Editorial Perspectives: Arts, Whiteness and Power in University 3.0

This editorial perspective brings together an editorial and some new perspectives on the theme of this special issue of Philosophy and Theory in Higher Education.

This special issues titled "Coloniality and Whiteness in the Academy: Towards Decolonial Futures" (eds. Thushari Welikala, University of London; Carola Boehm, Staffordshire University) represents a milestone, not quite an end, but certainly a marker in a much longer story that started with both my special issues co-editor Thushari Welikala and myself engaging in online informal but themed meetups, connecting with PaTHES members on topics around whiteness and coloniality within the academy.

As Thushari and I once mentioned, we came together, myself, with fears of having, at times, a white defensiveness and Thushari fearing to have a non-white one. We gingerly stepped into this sensitive, difficult and emotional theme by facilitating debates within a small group of scholars, exploring this topic from diverse, scholarly, but also very personal contexts.

This series of conversations, first in online meetups from September to January 2022 and then in the development of this special issue, resulted in extraordinary interdisciplinary and international perspectives on coloniality and decolonising, making visible the invisible, and shining a light on some of the unattended crevices of our social, epistemological and ontological fabric within our institutions; institutions that are a phenomenon of socially constructed learning organisations with its fallacies, vulnerabilities, prejudices and, yes, coloniality and whiteness.