Can Anti-Racist Civic Engagement Be Dialogic? A Dialogic Analysis of Decolonial Discourse in Belgian Higher Education

Universities have become central arenas in which the terms of racial justice are negotiated, contested, and at times sanctioned. This article examines how decolonial discourse in Belgian higher education navigates the tension between dialogic and authoritative discourse. Decolonial discourse in Belgium tackles racial illiteracy or the lack of institutional capacity to engage with the histories and contemporary realities of race. The study draws on a qualitative analysis of thirteen publicly available documents, including open letters, manifestos, and institutional responses produced between 2017 and 2021, with a dialogic analysis of five key texts within the Ghent University Association. Using Bakhtin’s framework of dialogic and authoritative discourse, operationalised through Matusov and von Duyke’s concept of internally persuasive discourse (IPD), the analysis identifies three modes of responding to racial illiteracy: appeals to personal conviction (IPD1), the formulation of new institutional norms (IPD2), and dialogic inquiry that treats illiteracy as a shared pedagogical problem (IPD3). The findings show that while decolonial movements expose the structural and epistemic conditions that sustain racial illiteracy, institutional responses from students, staff, and governing bodies often address these critiques by enforcing ‘decolonial’ personal convictions and institutional norms, risking the reproduction of the very illiteracy they seek to remedy. The article concludes that decolonial transformation requires cultivating dialogic practices that position racial illiteracy as a collective site of learning within the university’s civic mission.