IASH has been awarded the 2025 Public Humanities Award for Leadership in Practice and Community by the CHCI Public Humanities Network, for our work on the Institute Project on Decoloniality (IPD) between 2021 and 2024. The Public Humanities Network Award for Leadership in Practice and Community recognizes and celebrates exemplary public humanities work engaged with communities.
IPD '24 was a three-year research and public engagement project run by IASH. This project offered £750,000 in funding for scholars from around the world to visit Edinburgh and conduct research on themes such as decolonising the curriculum, the British Empire, slavery, contemporary inequalities and reparations. The project aimed to address the privileging of White scholars and Whiteness in the arts, humanities and the social sciences in many institutions of higher education across the global north, and the ways in which indigenous knowledges were generally overlooked in favour of hegemonic Western thought. In doing so, a key objective was to explore how the learning from the sponsored research could be used to shape a praxis (the fusion of knowledge with action) to support more just social orders.