On September 28th 2022, we hosted a discussion around the theme of Sophisticated Racism: Understanding and Managing Sophisticated and Everyday Racism, a new book by Dr Victoria Showumni & Carol Tomlin (link to UCL Library & link to publisher). Victoria was joined by Professor Parama Chaudhury, Dr Hélène Neveu Kringelbach and Dr Michael Sulu. The recording (with edited/corrected captions) is now available to UCL staff and students (only).

You can download just the audio here (UCL login required). UCL staff and students can read the transcript here (pdf)

Please get in touch if you would like to blog here (or provide a link to somewhere else) about your response to the session (by emailing j.p.davies@ucl.ac.uk).

Announcement

We are very pleased to announce availability of limited funds for Liberating the Curriculum projects for the current academic session.

These funds are intended to promote any initiatives to improve the inclusivity of education at UCL.

Criteria for funds

• These funds are to promote ‘unexpected futures’ rather than more routine work. We will favour bold initiatives that are anchored in terms of ‘where things need to be’ rather than ‘moving from where we are now’.
• Successful projects will work with other stakeholders than teaching staff, for instance bringing in expertise or working closely with students. This will ideally generate resources that others can use and/or involve an event with external expertise.

Uses for funds

Applications should articulate why and how these funds can make a difference and we therefore do not have fixed stipulations about their use, but preference will be given to their use for unique opportunities (such as bringing in an expert) rather than everyday items (such as catering for relevant meetings).

They can be used to supplement and extend an existing project or to fund a new intervention. They can also be used as part of projects that go beyond UCL, as long as there is visible impact and/or resources within UCL.

Sizes of grant

We propose two tiers of grants:

• £500;
• £1500.

Dissemination

Grant recipients are expected to work with Arena and LTC to provide resources following the use of the funds; the exact form can be negotiated depending on the nature of the project but likely outputs would be:

• publication of resources, preferably with commentary of some kind (either via LTC or another UCL site);
• creation of Open Educational Resources;
• interview and materials on the LTC blog;
• offering a workshop (through Arena) or signposting a publication to disseminate lessons learned.

Timing

Deadline for applications: 28th April
Announcements: 4th May

Please note these funds will be transferred from Arena to departments promptly, to be used before the end of the financial year.

Dr Victoria Showumni (IRIS profile) co-founded and is the longest-serving chair of LTC, and has a long career as a feminist sociologist. She is known by many in UCL and beyond as a staunch advocate of a liberated curriculum – for instance, she recently organised and chaired a UCL-wide Town Hall meeting on race and has been a key influence on the institution and mentor to others for many years. This is an edited transcript of an informal interview with Jason Davies (UCL Arena) from the 31st July 2020.

JPD: Tell us quickly, who you are, what your role is and a few headlines from your career and what you do.

VS: Okay, so hi Jason, really nice to do this for you on this sunny day and I can’t believe it’s Friday already. Who am I? I’m Dr. Victoria Showumni, I’m based at the Institute of Education, in the department of EPS, which is Education, Policy and Society. I have been at the Institute since 2008. I’m an academic there, my area’s around feminism and one of my research areas is around gender and leadership. That’s one aspect of my research, and the other aspect is looking at the experiences of black girls and black, young women in education and their well-being. And I’m very much involved internationally, with work and also nationally within the UK as well. Is that a good start?

JPD: That’s great. Yeah. I know, you’ve done an awful lot of projects over the years and had a lot of involvement in trying to persuade UCL to change its institutional racism and habits and so on. I mean, for instance, you recently chaired a Town Hall on racism, after the murder of George Floyd,. What would you say is UCL’s most pressing need? What must it address next?

VS: Let me go back to the Town Hall. I designed and and had a good hand in who was going to be on the discussion panel, and the design of that was deliberate, deliberate to ensure that we had a maximum integration but also I wanted the the themes to emerge from what has been said about what’s going on in the culture of UCL.

