On the affective threshold of power and privilege

Higher education is facing increasing calls to engage in a process of intellectual decolonisation. This process necessitates that we take time to consider both the content of our curriculum and the pedagogic practices used to facilitate its understanding. Drawing on discussions of both intellectual decolonisation and its underpinning principles of epistemic justice, I consider the implications of these ideas for the threshold concept framework. These implications are likely to relate to both the identification of potential future threshold concepts and the experience of engaging with them. As threshold scholars, we may need to reconsider our ideas about who the experts are within a discipline or practice in our efforts to identify candidate threshold concepts and consider alternative sources of evidence in support of this. In addition, we need to reflect on how the learning experiences that arise as a result of encounters with thresholds that have emerged as a result of the privileging of knowledge and ways of knowing from the ‘global north’ might serve as a source of epistemic trouble to learners from the ‘global south’. Such learning experiences are likely to be highly emotive and represent a significant source of troublesome learning.