Dr Cathy Elliott is a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Political Science at UCL. She has been involved in various projects involving students in liberating the curriculum, including making podcasts about the experiences of being a Jewish student or first generation student at UCL, and also coding the Political Science curriculum in order to analyse how inclusive it is. We wanted to find out about what motivated her, what issues she ran into and what she and her students got out of the experience of liberating the curriculum. What follows is an edited transcript of an interview with Dr Jason Davies of the Arena Centre.
JPD: What got you thinking about inclusive curriculum?
…the history of the ways we think about democracy, and how that was all bound up in Imperial histories
CE: I came from a practitioner background, working on democracy and governance in Pakistan, which I very quickly became very disillusioned by, so I started out in academic life by doing a PhD (now an open access book) about democracy promotion in a historical context. So, I was thinking about democracy promotion – specifically, for my story, the UK does in Pakistan – where that comes from, historically. I went right back to the 1830s to think about the history of the ways we think about democracy, and how that was all bound up in Imperial histories. I was fascinated by the ways in which British rulers in the Indian subcontinent used practices to control and to know, and to understand the populations that they were trying to govern and how those practices informed what we now think of as modern liberal democracy. So, I was always interested in these issues of imperialism and also in the ways that liberal democracy is racialized and gendered.
So, I came into the classroom with those interests, and wanting to impart those interests to students, and to help students understand some of the research and some of the thinking around this. So, to that extent, the curriculum that I actually teach – insofar as I’ve had control over it – has always been about decolonization in that sense of thinking about the influence of Empire on the ways in which we know, on knowledge practices, and on substantive knowledge in the modules I teach on, which are qualitative research methods and international development respectively.
JPD: So would you say that your interest in decolonizing arose from engaging with that material? Or did you bring it in with you, as it were?
CE: I definitely brought it in with me. But when I started out on my PhD, I wouldn’t have had the language to think about in that way. I think we’re all interested in discussing ideas from our own research with our students because that’s where our expertise lies. But I also did a Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education at the Institute of Education. This was very early on in my teaching career when I’d just become a Teaching Fellow. One of the things we did on that course was, we watched the video Why is My Curriculm White? which featured UCL students. I liked it because it really chimed with interests that I already had. But it also really brought into sharp focus for me the fact that this is something which is quite pressing in our classrooms, and which is important to our students, and which our students are already doing work on, in a way that I hadn’t quite considered or, rather, I hadn’t quite considered the sort of institutional politics of it before, including all the ways in which students are involved in demanding something from us around what we can know – what sorts of knowledge, epistemology, those sorts of things we allow – in the classroom.
JPD: Wow. Okay. So tell us what you then did. How do we go from Nathaniel Coleman‘s work and ‘Why is my Curriculum White?’ to the work I know that you’ve done?
I was trying to introduce topics, if you like, that would problematize the usual ways in which we think about international development
CE: I think it starts with…as I was thinking about decolonizing my international development syllabus, I was trying to introduce topics, if you like, that would problematize the usual ways in which we think about international development. I would say that this is a field of study which is quite ‘white’, quite Western-centric, and which privileges certain sorts of knowledge and those sorts of knowledge which I would trace back to imperial practices of knowledge, not least in the ways they are racialized and gendered.
So, one of the ways I did that was I introduced a week on religion and development. One of the things I was trying to encourage students to think about in that week was how it would make a difference to the ways we can think about international development if we took religious people seriously, and we took seriously what religious people believe. I think development studies in particular, and the development establishment has taken the view that as countries modernise and develop and come ‘up to date’, they will become more secular and less religious.
this sense that with time things go from being backward, superstitious, undeveloped towards being more enlightened, modern, developed and so on
This flies in the face of all the evidence, so you’ve got countries that organisations like the World Bank would consider ‘very developed’ like the United States – very very religious! And you’ve also got, in what you might call ‘the developing world’ (I probably wouldn’t) countries which are becoming ‘more developed’ but not becoming less religious. Then you’ve got the largest population of atheists in the world in China, which is not necessarily one of the ‘more developed’ countries right, so … This secularisation theory isn’t actually borne out by the evidence. And it’s also imbued with a linear temporality – this sense that with time things go from being backward, superstitious, undeveloped towards being more enlightened, modern, developed and so on. And that is clearly quite a problematic, condescending way to think. So what I wanted to do was say to students, if you’re a development practitioner and you’re working in the field, it would really help you out to take seriously what religious people believe. Maybe they know something that you don’t know. This really blew a lot of students’ minds. It was quite fun!
what’s…life like for ordinary Jewish students trying to negotiate all that?