I think some of the things within UCL at the present moment, which they need to tackle as quickly as possible, is racism and racism at all different levels. So, racism in relation to whose stats actually count. Because as we all know, people who are not counted do not count.

…as we all know, people who are not counted do not count.

And I say that when I’m thinking about terminology, like ‘BAME’. Because if you are not counted, you do not count. Within that terminology itself, it is a problem, and it is a problem because you can’t identify the numbers of black people, ‘black’ meaning African, African Caribbean people, within that statement.

So when I sit back and look through the window, I think ‘what would be good for UCL to do now?’ I think really, they need to tackle what’s going on in the workforce. I think they’ve done some really good tackling of the environment, whether it’s to do with the building names, and various other things. But I think it’s about time now that they actually tackled the workforce, and really started to talk to people about the curriculum. One – about the curriculum; two – about recruitment of people, recruitment of people that are not white. I think it’s important. And when we say ‘not white’, let’s be really honest. Let’s be honest and say people which are from African Caribbean backgrounds, or African backgrounds specifically, because they’re the ones where there are very, very few numbers across the whole of UCL. I think that’s something they do need to look at. They also need to look at how the people they do have, how do they look after the people they already do have in the organisation? So for example, you may have a person who is absolutely seen as exemplary in the delivery of their work, yet there’s no recognition of that. So yes, for example, UCL Provost puts out these teaching awards, a whole range of different things, but it’s about who votes for whom. Now if a high percentage of those people which are voting are white, you’re going to get the same people being voted on. And I think that’s what we have to look at. If, for example, you looked at the evaluations of what was happening with those academics, you would find a different group of people. So if you kind of made a shortlist based on the student evaluations, which means you have to do a bit of work, the shortlist would be different to self-nomination, or somebody nominating you from the head of department, or somebody else prominently within the organisation, or the student rep, which is white – all those types of things.

JPD: What would you say to the lecturers and teaching fellows who are particularly working with students at UCL? What should they learn about and what should they be watching out for? What should they look for in their behaviour and curriculum, to make micro-changes that improve things?

VS: I think if you’re a new teaching fellow or new lecturer who’s just been appointed to UCL, I think something you do need to look out for is what’s going on in your classroom. What do the students bring to your class? That’s a really important point. And secondly, how do the students, how do you want the students to interact with each other? And the third point is what do you bring? What do you bring to the conversation, which is going to take place in the actual classroom?

if you structure what you’re doing as a conversation, you start to kind of feel a bit more relaxed, because it is a conversation

And I think if you structure what you’re doing as a conversation, you start to kind of feel a bit more relaxed, because it is a conversation. And within that conversation, you’re gonna have debate, you’re gonna have debate from all different sides of the classroom. And it’s how to manage those and not belittle people, because you don’t agree with them. It’s not about you. It’s about the interconnection and inter…discussion, what’s going on within the classroom. So I think that’s something which we have to be, as academics, especially if you’re newbie, but you have to learn not to take it personally. Because you’re there to facilitate, to give knowledge, but also to facilitate discussions around what you’re actually delivering, if that makes sense.

JPD: Yeah, thank you. So I know you’ve been doing some of that yourself. Yeah, you’ve done various courses and projects and so on, do you want to talk us through one of them? Any one that comes to mind and some of the outcomes, and what students said.

VS: I mean, it’s there’s one I’ve just published, well I’ve published it, but the books not out yet. It’s a chapter in the book. And it’s on purposeful teaching. I was asked to do something called ‘purposeful teaching’. Now purposeful teaching is really how I see it, is how you use the – what’s in the classroom to help you design and develop your session. So there was one particular session, which I’m module leader for, for two modules. One is race and sociology or sociology of race, whichever way you do it, and the other one is MMR, which is minorities, migrants and refugees. Now in the MMR session a few years back, there was quite a lot of activity going on with Brexit and, and conservatism and a whole range of different things. And I had a big large group of about 50 students, mostly international, but some home students, from all different parts of the world. And I remember going into that class feeling a little bit disgruntled because – the society which we were living in was becoming a bit, you know, difficult, very right wing … was coming out, it was emerging out of the woodwork. And I’m just going to tell you what happened just very briefly, just a couple of minutes. So, in that classroom, I looked around the room, and I wanted to do an introduction. I like, I’m known for my introductions. I’m also known for kind of dancing around walking from place and talking to students and parents and and them talking to them and that kind of stuff.

