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During the opening Plenary at the 2025 ºÚÁϲ»´òìÈ Conference, Chantelle Haughton (Diversity and Anti-Racist Professional Learning), highlighted how Wales is ahead of the curve in the UK when it comes to implementing anti-racist educational policies and practices. The sets out a bold vision, and school-age curriculum reform has been significant. Welsh universities are also seeking to reform, prompted by student-led movements and equality, diversity and inclusion strategies including the .

While we welcome these actions, we argue that reform necessarily requires self-reflexive examination of university origin stories in Wales and wider recognition of links to transatlantic slavery, genocide and the promotion of White settlement on indigenous lands. Origin stories are often rewritten to serve the needs of the present, representing sites of struggle about who is included, and under what conditions. Building on several workshops and conferences with academics, policymakers, community leaders and students, we share some entry points for thinking about applying a decolonial lens to Welsh universities.

Moving beyond beneficence

The establishment of universities in Wales is often framed as a grassroots national project, funded by the masses and coordinated by high-minded statesmen. These grandly crafted genealogies, often written to celebrate the achievements of benefactors, position the university mission within broader efforts of national progress.

In our edited collection under contract with University of Wales Press, we re-map the foundations of Welsh universities in terms of global flows of capital, bodies and violence. This includes reflections from on centring the experiences of enslaved Africans in North Wales. Nicki Kindersley highlights connections to violent extraction via the Royal Niger Company in relation to the founding of the University College of Wales. Andy Bevan explores how University of Wales Trinity St David (UWTSD) has , an enslaver of St Vincentians. Such examples reframe regularly expressed defensive orthodoxies about Wales as a victim of English colonialism that conceal the role of Wales as an active perpetrator of transatlantic injustices.

Statue of Lord Aberdare (Henry Austin Bruce) Aberystwyth University

Situating Welsh higher education within the matrix of domination

A full-bodied reckoning with the legacies of Welsh universities requires situating them within the ‘matrix of domination’ – an intersecting network of oppressions based on race, sex and social class organised to disadvantage and harm marginalised people in society (Hill-Collins, 2000, p. 18). Research from critical perspectives linking Wales with the rest of the world (Chetty, 2022; Evans & Williams 2024; Owens, 2024), and a growing body of corrective work within abolitionist and decolonial thought (Mirza, 2015; Bhambra et al., 2018), help us to reposition the origin stories of Welsh universities.

‘As a key infrastructure of the British Empire, universities in Wales provided scholarly cover for the export of ideas that justified colonial plunder, enslavement and dispossession, while also training students as colonial explorers and administrators.’

As a key infrastructure of the British Empire, universities in Wales provided scholarly cover for the export of ideas that justified colonial plunder, enslavement and dispossession, while also training students as colonial explorers and administrators. Our archival research indicates that students in the 1880s/1890s were taught emerging theories of racial science by professors including the natural demise of indigenous races and the benefits of White settlement in Canada and Australia.

We are each engaged in work to trace the legacies of these relationships of exploitation into the practices and materialities of today and what they mean for those who engage with Welsh universities according to classed, gendered and racialised identities.

Poster from the Dude Walls/Wal y Boi Project Cardiff University 2025

Imagining different futures

Moving beyond historical critique, we have sought out case studies of anti-racist teaching, engagement and research practices including non-Eurocentric teaching through storytelling, and compassionate assessment. Following Das et al. (2024, p. 1) we frame the potential to decolonise as an ‘ongoing and inconclusive process’. We therefore invite others to join us in critically reflecting on the (im)possibility of reform, complicity and the responsibilities of working within higher education:

• How can marginalised knowledges be brought to the centre?
• How can we repurpose conventions of academic scholarship and rework spaces of teaching to become sites of resistance that advance racial justice and gesture towards decolonial repair?

These questions animate the volume we are editing as part of a hopeful problem-posing text that seeks to engage readers in imagining an inclusive and socially just future for Welsh universities and beyond.

References

Bhambra, G., Gebriel, D., & Nişancıoğlu, K. (Eds.). (2018). Decolonising the university. Pluto Press.

Chetty, D. (Ed.) (2022). Welsh (Plural): Essays on the future of Wales. Repeater.

Das, B., Dey, S., Khoo, S., & Amoo-Adare, E. (2024). Decolonising academia. International Journal of Sociology, 32(1–2), 3–7.

Evans, N., & Williams, C. (2024). Globalising Welsh Studies: Decolonising history, heritage, society and culture. University of Wales Press.

Hill-Collins, P. (2000). Black feminist thought. Routledge.

Mirza, H. (2015). Decolonizing higher education. Journal of Feminist Scholarship, 7, 1–12.

Owens, R. (2024). A Welsh vision of empire? Britain and the World, 17(1), 42–66.