Event
WUR’s Colonial Past, Present and Future
Have you ever wondered, as a student at a former colonial school, if what you are studying has been derived from colonial roots? Join our panel discussion to understand WUR’s role in past Dutch colonies, critically think about your current curriculum and how we can move forward.
During this evening, we will discuss WUR's colonial ties and chart a path forward for our university. We will be joined by Esha Shah, Raki Ap, and Larissa Schulte Nordholt. The event provides an immersive experience through storytelling, a panel discussion, and a photo gallery from the archives of WUR. This evening questions how colonialism has shaped this university. What are its remnants, in the form of coloniality? And how do we move forward?
Esha Shah
Esha Shah is a senior lecturer with WRM chair group at Wageningen University. Her research and teaching interests mainly span feminist studies and science and technology studies. Sheemploys anthropological and historical methods in all her research. She increasingly uses sources from popular culture (films and fiction) and (auto)biographical life-writings for her research and teaching.Currently she is developing her research interests on the way in which subjectivity (including emotions and affects) shape modes of political rationality, normativity, including objectivity in scientific knowledge.
Raki Ap
Raki Ap is a former soldier, civil servant at the Ministry of the Interior and climate and anti-racism activist. During guest lectures and presentations Raki Ap takes his audience on a journey to his homeland, West Papua, also 's the world's largest tropical island.
Raki lets people experience what it feels like toone day to be Papua and some climate change from the point of view of many Indigenous peoples means. Raki therefore speaks from the Indigenous language perspective and thus unleashes a lot within the climate movement and established institutions.
Larissa Schulte Nordholt
Larissa Schulte Nordholt is a historian working at Wageningen University & Research, currently working as a postdoc on a book about the colonial history of the university and her predecessors. Her PhD dissertation, finished in 2021 at Leiden University, concerned the UNESCO-funded General History of Africa/l’Histoire Générale de l’Afrique (1964-1998). In it, she researches how the UNESCO project aimed to decolonize the writing of African history and what that looked like in practice. She is interested in questions of colonial and postcolonial knowledge production, decolonization and emancipation in the broadest sense.