Samantha Gayatri, UoG GMH Alum, Northumbria University PhD student
This post is published on behalf of Samathan G by Laura Sharp.
Last year, I joined Laura Sharp, Samuel Owusu Achiaw, Ailsa Foley, Mia Wilson, along with my fellow Global Mental Health Masters course mates Izah Bowes and Chrissy Kleist, to do something that sounds straightforward on the surface: review the Principles of Public Health curriculum at the University of Glasgow’s School of Health and Wellbeing . Our goal was to make the weekly online content more inclusive and representative, to surface colonial biases, to centre Global South and low- and middle-income country (LMIC) perspectives, to help students see health systems beyond the Western lens. We created new materials: pieces on Jamu and Indonesia’s preventive health systems, a WHO critique, clinical governance comparisons, analysis of vulnerability and extreme weather. Students now have access to these perspectives, and that matters.
We did this with minimal resources. Just collaborative effort and fitting it into already-stretched schedules. That detail matters because it shapes what was possible. We worked with what we had: time, critical eyes, and the collective will to shift what was there. In some ways, that constraint was clarifying, and we had to be strategic about where representation could actually deepen curriculum, where existing materials could be reframed, where new examples could punch above their weight. But it also meant the work stayed within existing structures rather than challenging them fundamentally. You do more with less when you don’t have the luxury of waiting for resources. In addition, you also get to learn what you can change and what you can’t, very quickly.
But I want to be honest about what it took to get there. I came into this work as an Indonesian person with an explicitly anti-imperialist lens. I ask questions about whose knowledge gets legitimised, how power shapes what we teach, questions rooted in what Fanon (1963) calls a critical consciousness, a decolonising awareness of how knowledge and power intertwine. I was also the only Global South person in the room, a position that sits at the intersection of geopolitical and epistemological power, to borrow from Crenshaw’s (1989) framing.
This positioning shaped everything. For example, when discussing terminology, the term “global majority” came on the surface, over “people of colour”, not as political correctness, but because it reflects demographic reality and challenges how race itself was constructed through Western frameworks. One of the staff team was resistant, explaining that they were concerned it could be perceived as sidelining white people. At the time, I couldn’t fully articulate why the term matters, why centring the fact that the majority of the world is not white fundamentally shifts how we think about knowledge and representation, without triggering defensiveness. That’s the softening and the emotional labour of being the critical voice in a room where not everyone shares the same urgency and insights about these questions.
But it’s important to say this too: I was given genuine space. When I wrote the piece on Indonesian Jamu, tracing how traditional knowledge is commodified, how women’s labour disappears in commercialisation, that was valued. My critique of the WHO, my analysis of clinical governance across LMIC contexts, my writing about vulnerability to extreme weather: these materials shifted how students encounter health systems. That is real. While the space was constrained, it was given. And my voice, my positionality, my analysis: these became part of what students learn. This work is significant because I was given that space, however limited, to centre perspectives that would otherwise be absent from health education in general.
So, here’s both/and, informed by what Alessandrini (2023) calls the tension in institutionalised multiculturalism: the educational materials are substantive, and they’ve shifted how students see the curriculum. And they’re still incremental, important groundwork, but not the radical curriculum overhaul that I think is actually needed. Students feel more included and heard. However, we haven’t challenged existing knowledge about colonisation deeply enough.
What we did fits what Alessandrini describes as institutional multiculturalism, representation added, perspectives centred, but within existing structures. Ideal decolonisation, by Alessandrini’s framing, would go further: to wrench the university from its settler colonial, white supremacist roots and transform it into something fundamentally different. That would mean not just adding Global South materials to existing modules, but questioning why those modules exist in that form, who designed them, and what structural violence that represents. It would mean genuinely transforming the curriculum, not patching it.
And this is crucial, Alessandrini also notes that even institutionalised multiculturalism contains seeds of more radical demands. What we did planted those seeds. We showed students that knowledge is constructed, that Western frameworks aren’t neutral, that other ways of understanding health exist. Whether those seeds grow into something more transformative depends on what happens next: whether future students, staff, and institutions build on this groundwork or let it be absorbed into institutional comfort.
Change in institutional contexts is messy and constrained. This is what that actually looks like: what got made, what got softened, why the incremental work still mattered, and what remains undone.
This work has been meaningful to me in ways that go beyond CV lines or institutional recognition. As an Indonesian person educated in a Western system, as someone whose knowledge and perspective have often been positioned as supplementary or illustrative rather than foundational, being given the space to critique, to question, to centre my own understanding of health and wellbeing felt significant. It meant that my voice wasn’t just welcome… it was necessary. It meant that the curriculum could be different because I was in the room, and that matters. Not because I fixed everything or transformed the institution single-handedly, but because I showed up as myself: critical, grounded, unapologetic about asking whose knowledge counts and why. I wasn’t alone, either. Izah and Chrissy brought their own perspectives too. We softened some edges, yes. We worked within constraints, absolutely. But we also planted seeds. And that is real contribution to change, even if it’s incremental, even if it’s incomplete. For any other students, staff, or allies reading this: the work of decolonising your spaces matters. Show up, ask the hard questions, don’t wait for perfect conditions. The small shifts accumulate.
References
Alessandrini, A. C. (2023). Decolonize multiculturalism. OR Books.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), 139–167.
Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Press.
thanks for info.