And I was talking about that with Teresa McConlogue, from Arena, just when we went for a coffee. We were having this conversation around the same time that there had been an incident at UCL where there had been a Friends of Israel event, and there had been some antisemitic chanting and a lot of disruption – the police were called. What Theresa and I got talking about was the fact that actually it would be interesting to know apart from these big dramatic events, where you have some students that are quite interested in politics and interested in Palestinian activism and Israel activism and so on – what’s that what’s actually life like for ordinary Jewish students trying to negotiate all that? Because there were lots of accusations of antisemitism going around. But what we wanted to know was ‘is there a lot of antisemitism at UCL? Is it an isolated event like this where something happens, and it may be people from the outside who are protesting? Or is antisemitism an everyday experience for our students?’
And I think we both quite complacently thought there’s probably nothing to see here. It would be very reassuring if we could interview some students and find out that this isn’t much of a thing, right? And Mira Vogel (erstwhile of UCL), she was very keen on this idea. So, they said to me, ‘Well, why don’t you do a bit of research on it, get some students involved and see what you find out and we’ll give you a little bit of a grant. You can pay them a stipend, maybe you can make a video or something with this money.’
So, I did that. I applied for the grant and I got I think it was about £1000, it wasn’t a huge amount of money. I knew from my class on religion and development that I had three Jewish students in my class, which seemed like a good number. So, I recruited them, and they were all keen, and they all wanted to get involved. As I also teach research methods, I was interested in getting them to do a really good piece of research interviewing other Jewish students. We spent a whole lot of time thinking about ‘How do we sample? How do we choose who to interview? How do we interview them? What sorts of interviewing techniques should we use? Should we record it, should be transcribe it, how do we think about research ethics, consent, data protection, privacy and so on… And so, for me, it was just sort of a fun research project, teaching them how to do research. And so off they went to interview their friends and, through that, other students that they didn’t know. They got a really good sample across UCL of Jewish students: postgrad and undergrad, different programmes, some were observant, some were entirely secular but had Jewish heritage, some were involved in campus politics or Jewish life, others just preferred to keep their heads down, a really good range of different experiences. And they started transcribing these interviews.
It suddenly became apparent that there really was something to see here – that there was a lot of antisemitism bubbling away under the surface of university life
Then they started uploading them to the Dropbox and I started reading these transcripts, and we all started reading each other’s. It suddenly became apparent that there really was something to see here – that there was a lot of antisemitism bubbling away under the surface of university life, which I think really came as a shock to all of us, even those three Jewish students who were living it and had experienced it. I think something about the fact of voicing that, writing it down, making it visible, talking about it amongst ourselves was really, really shocking to all of us. So then the question changed from ‘shall we make a nice video? Shall we try and be reassuring?’… to ‘…okay. How are we going to try and communicate these actually quite worrying and dark findings?’
Every single person we interviewed, more or less, with very few exceptions, had had a few experiences of anti-semitism which were really quite nasty. So that’s why we made the podcast because we thought actually being able to talk about it and talk about how that made us feel, on air, and have people hear what we were saying and hear the pain of that, would be quite an appropriate way of communicating it. So that was how the first project started. That was how we managed to make the JewCL podcasts, which are still available and still being downloaded at quite a rate. So I think we’ve had 4,000 downloads over the last couple of years, and we still have a few downloads every month.
JPD: Amazing. I’ve listened to them all! But so long ago that I’m struggling to remember more than vague outlines, but I had the same reaction; I thought it was a really good way to honour the microaggressions and the grind of ‘little comments’ and ‘funny looks’ and the equivalent…
That every little thing that happens feels like ‘it’s nothing’, feels like ‘you should forget about it’
CE: and the deniability of it. That every little thing that happens feels like ‘it’s nothing’, feels like ‘you should forget about it’. It’s only when you put that whole picture together, as we did, that you realise that actually, this is not nothing, this is… this is a pattern.
JPD: The deniability… I think it’s a really good good point, you know, people go, ‘I was only joking’ or ‘don’t make such a fuss’ which adds insult to injury, doesn’t it?
CE: Of course it does.
JPD: How did you then go to the next ones about first generation students?
CE: So, that was perhaps a slightly less successful project. I think that was partly because it just came out of something I was personally interested in rather than something students were interested in.
