Network project set up by SPS academic receives public humanities award for work on decoloniality
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A network project about decolonisation developed by a School of Social and Political Science (SPS) academic has received an international award recognising it as an exceptional example of research and public engagement.
The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), based at the University of Edinburgh, received the 2025 Public Humanities Award for Leadership in Practice and Community from the CHCI Public Humanities Network, for its work on the Institute Project on Decoloniality (IPD) between 2021 and 2024.
The Public Humanities Network Award for Leadership in Practice and Community recognises and celebrates exemplary public humanities work engaged with communities.
IPD '24 was a three-year research and public engagement project run by IASH. Steven Yearley, Professor of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge at SPS and director of IASH from 2017 – 2022, led its development. The project offered £750,000 in funding for scholars from around the world to visit Edinburgh and conduct research on themes such as decolonising the curriculum, the British Empire, slavery, contemporary inequality and reparations.
The project aimed to address the privileging of white scholars and whiteness in the arts, humanities and the social sciences in many institutions of higher education across the global north, and the ways in which indigenous knowledges were generally overlooked in favour of hegemonic Western thought. A key objective was to explore how the learning from the sponsored research could be used to shape a praxis (the fusion of knowledge with action) to support more just social orders.
Professor Yearley, who works in the Science, Technology and Innovation Studies subject area at SPS, said: “The idea of an initiative on decoloniality occurred both to me and to Ben Fletcher-Watson, my deputy at IASH, just as we were coming out of lockdown. It was a lot of work to coordinate our funders and partners (including SPS) to buy into the programme for three years, but it turned out to be a transformational activity for IASH. It has led to some wonderful research by our fellows but also deeply affected our academic practice and our relationship to our publics and partners. It also meant that IASH became a focus for the University’s wider work on decoloniality, including reflection on our institution’s own history and current practices.”