WGS Publishing was founded in 2020 by Wasuk Godwin Sule-Pearce. She is a first-generation immigrant from Uganda and currently resides in London. Wasuk is a mother of four, home-schooling through the different stages to university. Wasuk’s curiosity in education began with her eldest child’s journey through the English education system where she was baffled by the approach of both primary and secondary schools and their relationship with the local authority.
Wasuk is a chartered accountant. In Wasuk’s Masters degree dissertation, she interviewed 22 people who had been pupils in the English education system. Whilst on maternity leave in 2019, Wasuk expanded her Masters dissertation into her first published book, Black Pupils Matter: Our Experiences of the English Education System 1950s-2000. After graduating with a distinction, Wasuk was offered a fully paid doctoral scholarship in Education, where she explored the lived experiences of Black LGBTQ+ students in higher education institutions. This was a comparative study encompassing the UK, the U.S., and South Africa. Wasuk employed a mixed-methods approach using questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups.
Early on in Wasuk’s Ph.D., researching the Black experience in higher education in the UK, U.S., and South Africa, she was prompted to undertake a vigorous search for peer-reviewed academic journals, articles, theses, and papers. Wasuk searched databases, Digital Commons Networks, and physical libraries, unfortunately, she experienced hurdle after hurdle. 1)Wasuk needed access to more than one library which was expensive. 2) There were hardly any articles written by or citing Black authors. This was prevalent in the Global North more than in the South. On further investigations, Wasuk found the African Journal online which was not accessible from many library sources.
The university press sector, library, and publishing are frequently discussed as fragmented from each other however; Wasuk experienced these structures as constitutive of epistemic racism. As an early career researcher studying in the Global North, Wasuk’s research is reduced to the theories born from the experience and problems of White men and increasingly women from the Global North that were created within a particular time or space dimensions that she then has to apply to the Global South even if the experience and time or space of the former are quite different from the latter.
WGS Publishing was inspired by Wasuk ’s early career research derived from experience in the academe. On her doctoral journey, Wasuk had her fair share of rejection from educational and related journals and struggled to find a publisher for her very first book. Despite this, Wasuk has published over 20 books. These experiences were shared in articles and books. Her research, work, and advocacy are centered around: race, racism, Blackness, intersectionality, identity development, higher education, the English education system, qualitative and quantitative research, and African studies.
WGS Publishing is tackling epistemic racism and advocating for the decoloniality of publishing and knowledge production. Publishing therefore was a vehicle to subvert and speak back to the racial processes that threatened to define the Black experiences. WGSP Publishing validates Black culture, history, and politics while promoting a sense of self and belonging. For the last 4 years, WGSP Publishing has made available to the Globe and communities, literature, non-fiction, history, geography, and children’s books from Africa, and the Black global village. WGSP Publishing continues to produce an important body of academic and general readership publications. Our titles are available on this website.