The three students I worked with on the JewCL project were adamanant that the experience of doing the podcast had been a really brilliant educational experience for them and their final main conclusion was that other groups of students should have a similar opportunity because they found it’s such a great experience to do this work and to do their own piece of research. So I thought, well, all right, maybe I’ll have a look at first-generation students because that struck me as an interesting topic and it spoke to some experiences that tangentially I might have had.
there were all sorts of things at university for me that were very strange and difficult to negotiate
I’m not a first generation student, but I did come from a comprehensive school background and there were all sorts of things at university for me that were very strange and difficult to negotiate. So – this might be because I’m northern – for example, I discovered that I was handing in my essays five hours earlier than everybody else, because we have to turn them in “by dinnertime”. I discovered halfway through my final year that “dinnertime” for everybody else was six o’clock!
JPD: That’s a wonderful example.
CE: Haha. So this time I advertised for students to take part. Before I had known I had three Jewish students, but I didn’t know whether I had any first generation students and so I advertised, then I got three students, again, who were interested. But that was much more difficult because they weren’t really sure that being a first generation student was even something that we should be investigating. So that was the first problem.
One of them in particular, she was very keen to take part, I think, in order to question my idea that first generation students are in any way different or special or need any special treatment. She said she’d been filling in forms all the way through, where they asked her whether she was a first generation student, so that she could have more money or access to hardship funds or that kind of thing. As it turned out, she felt that she had been very lucky in her life and that by using “first generation” as a proxy for other kinds of disadvantage, she was being offered help that she shouldn’t really have been entitled to.
It was interesting, because she did have all sorts of stories about the sorts of experiences I thought we would hear about. Her parents hadn’t attended University, and therefore, they didn’t understand things like what a UCAS form was. They didn’t understand what she was studying; they didn’t understand what her marks meant. So, you know, 65 to them could it sounds like it’s ‘a bit in the middle’ a bit, you know, ‘not that great’. And, so, obviously, she did have some interesting stories to tell, but she really felt strongly that she didn’t want to be singled out.
Also, not SO many interviews took place in the end. The students working on the project were doing all sorts of part-time work in their spare time, inevitably, and so they had less time to devote to the project, perhaps a bit less confidence, so they didn’t drive it forward as much. So that in itself was really interesting. I mean, I keep thinking I should write something about it, actually, that all those disadvantages that I perceived first generation students to have meant that they couldn’t take part in a project in the same way, as the students taking part in the previous projects had been able to. Nevertheless we did put a podcast series together which also gets quite a lot of downloads and contains some really thoughtful interviews with the students themselves and also the President of UCL’s First Generation Society.
JPD: I mean, if a hard-to-reach student feels that they’ll never get access to things, they wouldn’t have bothered answering your advert. There is a sort of catch-22 in there. And anyone at UCL has somehow found a way through the system. So they’re not necessarily going to be typical.
…a project to find out how “inclusive” our reading lists are in our department
CE: There’s one other big project that I haven’t talked about at all, which you might be interested in and that’s the Inclusive Curriculum Project in Political Science. This was a project to find out how “inclusive” our reading lists are in our department.
What we did…so it started off being funded by a Faculty Challenge Fund, for which I wrote the bid and was given some money. We recruited a group of 8 students and gave them the job of coding reading lists. We took all the compulsory reading lists in the department – PhD, masters and undergraduate – we took all compulsory modules and then we took a random sample of the reading lists from the optional modules to give us a really good overview of the Political Science department’s curriculum as a whole and at all levels. We coded all the required readings for the following: the gender and ethnicity of the author; whether or not those readings in any way touch upon topics of gender, race, disability, or sexuality; and whether or not those readings took standard positivist methods and approaches or whether they used any of: critical theory; Marxist approaches; critical race theory; feminist or queer theory or social models of disability.
So you’ve really got very ‘white male Eurocentric model of knowledge’ curriculum there.
So, we coded them on all those dimensions. We discovered – quelle surprise – that: 71% of our readings in Political Science are by white men; 22% are by white women; 5% are by men of colour; 2% of by women of colour. 2% by women of colour. Also, 81% of our readings take standard positivist approaches, and that rises to 85% in the compulsory modules if you take out my module! So you’ve really got very ‘white male Eurocentric model of knowledge’ curriculum there.
JPD: So, a positivist view in your field would effectively equate with a white male Eurocentric view?
CE: Insofar as it excludes feminist, critical race, critical theory, social model of disability, queer theory, and even Marxist approaches – so it’s excluding anything that challenges epistemologies that emerged through the enlightenment, the experience of the British Empire and the eugenics movement.
And by positivism, we broadly meant anything where the researcher is understood to be doing their best to come to an “objective” view of the world that they’re studying, without reflexively taking into account that ‘who you are’ changes what you’re able to see and what you’re able to study and the ways in which you’re able to study it.
JPD: So, no positionedness of the writer?
CE: No, exactly. No reflexivity, no positionality.
We need to be very explicit with the reader about where our knowledge is coming from.
