The academic year 2019-2020 saw a novelty in our philosophy bachelor program: the first issue of a course called Diversifying Philosophy, which I was asked to teach. Students had been pushing for more diversity in course materials for some time, on top of the already longstanding course in Arabic Philosophy, taught by Olga Lizzini. Two students, in collaboration with Annemie Halsema developed the idea of the special diversifying course. Carlo Ierna recently was given a Comenius grant to work in a similar direction, enriching the canon.
Reducing poverty, hunger, and inequalities, promoting health and education – all SDG’s are interconnected. Within philosophy education and research, the most important SDG is nr 10 – to reduce inequality and to support the marginalized. In our field too many are still marginalized, their voices not considered part of the core curriculum and its materials. The suppressed voices of queer philosophy, feminist philosophy; of postcolonial and black thinkers – these are central in the new course to diversify the field. This year students can hear more underrepresented voices in philosophy in my courses. First in the new optional course in African Philosophy (BA 2/3), second in the graduate winter course on African Philosophy in Global Times - where students encounter lecturers from the Netherlands, but also from Cameroon and Senegal.
All of these teaching initiatives are intimately connected with my research into African and Intercultural Philosophy, which resulted in the book Indigenous, Modern and Postcolonial Relations to Nature. Published in the Routledge series on Environmental Humanities, this book argues the necessity to dialogue with indigenous peoples. To encounter their philosophies as worded by their shamans and thinkers, and to enter the negotiations that will make a dialogue on a shared issue such as our relation to nature possible. I hope to carry the inspiration of SDG 10 further in more collaborative research projects – one on Indigenous Knowledge Systems and another revisiting Bantu Philosophy, a contested work from the colonial archive – thus helping to carry the mission of engagement of our university into a new age – an age of interculturality.
Angela Roothaan