Abstract

This interactive session explores how co-created comic-book storytelling can function as a decolonial pedagogical tool, enabling students to uncover, visualise, and celebrate the invisible contributions of historically marginalised figures in education, health, and social reform. The project centres on collaborative partnerships between students and educators across two UK universities - Sunderland (post-92) and Glasgow (research-intensive) - to challenge dominant Eurocentric, male, and Western narratives embedded in higher education curricula.
Mainstream curricula across disciplines continue to privilege white, Western epistemologies, marginalising global and local knowledge systems. Within fields such as education, social sciences, nursing, and health sciences, the absence of diverse voices reinforces systemic inequities and limits students’ sense of belonging. Decolonising curricula therefore demands more than adding content as it requires reimagining how knowledge is represented, shared, and valued. Yet, few pedagogical models centre creative co-production and student agency in this process.
This session presents the start of a participatory research and teaching project in which students act as co-researchers and co-designers, creating comic-style narratives that re-story the contributions of overlooked historical and contemporary figures from the Global South and marginalised UK communities. The comic format - accessible, visual, and narrative - enables critical engagement with complex social histories while disrupting the textual dominance of Eurocentric academic discourse.
The workshop will:
• Demonstrate how visual storytelling can act as a decolonial research and teaching method;
• Share examples of student-created comic panels and narratives from the project;
• Explore how co-production can begin to foster psychological safety, belonging, and epistemic justice in higher education;
• Reflect on initial lessons learned from collaboration across post-92 and research-intensive contexts, highlighting institutional contrasts and shared commitments to inclusion.
The session embodies undisciplinarity by collapsing traditional academic-artistic divides and positioning creativity, affect, and relationality at the heart of knowledge production. Through fusing decolonial scholarship, visual arts, and participatory pedagogy, the project enacts an epistemic refusal that seeks to resist disciplinary silos and hierarchical modes of knowledge-making. It offers an imaginative, practice-led vision of what decolonial futures in higher education might look like: plural, embodied, and co-created.