A reply to ‘Education, decolonisation and international development at the Institute of Education (London): a historical analysis’ by Elaine Unterhalter and Laila Kadiwal

In this reply, I make three comments on the article ‘Education, decolonisation and international development at the Institute of Education (London): a historical analysis’ by Elaine Unterhalter and Laila Kadiwal (2022). Unterhalter and Kadiwal foreground the meanings and implications of the department’s changing organisational titles over time, illustrating that these titles can be interpreted as metonyms that symbolise shifting registers of colonial and post-colonial identification for the department as a whole, as well as among individual staff at the UCL Institute of Education (IOE), London, UK. Geographies and positionalities are extensively elaborated in the analysis. Expanding on this, I suggest that the authors’ initial line of thinking begins to show, and can show even more, the limited recognition at the IOE that decolonial identities and discourses are underlined by an affective dimension. This connects with Unterhalter and Kadiwal’s observation that although recently decolonial theories and praxis at the IOE have taken on a more nuanced, multidimensional perspective, further institutional and individual work is required. Thus, my response engages with questions around the modalities through which a narrative of history is constructed and naturalised.