So I remember going up to this young woman I said to her ‘Oh, hi. So um, so who are you?’ (Let’s call her Natalie) ‘Natalie. Hi, Natalie. How you doing?’ And remember the actual module is called MMR – minorities, migrants and refugees. So I said ‘so, do you see yourself as a migrant?’

‘No’, she said, ‘I’m not a migrant. I come from Greece.’

So I said, ‘ok, that’s good to know’ and I go over to this other person who happened to be from Spain. ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Me. I’m José’ (let’s call him José). ‘Oh, hi, Jose, how you doing? Where are you from?’ He said ‘from Spain’. I said, ‘do you see yourself as a migrant?’ ‘No, no, no’, he said, I said, ‘Do you see me as a migrant?’

‘Yes’, he said, I see you as a migrant.’

I said, ‘Really? How can that be? I’ve been here all my life. I’ve been in the United Kingdom all my life. Yet you have arrived for this course, and you’ve been here six weeks. You’re not a migrant, but I am a migrant. Why is that?’

We were able to really get into understanding the three different words of migrant, minority and refugee, and really, really own them.

And people say ‘oh, it’s because you’re black’ and this and everything else. That‘s where the discussion started. It was fantastic. We were able to really get into understanding the three different words of migrant, minority and refugee, and really, really own them. And I wanted them to also think about which one of those three words did they fit to? Because everybody fits into one of them whether it’s a minority or migrant or refugee, you fit into it somewhere in your life. And that was the start of the session. And like I said, it was a three hour session. It was fantastic. Is that helpful, for that one?

JPD: Yeah. It’s a very revealing anecdote! I mean, you’ve mentioned the basically … rising tide of intolerance, bigotry, racism, a whole bunch of things. It’s hard to get them all into one word. But people of our age, not traditional student age any more, we’ve noticed an increase in temperature, shall we say, on several fronts, you know? And I mean, this is a question you weren’t expecting, but what role do you think universities should, and could have, in a society that’s walking down paths that are familiar to historians who are dismayed at the sight of it? What’s the university got to do with this in the broader context… What’s that role? I mean, this is a question for me as much as for you.

VS: I think people should, I think I think the university should take a stance, this is an opportunity to take a stance, you can’t sit back. Who do they think is going to come to the university? It’s not going to be filled up with a hundred percent of people from the far right, that’s not going to happen. I mean, you may have, of course, you’re going to have a percentage, but it’s not going to be 100%. So they’ve got to take a stand and say ‘these are our policies’, and just how they said they’re not tolerating ‘terrorism’ whatever that looks like, coming from that standpoint, but you’ve also got white terrorism. So they need to take a stand. And it’s very difficult for them to look in the mirror, because they can’t Other themselves.

Let me talk about something which took place today, in the newspaper. You know, it says one of the MPs said that ‘BAME people need to take responsibility for COVID’ – I don’t know whether you saw it – so hang on a moment. Who’s on the beaches? I don’t see any black people on the beaches. who’s having parties out on the streets, are there many black people on the streets? Oh, no, no, no. So who are you talking about? So – it’s very difficult to look in the mirror. When you look in the mirror and you see 82% whiteness is in this country, United Kingdom. And so we are looking to blame somebody; when you’re looking to blame somebody and there’s only the 82% which is yourselves… It’s a bit of a problem.

So going back to what you said, I think the top, senior, leadership need to own what is happening, and they need to speak out about it. I quite like what Michael did (Michael Arthur) when he made an apology, that he didn’t get it quite right regarding the statement he made recently, with Black Lives Matter. I think that was I think that was very wise of him to do that. And I think more should be speaking up about that.