I mean, that’s caricaturing because of course, positivist researchers know that they can’t be truly, fully objective. But there are different ways of addressing that problem, right? So for a more interpretivist, or critical researcher, you might say, ‘Well, we know we can’t be objective so therefore we need to think about what kinds of perspectives are missed out by the ways in which this knowledge is produced and what sorts of ideas we miss out if we use any given approach. We need to be honest about that. We need to reflect on it. We need to be very explicit with the reader about where our knowledge is coming from.’ Whereas a positivist would say, ‘We can’t be totally objective, but we need to do our best to be as objective as we can and we need to be honest about how valid and reliable our research is, whilst always aiming for the most valid and reliable we can possibly get to.’
JPD: So one group would foreground the limitations; the other would, as it were, suppress them, right?
CE: Yes, and I don’t think this is an issue that is just about our department or Political Science as a discipline. This is a debate which rages in all sorts of places.
JPD: Some subjects still will assert their objectivist criteria much more so than others…
CE:. So when I first did a research methods class, when I was a novice scholar at UCL, the first two weeks were on the scientific method and all the examples were from the hard sciences.
JPD: I had to confess my impression of Political Science was it was more up front about its interpretivist foundations.
One of my students put it rather nicely by saying that he felt his academic freedom was curtailed by those silences.
CE: Yeah, I mean, in many departments in the UK it is. This is partly my question about our curriculum in our department, actually, because in many departments in the UK and in Europe (perhaps less so in America), there is an older tradition of studying politics, which is much more aligned with the Humanities, and which is much more about interpretation and history. Then you’ve had very vigorous debates, very interesting debates, in my view, that students should be exposed to, with critiques of the discipline coming from feminists, from queer theorists, from people of colour, from critical race theory, and from people talking about disability and bodies, and all of that. Our curriculum in UCL Political Science department by and large doesn’t pay attention to those debates, and it doesn’t give students the opportunity to read that work. One of my students put it rather nicely by saying that he felt his academic freedom was curtailed by those silences.
So, we did this project, which was to code the reading lists and find out whether the problem is as serious as we thought it was. And a couple of the students on the project were really good at doing graphs so that really helped us communicate what the problems in the curriculum are. (In that sense, we are using those standard Political Science methods to try to be a bit disruptive.) So we used LTC/Arena money (thank you!) and some money also from our department to do a nice booklet to communicate these findings.
Now that doesn’t solve those problems, right, solving them is a bigger problem, and one person can’t do that on their own, but it shows that the problem is there. I think that that’s a big thing. We’re also setting up a website, which communicates the findings and give some recommendations for places where people could go if they wanted to get get a more diverse reading list, if they wanted to find a wider range of authors and readings.
I am personally much more interested in theoretical diversity rather than representative diversity. So if you have 10 more women of colour on your syllabus, but they’re all doing basically the same thing as all the readings that you had before, that’s great, it’s not nothing, but it’s not as interesting to me as getting some critical race theory and some African feminist thought – that kind of thing – into your curriculum, which might well be the result of including more women of colour, but it doesn’t have to be.
We’re also writing an article for the London Review of Education. We’ve sent them an abstract and they’ve asked us for the full article, so we’re hopeful that will come out in print. We’re co-authoring that together as a group of staff and students, and hopefully that will come out sometime in the next six months or so.
This is all still work in progress because we can’t take delivery of the booklet during the pandemic. The website also hasn’t gone live yet because we’re still making it look nice and sorting it out, but we’re aiming for Freshers’ Week because we think that’s a nice time to get people’s attention. [Edit: see here for the launch.]
JPD: So is there anything else you want to throw in to that? Would you have gone about it differently? Or did that kind of gradual opening up of things… Is that the way to walk it?
CE: I think I quite like this story of figuring things out as I went along. .. I mean, I can’t imagine it playing out any differently, if you know what I mean. It’s just, you know, things did happen a bit by accident or by being in the right place at the right time, having these conversations with people. But opportunities have to be grasped.
‘I wonder if there’s something to this? Let’s look into it.’ That’s who we are, isn’t it?
JPD: I will applaud the fact that you had a conversation wondering about it in the first place, and then went off to find out, even though you thought there was nothing there. I was reading something earlier about heterosexual students massively underestimating the amount of transphobia and sexism and it’s very simple, they don’t see it, but then think ‘well, if I don’t see it probably doesn’t happen.’
CE: ‘If it’s not happening to me, it’s probably not a thing’, right. I know. But that’s the mark of a researcher, isn’t it? Always pausing to ask the question. ‘I wonder if there’s something to this? Let’s look into it.’ That’s who we are, isn’t it?