Description
There has been an urgent call to decolonise Business Schools in the last five years. Reflecting on this, decolonisation has become an important component of BAM’s commitment to advance sustainability and equity, diversity, inclusion and respect as reflected in the publication of the BAM Guide to Decolonising the Business School Curriculum.
Putting decolonisation into practice can be challenging as this means challenging our ways of thinking and doing in our particular personal and professional contexts. This event is an opportunity for delegates to engage with a range of creative and decolonised methodologies that can help them get started on their journey in addition to learn about decolonial approaches that they can use in their own practice.
These methods will be used to explore what decolonisation means to participants in terms of their own personal and professional context and subsequently to identify ways they can develop their teaching and pedagogic practice through the decolonisation of their curriculum. Given the important experiential and embodied nature of these methods, this event has been designed as an in-person event so participants can fully experience them first-hand and get the most of the day.
The number of places is limited.
The event will also provide an opportunity for participants to progress and build the BAM community of practice around this area of work. The event will be followed by a drink reception launching the BBS Sage Case Report on Decolonising a Business School in Context: from theory to practice and will give a chance to participants to connect with the wider community of academic and professional services colleagues as well as practitioners who have contributed to the BBS decolonisation project in the last 3 years.
Provider Information
BAM Management Knowledge and Education Inclusive Education Working Group and the Birmingham Business School Decolonisation Project Team.
Who should attend?
Anybody who is interested in getting started with their decolonisation journey or progress it further, would like to learn about decolonial creative methodologies and/or connect with other interested colleagues in this area around this important agenda.
The event speaks to Section A1, A2, B1, B2, C1,C2, as detailed in the BAM Framework.
Facilitators
Dr Caroline Chaffer
Dr Caroline Chaffer is a Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching at the School for Business and Society at the University of York.
Caroline holds a Doctorate in Education from the University of Sheffield where her thesis examined the role of pedagogy in the reproduction of social inequalities.
Caroline is a member of BAM's Management, Knowledge and Education Committee where she jointly leads the inclusive education working group.
Professor Jill Webb
Professor Jill Webb is Associate Dean for the Faculty of Social Sciences and is proud to be one of the first Professors in Teaching and Scholarship at University of York. She co-founded the Centre for the AdvancedStudy of Management Education through which colleagues are supported to enhance the student experience and develop their careers, by working together at the nexus of scholarship and educational practice. Jill was the first in her family to attend university and is deeply committed to removing institutional barriers to student success.
She is the institutional academic lead for the Access and Participation Plan, inclusion and the international student experience.
Professor Kendi Guantai
Professor Kendi Guantai is a widely recognised scholar and leader in Ubuntu-Informed Strategic Communication and Cultural Transformation. As the Dean for Culture and Inclusion at Lancaster University, she provides strategic oversight for all Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) objectives, driving organisational accountability across staff and student initiatives.
Her unique, award-winning academic work is founded on the African onto-epistemological philosophy of Ubuntu, often summarised as "I am because we are." This principle is the bedrock of her mission to evolve education and business practice away from individualistic, transactional models. Professor Guantai champions a philosophy that prioritises shared humanity, compassion, and collective liberation.
By combining her expertise in Corporate Communication and Community Development, Professor Guantai employs story-based approaches to co-create genuinely equitable environments. This collaborative model offers a pathway for achieving meaningful and sustainable cultural transformation, making her a sought-after international speaker for institutions looking to move beyond superficial inclusion to deep-seated belonging.
Professor Iwi Ugiagbe-Green
Professor Iwi Ugiagbe-Green is a Professor of Equity in Education and a National Teaching Fellow (2025). She is an inter-disciplinary academic activist whose work is centred in equity and social justice and as such is aligned with SDG 4 (quality education), SDG 8 (decent work) and SDG 10 (reduced inequalities). Her professional identity and praxis are anchored by the Ubuntu philosophy (I am because we are).