JPD: Yeah, thank you. Is there anything you would say to students, particularly young black students, who may be arriving at universities metaphorically, or literally, who knows, in the autumn about you know, what’s good and what’s not so good about universities as a particular kind of environment within an institutionally racist society?

it’s a time…for white students to really see transformational aspects of themselves

VS: Well, first of all, let me take white students, white students are the majority. And I think white students need to be very, very aware that a university is a place where knowledge is created, enhanced and also kind of … developed and your mind when you go into the university, your mind should not be – it might go in narrow, but you should come out really open, like you blossomed into a flower, not completely closed down. Now, of course, a small minority of students will be closed even further than what they will when they came in, majority of the experience is to open up. So I think white students in this current situation – even though we’re not seeing what’s happening with Black Lives Matter because the stranglehold on the news is not allowing you to see the positive things that are happening across the country. It’s as though it’s not existing. I think it’s a time at the moment for white students to really see transformational aspects of themselves, to be able to ask questions and continue to ask questions.

When it comes to black students coming into universities, universities like ours, they need to not feel that they have to be the font of all knowledge to do with anything to do with race, or anything to do with, you know, equality. They don’t have to be that person. They don’t have to be the person educating the people. That’s not their role. Their role is to be part of the conversation but not be the dominance of the conversation, because they will be worn out. They’re coming to do an undergrad or master’s or PhD, whatever they’re doing, research programme, whatever it is, they’re not there to feel that it’s their role to ‘educate the masses’. They’re there to be part of the conversation. And I think that’s really, really different. I say that because it’s about well being it’s about their mental health. about the fact of looking after our black students, but also, at the same time ensuring that the white students understand that no one’s wanting them to feel guilty. No one’s wanting them to cry. No one wants them to feel that they need to do something so drastic; no, what they want, what everybody wants, is for them to have a conversation and reflect on what they’re bringing into it and reflect on themselves. And I think that’s important.

JPD: Very powerful. Thank you. I think that helps white people, to hear that the appropriate thing to do in this situation, because I think a lot of us are very ‘rabbits caught in the headlights’ about this, and we’re clutching our pearls, and that’s probably more emotional drama for you, who, you know, who didn’t come into the room as a black woman, you came into the room as a feminist, or an academic or a mother or a shopper

VS: Exactly.

JPD: So that’s, that’s really helpful. There’s one more thing I particularly want to pick your brains on. Because of your long experience, over your career, have you seen a good solid change actually happen? And if so, what made it happen? What were the important ingredients? Because I know from conversations with you previously that some of the stuff we’re doing, an awful lot of the stuff that’s being said, and Black Lives Matter, was being said in the 80s, under Ken Livingston’s GLC and other such groups. So, what has worked and how did it work? What made the difference?

VS: Well, first of all, I wasn’t living in London when Ken Livingstone nor people like that were around. I was in Somerset. I was in Somerset and if I wasn’t in Somerset, I was in Broadstairs, Ramsgate, that kind of area. So I didn’t really connect with what was going on in in the heart of the cities at all. So for me, I think what’s changed? Well, that’s an interesting question. I’ve got three daughters, if I may be personal for a second. And I would say that ‘generational’ because the youngest is 15, the oldest is in her 30s. So I have my daughters very young, extremely young, unfortunately. So for me, what has changed? When I look at those three, when I write about those three, I remember when my oldest was five. She came home and said that someone called her a p*** (her father’s mixed race). And I thought, ‘well, let me just help to educate her too. So she knows what that means, what the terminology means.’ Because it’s not, you know, the word is really, really, you know, not the word you’d use. Okay? Yeah. Now, if I rewind back to my young girl now at school, she comes across the same terms. But what’s interesting is living in London you get called you get called a n*****. Um, but I was, I was called a n***** when I lived in Somerset.

