Perspectives on Decolonising the Business School from students and Professional Services

Over the past year Birmingham Business School’s Decolonisation Project has been running a series of events within the School to develop understandings of what a decolonised Business School looks like to BBS staff and students. Part of our enquiries into this have included running workshops with staff and students, using creative methodologies as tools to facilitate conversation, engagement and understanding with the topic of decolonisation. Short films were made at these workshops to help engage students and staff further with the topic of decolonisation, and make the workshops more accessible to those unable to join in person on the day they were held.

Earlier this month, as part of the wider 3rd Birmingham Business School Education Conference, the Decolonisation Project held a film screening to premiere two short films that were created during these workshops. Talks were given about the role of using theatre, film and storytelling for research purposes from Rachel Reddihough, New Vic Borderlines, a theatre group who we worked with for our workshops with students, and Dr Richard Langley and Jemma Penny from University of Birmingham’s Department of Film and Creative Writing. We were also joined by Black Heritage Walks Network, who we collaborated with for our workshop with Professional Services staff, and Xinyi Che, Jingyi Bian and Arifa Saeedi; MA Film and Television students who directed, filmed and produced one of the films.

Read more about the workshops with the undergraduate and postgraduate students, and our work with Professional Services staff.

Decolonising a Business School: Going beyond the curriculum was created as part of the MA Film and Television: Research and Production course’s placement module. To find out more about this, and to enquire into similar projects in the future, please contact Jemma Penny or Dr Chris Nunn.