She is also an active researcher and recently co-edited the series, Reimagining Futures: Decoloniality in Higher Education – An Ubuntu Perspective in Frontiers of Sociology. As an academic activist, Iwi seeks to apply decolonial praxis in her intentionally inclusive distributive leadership approach and teaching practice. She is the recipient of several institutional and national awards in recognition of the impact of her equity in education work.
As a senior education leader of her university, she understands some of the challenges of implementing decolonial praxis within the complex organisation that is a university operating in a specific regulatory, marketized context. However, she remains committed to continuously ensuring that she centres decolonial thinking in her praxis and strives to encourage others to do so, in the spirit of Ubuntu.
Dr Caroline Chapain
Dr Caroline Chapain is an Associate Professor in Management at Birmingham Business School. Born of French nationality, Caroline has studied, worked and lived in France (20 years), Canada (10 years) and the UK (20 years). In addition, she did her Ph.D. in Mexico.
This cross-cultural experience made her reflect on the notion of identities and cultural practices as well as issues related to the production of knowledge. While her career initially focused on researching the links between creativity and local and regional economic development in North America and Europe, she has progressively shifted her research interests towards the practice of responsible management and education and issues related to equity, diversity and belonging in business schools as well as the practice of art-based research and education. She brings these personal and professional identities and perspectives to her understanding and practice of decolonising work.
Dr Emma Surman
Dr Emma Surman is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Birmingham Business School. Emma’s research and teaching falls broadly within the areas of consumer culture and the sociology of consumption. Recent projects have explored the links between the production and consumption of food including food swapping, communal eating, school gardens and community responses to food poverty. Emma has held grants from the EPRSC, ESRC and AHRC and has published in journals including Sociology, Sociological Review and the Journal of Business Research. Her teaching takes a critical approach to understanding the role of marketing in society and what responsibility entails in the context of a business school, in part informed by a period spent as PRME champion for BBS. She is one of the editors of Responsible Marketing for Well-being and Society: A Research Companion, published by Routledge.
Anita Lateano
Anita Lateano is a Research Fellow at Birmingham Business School. Born in Birmingham, UK, Anita identifies as mixed race with heritage that spans both Asia and Latin America.
With a professional background within the environmental and charity sector which included work in South Africa and Tanzania, this led her back to academia, with a desire to reflect on those experiences, the role of INGOs in critically understanding climate and environmental injustices.
She joined BBS after gaining an MA in Social Anthropology from SOAS and this is Anita’s first position within Higher Education, allowing her to hold an “outsider” perspective within both the Business School and academia. Alongside working on the Decolonisation Project, she is currently a PhD student at the University of Westminster.
Dr Ray Ndibalema
Dr Rweyemamu Alphonce Ndibalema is an Associate Professor in Management at Birmingham Business School. Rweyemamu is from Tanzania, whose life experience spans from living, studying and working as an academic in different countries including Canada (lived), New Zealand (lived and studied), Tanzania (lived, studied and worked) United Kingdom (lived, studied and worked) and the United Arab Emirates (lived and worked). Rweyemamu holds Ph.D. in Management centred on work engagement among academics, it aimed to discover the environment/conditions that trigger positive people engagement enabling them to unleash their best selves. Decolonising Business education coincides with his passion to providing/fostering an environment in academia where every person despite their race (ethnicity) or gender is not disadvantaged by the dark colonial legacy but instead has the best conditions/opportunity to reach their full potential. He brings both in his personal and professional capacity his international lived, study and work experience in our reflective journey of decolonising business education in our business school.
Draft Agenda
Draft agenda
09:45 - 10:00: Registration & coffee
10:00 - 10:30: Introduction to the event i.e. aims and objectives of the BAM MKE Inclusive Education Working Group and decolonisation subgroup & aims of the day - Caroline Chaffer, Jill Webb & Iwi Ugiagbe-Green (BAM MKE Inclusive Education Working Group) & Caroline Chapain, Emma Surman, Anita Lateano and Ray Ndibalema (BBS Decolonisation Project Team)
10:30 - 12:00: Workshop on Decolonising Business School in Context - BBS Decolonisation Project Team.
