Confronting Historical Wrongs in Liverpool and Beyond: Creative Responses and Anticolonial Approaches to Environmental Science

Conversations related to "decolonising the curriculum" have gained increasing momentum over the past ten years and continue to surge. Whilst ideas related to such a demanding yet necessary endeavour are often hotly contested and unquestionably imperfect, discussions across the UK related to "decolonising" higher education are generative as they cast crucial light upon a host of persistent challenges and structural inequalities faced by underrepresented groups, teaching/research staff, university administrators, and even policy makers. Undeniably, coloniality endures, which is especially the case in the fields of Environmental Science and Geography. On this point, as Noxolo (2017) reminds us, the continued Eurocentrism of Environmental Studies and Geography "displays little practical contemporary openness to difference and diversity in its knowledge production processes." That said, decolonising a curriculum and diversifying a discipline is not the same as simply comparing Western and Southern theories or adding readings from non-Western and/or Majority World scholars into a course syllabus. Material and structural change is necessary and it is imperative that decolonisation not be merely a metaphor (Tuck & Yang, 2012).

If a "decolonising" agenda that takes seriously and wrestles with the politics of race, history, and the environment is going to be advanced in the UK, there is a case to be made that Liverpool be ground zero. As a city with the longest established Black community in the UK (Costello, 2001), both Liverpool's history and its present reality provides a complex and poignant case for examining the legacies of colonialism. Indeed, the experience of Black people across Liverpool has been one of continuous exposure to and struggle against racism and discrimination coupled with collective, community-based strategies for confronting legacies of coloniality within the city (Zack-Williams, 1997). Accordingly, this project aims to pinpoint and correct colonial conventions and Eurocentric values that exist at the University of Liverpool through how we conduct science in the day-to-day, with the ultimate goal of making Environmental Science at once more diverse and accepting of other ways of producing knowledge.

To avoid extractive and tokenistic (colonial) research (Smith, 2021), this project is co-produced and guided by the preferences of local stakeholders and community partners. Collaborative process will feature extensively with an emphasis placed on: 1) strengthening university and community relations; and 2) producing quality open access outputs that are relevant to project partners and effecting social justice. Research activities will consist of dynamic, mixed methods approaches that include a variety of archival and participatory techniques that will cast critical anti-racist light on both the environmental sciences and Liverpool's colonial history. In addition, community-based workshops will facilitate discussions about what role ULIV can play in community development. Here, interviews with local stakeholders and established experts will generate ideas about how ULIV SOES can ameliorate enrolment gaps in minority ethnic and first-generation students, as well as what SOES can do in hiring practices to increase diversity in the environmental sciences. Additionally, via a series of in-depth interviews with scientists and artists from minority ethnic and first-generation backgrounds, we will produce a podcast, website, and visual 'Anticolonial Practice in Environmental Science' guide. The anticolonial guide content will consist of an array of informative and accessible materials that can be hosted on SOES and UKRI websites. The dynamic methods we employ will allow the team to explore the hidden histories of Liverpool and Environmental Science while showcasing academic-informed and community-led solutions that are aimed at rectifying injustices related to institutionalised racism, classism, and colonialism.