Love, D. N., Yeboah, D., Folayan, D., May, S., & Adegbite, P. A. (2026). 'Britishness is not Whiteness': Youth poets 'bite back' at the education survival complex through a killjoy call-and-response towards creative abolition. Creative Critical Interventions for Social Justice, 39.

Abstarct: This chapter shows that young people see poetry and school spaces in England as sites where it is not possible to fully embrace spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. Through a creative critical inquiry, we argue that if poetry, culture and spirituality are to be justice-centred then there is a need to turn towards radical creative and cultural lineages of Black and Afro-diasporic arts like spoken word poetry. If poetry and its spiritual potential are to hold meaning in the lives of young people of colour in Britain, then they need to be de-linked from embodying unexamined Britishness synonymous with Whiteness. First, the chapter contextualises Blackness and Britishness through the self-identified lens of a Manchester-based youth poet Princess Arinola Adegbite aka P.A. Bitez, an alumna of the arts charity Young Identity who partnered with the Poetic Justice project to examine issues of educational justice. Second, the cultural relevance of the poetry-based method of call-and-response is introduced. Third, the call-and-response presents spoken word poetry as a portal to epistemic and aesthetic justice amidst the violence of education that youth poets attest creates unsurvivable conditions for youth of colour and punishes their artistic, cultural and spiritual expression. The discussion identifies these unsurvivable conditions as the unnamed problem of Britain’s educational survival complex through Arinola’s anticolonial refusal of the elitist racist tradition of the avant-garde; the whitewashing of English and poetry in schools; and the historical colonial legacies in the policing of the Black imagination and criminalisation of Black artists in UK drill music. In conclusion, the call-and-response gestures towards a generative possibility of practising everyday abolition in the non-formal gathering places of spoken word where Arinola’s poetics holds a promise for feminist killjoy praxis that is anticolonial, anti-carceral and anti-capitalist.

Folayan, D. (2025). From Colonial Legacies to Decolonial Futures: Explorations of Coloniality Through Oxbridge and Lagdan in Bagga-Gupta, S. (Ed) The Palgrave Handbook for Decolonising Education and Language Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan.

Abstract: This chapter employs poetry and storying to outline the legacies of colonialism evident in elite higher education institutions (HEIs). Situated across the UK and Nigeria, this chapter engages in a comparative institutional analysis of four universities to detail manifestations of the colonial matrix of knowledge formation across the territories of the global North and South. I outline how elite HEIs are historic tools of colonial logic that purport and preserve colonial ideals. I illustrate a break from colonial requirements for knowledge formation through form and content. I utilise creative-arts-based academic practices to demonstrate how thinkers can counter coloniality’s one-dimensional sense of knowledge formation. Highlighting the importance of doing decoloniality I explore why decolonial efforts and projects cannot fit neatly into the frame of academic rigour if they seek to truly achieve their aims.

Amofah-Akardom, T. and Folayan, D. (2022). Student blog post: Symposium July 2022, Close the Gap. Available at: https://www.closethegap.ox.ac.uk/article/symposium-1.

Commissioned blog post exploring themes that arose during the Close the Gap research symposium which took place at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford in July 2022.

Williams. A., Mayblin L., Birdi B., Carnegie E., Fields D., Gadhia M., Igali F., Kiyumbu W., Ladipo D., Mills C., Pinney M., and Stampnitzky L. (2019). Decolonising the Curriculum in the Faculty of Social Sciences: A report completed by a working group of the Faculty of Social Sciences Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Committee of The University of Sheffield. University of Sheffield Faculty of Social Sciences.

An internal report for staff and students exploring the best practices and processes involved in decolonising the curriculum within the Faculty of Social Sciences.