This guided workshop aims to contribute to the development of decolonising practice in situ within the context of Business Schools. It builds on the work that Birmingham Business School (BBS) has pursued in implementing a decolonisation project since 2022. As the BBS Decolonisation project team engaged with this work, they developed a holistic and research informed approach to guide them in putting theory into practice in their specific context, now summarised in a case report published by SAGE that will be made available to participants.
The workshop will explain and build on this approach in terms of content and design. It will offer an interactive and inclusive experience that can help participants share their own perspectives, learn from others and situate themselves with regards to decolonisation in terms of their personal and professional identities and identify ways they could concretely move this forward within their contexts and through a community of practice within BAM. To do so, the workshop will offer participants the opportunity to concretely experience how creative methods can be used to support decolonisation in practice and to come-up with a set of individual and collective principles.
12:00 - 13:00: Lunch and networking
13:00 - 16:00: Workshop on Decolonising your curriculum in practice - Iwi Ugiagbe-Green & Kendi Guantai
We invite you to join us in community, in the spirit of Ubuntu (I am, because we are) to experience an immersive experience of becoming. We promise you that you will leave with more than you came.
Our Ubuntu workshop will challenge you to interrogate your ways of being and of knowing. We centre all of those who accept our invitation to join us to enter a space of humans being together, of community and challenge.
We are intentional in offering very little detail by way of what you will be doing but leave you with this quote from one a Head of School who invited us to run an Ubuntu session with their staff.
You were able to engage us all to take a good look at ourselves, our thinking and unconsciously excluding valuable material or not giving due credit to sources. The workshop was well balanced between time for transmitting information, reflection and discussion. The workshop started with some excellent icebreakers, designed in such a way we could approach the topic of decolonisation positively – by allowing us to realise that which binds us is far more than what divides us. Ubuntu has now become a key work in my vocabulary following the workshop. Colleagues who attended the workshop were overwhelmingly positive about it and we are already planning another one.
16:00 : 16:30: Conclusion and next steps - Caroline Chaffer, Jill Webb & Iwi Ugiagbe-Green (BAM MKE Inclusive Education Working Group)
16:30 - 17:30: BBS Sage Case Report Launch and Drinks Reception
Benefits of Attendance
Benefits of Attendance
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Learn about and experience with a range of decolonial and creative methodologies that you can build in your own practice;
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Identify areas to decolonise your practice within your own personal and professional contexts;
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Connect with a community of practice around this agenda and help progress this agenda within BAM.
Event Fee
Event Fee
BAM Members and Student Members: £65
Non-BAM Members: £90.
If you are booking multiple paid events as a Non-Member, it may be cheaper for you to purchase a BAM Membership as nearly all BAM Events are free or at a discounted rate for Members.
For more information, please visit BAM Membership
Registration closes on 31st October 2025 at 23:59 UK time.
Event Venue
Event Venue
Birmingham Business School,
University House,
116 Edgbaston Park Rd,
Edgbaston,
Birmingham,
B15 2TY
Payment and Cancellation Policy
Payment for the event must be received before the start date of the event concerned. Access will not be permitted to the event if full payment has not been received.
Cancellations
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Cancellations received within 14 days of booking your place on the event will receive a full refund.
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Cancellations received after the 14-day cancellation period and later than 14 days before the start date of the event will not be eligible for a refund.
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Although we endeavour to run all events as advertised, BAM reserves the right to cancel any event if, for example, there are not enough people to justify running the event or if other significant unforeseen circumstances arise. Please be aware that delegates are always responsible for ensuring their own travel and accommodation against cancellation, and the British Academy of Management is not able to reimburse anyone for these under any circumstances.
To cancel a booking a cancellation request must be submitted via your BAM Account, to do this:
- Go to your BAM Account
- Click 'My Events'
- Under 'Upcoming Events' will be the booking, please click Cancel Booking
- Follow the steps and complete the request