Persona, shadow and symbolic violence: the case of university brochures and how they can inform decolonizing actions

Abstract

New student-centred approaches have been trying to make academic education more inclusive. However, these approaches seem not to be leading to more equal classrooms (Taylor, 2017; Lambert, Greene and Lai, 2022). In addition, there are actions being taken worldwide to create more diverse universities, but they also seem to fail (Scarritt, 2019). One of the main criticisms to these new tendencies is the inability to tackle problems from their social, economic and cultural roots. This takes the debate to a decolonization level, when we start to see that solving these issues will require a change on the very sources of inequality and oppression, being the university one of them (Arshad et al, 2021). This study is a search for decolonizing tools, and one way of finding them is through self-reflection (Bologna, Trede and Patton, 2020). We start this by analyzing marketing materials produced by universities in order to identify contents that are reproducing oppressive norms and behaviors. We analyze the brochures from the Hasselt University based on a thought partnership between Carl Young and Pierre Bourdieu (idem).