Avoiding the Housekeeping Trap: Challenges and Opportunities in a Decolonizing Project at the University of East Anglia, UK

This chapter is based on the authors’ reflections about the challenges and opportunities that they encountered while working on a new teaching toolkit for the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich, UK, between February 2022 and May 2023. The chapter’s central arguments deal with the so-called institutional housekeeping trap, which refers to the risk that certain professional activities are relegated to the realm of unpaid or otherwise unrecognized labor. As the authors’ experience working on the UEA toolkit shows, close collaboration between different members of the university and ongoing criticality about the relevance of positionality are crucial to ensure that decolonization efforts are not reduced to the racialized, gendered and often little-rewarded realm of institutional housekeeping.