So what’s changed? I think what’s changed at the present moment, which is not very positive really, is at one stage, people felt that there was some kind of order that you really need to adhere to, in everyday society. I think what’s happened is the genie has been let out of the bottle. And so everything goes and if somebody wants to call you the N word, or somebody wants to say, ‘Well, I don’t like this about you’, they can do it because who’s gonna challenge them?

So the framework which we had, to be able to deal with – David Cameron, when he turned around and said ‘multiculturalism is dead’ just basically put the nail in the head, and just let the genie out of the bottle. Now they’ve been trying to put the genie back in. But all the years which had gone to really, really do good work, they are trying to do it from the beginning again. And it’s very, very, very sad, when you think about schools and all what was going on in schools. And whether it was to do with bilingualism, whether it was to do with attainment of children…all this stuff was just torn away with one swoop because they had the test against you know, the Labour government even though the Labour government at the time had done some very, very good work in society, but also in education. So now 10 years on we, you know, we’re in a very difficult place when it comes to equality issues.

I think what’s changed is people aren’t looking over their shoulder and thinking about, ‘Oh my goodness, I can’t I shouldn’t say I shouldn’t say that.’ Until the recent COVID and Black Lives Matter situation, people were just really finding ‘if I want to call you x, y, and z, I can call you that.’ So I think what has changed in the last few months, whereas people would be very busy, and yes, things are still you know, there were lots of things which had happened. I think standing still and reflecting has really started to make them perhaps think that it’s not, it’s not the other person which has caused the issue, it’s themselves and what are they like, in their family on on the street or whatever. I think it’s actually making white people become quite vulnerable. And that’s worldwide, not just looking at the UK. So I think vulnerability is shifting, actually shifting towards the white community? Which is uncomfortable.

JPD: Yes. Yes. There’s a lot of discomfort around and we’re seeing it – there’s a lot in there. I’m just dwelling on all the things you said. Is there anything else you want to put in here, any other stories you want to tell or advice you want to give or not give or celebrate, etc, etc.

VS:
Yeah, I mean, one of my favourite things I do in different parts of the world is the work I do on ‘Who am I?’ and I love that; I love being able to go into a room in Germany, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, you know, Ireland, America, wherever and just get the room going and say ‘I want to do something in my research, but I want to first of all, get a feel of the room.’ So I throw out this kind of start, and say ‘So who am I?’ and I do that because of my own background because I want people to understand who I am. And when they first see me, yes, I’m visibly black. So I think that many people would make a statement and in their mind and think, well, I know, they know what I’m going to be like. Well, actually, they have no idea who I am. They don’t know at all. But they think, ‘Oh, yes, I know that because I have a friend who’s black.’ Or ‘I’ve seen a black person on TV’, or ‘I’ve read about them in the newspaper.’

…the conversation doesn’t focus on ‘the Other’, it focuses on themselves.

So when I say to them, ‘when this person walked into the room, what did you think?’ ‘Oh, I saw this person, a nice hairstyle. And I liked your shoes’, or ‘I saw this’ and ‘I saw that’ I said, ‘Yeah, what about, what else did you see about me?’ They don’t know what to say. So then we when we start to have the conversation, somebody bravely says, ‘oh, you’re black.’ Oh, my God! We’ve said the unspoken. So I like doing the ‘Who am I?’ because people do it on themselves. And it starts them to think about who are they and where do they belong? So the conversation doesn’t focus on ‘the Other’, it focuses on themselves. So it brings them into the conversation about ‘Other’ because if they’re white, if it’s a whole group of people in Ireland and they’re white, what does that mean? What does that mean in the context of everything else?

