Decolonisation has become a lightning rod for critics who accuse universities and colleges of being full of liberal ideologues, with a number of pundits up in arms about efforts to decolonise reading lists and the curriculum. 

But for some scholars, decolonisation is merely a by-product of the work that they do, including our guest Farish Noor, a professor in the department of history in the Faculty of the Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Malaya in Malaysia and a professor in the Standards of Decision Making Across Cultures programme at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Despite its complexity, Noor says, decolonisation is essential to a comprehensive view of humanity.

Many in academia doubt decolonisation's relevance for STEM subjects, but in this episode we’ll also hear from Brigitte Stenhouse, a lecturer in the history of mathematics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at The Open University. She has overseen the creation of a database of original sources to give students a global and historical view of the discipline.