The verdicts of hearing of the CICC session in Amsterdam in 2021 are published in CICC: Comrades of the Netherlands versus State of the Netherlands, Unilever, ING Group and Airbus (Amsterdam: Framer Framed, 2024). She is co-editor together with Professor Sunera Thobani of Decolonising Knowledge: Looking Back, Moving Forward (Bloomsbury Academic: London, 2025)

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The CICC School Programme is a series of talks, workshops, assemblies, screenings, guided walks, and performances designed to activate the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes: The British East India Company on Trial (CICC) installation at Ambika P3 and across London. Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC): The British East India Company on Trial is a project by Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal.

Commissioned and produced by Serpentine Ecologies. In partnership with Framer Framed, Amsterdam (long-term partner), Law Development & Conflict Research Group, Ecological Futurisms, CREAM, Ambika P3, University of Westminster, Creative Scotland, Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) and Create Ireland. With special thanks to Mondriaan Fund and Jessica Sweidan.

For more information, visit https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/court-for-intergenerational-climate-crimes-cicc