Black Feminist Interventions to Decolonize the Westernized University

Universities in the United States and South Africa were built on colonial foundations, and Assata Zerai argues that their neoliberal workings still carry that inheritance. Drawing on three decades of scholarship, she sets out feminist decoloniality as a practical tool for change: indirectly, through how social scientists research and teach, and directly, by putting social justice at the centre of higher education. Students who have been racially and culturally excluded are at the heart of her account, with evidence of the intersectional microaggressions they face, including gendered, ableist and queerphobic anti-Blackness.

Zerai asks faculty to recognise these realities, to build learning environments where every student can thrive, and to carry the same ethical commitments into humanising research. She also traces how scholars are moving their disciplines beyond the modernist canon. A grounded, purposeful book for academics and educators who want their institutions to change.