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The Race, Coloniality, and Education (RCE) Research Group brings together scholars whose work examines how race, racism, coloniality, and empire shape education systems, knowledge production, pedagogical practices, and institutional life.

The group provides an intellectual home for academic staff, postdoctoral researchers, and doctoral students working across schools, higher education, policy, and community contexts. While members’ research spans diverse empirical settings, RCE is united by a shared commitment to understanding race and coloniality as structuring forces in education rather than marginal or additive concerns.

The group foregrounds education as a key site through which colonial legacies are reproduced, contested, and reworked — from curriculum and assessment to teacher education, research methods, institutional governance, and student experience. It offers a space to think critically about power, knowledge, belonging, and exclusion, while also attending to questions of repair, refusal, and the possibilities of educating otherwise.

Research Focus and Themes

Research within RCE engages with a wide range of substantive and conceptual concerns, including:

  • race, racism, and coloniality in education
  • decolonial, postcolonial, and anti-racist theory
  • empire, migration, belonging, and historical legacies
  • curriculum, canon, and knowledge selection
  • teacher education, pedagogy, and professional learning
  • epistemic injustice and research ethics
  • student experience, identity, and access in elite institutions
  • education policy, governance, and the role of the state
  • community knowledge, museums, archives, and public history

Rather than organising work around fixed phases or sectors, the group encourages relational and interdisciplinary analysis, drawing on history, sociology, geography, political theory, cultural studies, and philosophy.

Ethos and Approach

RCE is not a conventional research group. Its activities foreground themes, questions, and collective inquiry, allowing members to enter discussions through theory, empirical research, lived experience, pedagogical practice, or institutional work.

A central commitment of the group is visibility — both of the work being done on race and coloniality, and of the people doing it. Research in this area is often marginalised, dispersed, or rendered invisible within institutional structures, even while it is called upon in moments of crisis or controversy. RCE seeks to make this work legible, sustained, and collective, rather than exceptional or individualised.

The group functions not only as an intellectual space, but also as an institutional presence: a place where questions of race, coloniality, power, and responsibility in education are held openly and continuously, rather than appearing intermittently or reactively. Creating this visibility is understood as a form of care, accountability, and scholarly responsibility, particularly for early-career researchers and doctoral students whose work may be politically or emotionally demanding.

Critical approaches are central to the group’s work, including attention to ethics, positionality, affect, and epistemic justice. RCE is committed to supporting scholars engaging difficult or politicised topics and to building a research culture grounded in care, reflexivity, and intellectual generosity.

Activities and Collaboration

The group meets regularly during term for seminars, workshops, and discussion sessions, and contributes to a wider programme of public engagement, teacher professional development, and collaborative research. Members are involved in nationally and internationally funded projects, work closely with schools, cultural institutions, and civil society organisations, and contribute to public debate on race, education, and colonial legacies.

RCE also plays an active role in doctoral supervision and mentorship, with a particular commitment to supporting students researching race and coloniality and to strengthening the pipeline of under-represented voices in education research.