And it’s powerful, because it could be about ‘well, I’m white, and I’m Catholic, and I’m living in Ireland, and I lived in rural Ireland’. That has a lot of connotation compared with somebody in the city in Ireland, you know, like Dublin or something like that. So, you know, it’s about them looking at themselves. So I like doing that. And I think it’s, I think it’s so powerful. That it’s a way to be able to have a discussion about equality in many different strands without people feeling that ‘this is not about me’, because it goes to the heart of who they are. And I think there’s a positive aspect in that and recently, as I was saying to you before, I’ve done an assignment with students, and that assignment is asking them to read a critical reflection through the lens of race as an autobiographical account, so they’ve been asked to kind of, you know, speak to their grandmother or speak to the neighbour or speak to their friends about race and, you know, kind of build up a conversation around it, and then kind of bring that together about what they feel. And they use some vignettes of themselves as well so it could be when they’re at school, they talk to their mother and so ‘do you remember when I was five, and this took place, and, you know, it was a racial incident. What did you think about that?’ Or it was, you know, ‘I saw this at school when I came home and told you about how these two children had acted or whatever it is, it’s so powerful.’ So does that help you?

JPD: Yeah! Another big question then. I love hearing your thoughts on these things because usually I’ve found my own way about five inches into the room and you’re, you know, the other side on the opposite wall.

VS: (laughs)

JPD: So this kind of identity and reflection will perhaps be more comfortable in some disciplines and others or perhaps not, I don’t know. Certainly there’s somewhere it’s as it were more valued explicitly by teachers, but what implications does it have for knowledge and it could be in any field, not just the more reflective ones? What do you think? So if we’re doing identity work with students like this, or creating lots of spaces where anybody – doesn’t matter if they’re a student or staff – is actually operating in that way, you’ve described, of acknowledging that they’re positioned, you know, that they they’re not just in some default ‘objective stance’ that they were put on by their school, but actually, they have a very distinctive position which has its limitations and its strengths. What implications does that have for knowledge? Especially universities, there’s knowledge creation or discovery places, or engines we could call them. I just wonder, I’m wondering aloud about, you know, how that affects not just the teaching, but the actual, the apparently separate body of knowledge that goes with the discipline.

VS:
Yeah, that’s, that’s a really interesting question. So, for example, let me take sociology and feminism. Now, some people, which I won’t name…one could argue that some people in sociology, see it as an elitist subject. And there’s sociology and there’s sociology. And sociology, as you know, is meant to be, kind of, understanding society.

‘classics’ made by whom? By whiteness.

Um, but there’s some key people which are always named in sociology, which of course are Bourdieu, Foucault…people talk about them a lot. Um, but I refused to, because they’re all white. They’re all white men or women. So when I talk about Franz Fanon or W.E.B. Dubois or Frederick Douglass or Angela Davis, people like that, they’re sociologists but they’re not the same sociologists, which are what the people say, that they’re ‘classics’. Well ‘classics’ made by whom? By whiteness. And it makes and it does contribute to who we are. Because your identity is framed by (not your personally) but is framed by what you read and what you buy into. So if you think ‘well actually, you know what? The person who’s the best sociologist is a white male or white female,’ that’s sad.

If you think about feminism, well white feminists try to claim that they’re the ones who developed the notion of feminism. They didn’t. Many of them have been forced to, to speak up and say, ‘well, actually, if I’m really honest, I learned all the feminist practices from black women, and how they galvanise and pull things together, over the years through slavery.’

JPD: So when people talk, for instance, about decolonizing a curriculum, you know, in a sense, it’s very simple: become aware of how the influence arose. You know, why do we always cite Foucault and if we cite Foucault then we have to cite Foucault and that’s why we cite Foucault because we do it and, you know, he gets bigger and bigger all the time, right?

VS: Absolutely. Just speak of sociologists, you’ve got Max Weber, Pierre Bourdieu and Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, Jürgen Habermas. We’ve got all of these people. They’re all men, all men, and you’ve just got one black person, which is W. E. B. Dubois, that’s it – the rest are all white men. All white men.

JPD: So get out and read more widely.

if you’re gonna actually develop the curriculum, so it becomes decolonized, use other people.

VS: All men. And I find that really really concerning. And when you decide that you don’t want to do that, you then get told you’re not a sociologist.

JPD: Right. So there’s policing of the canon.

VS: Exactly. And it’s not just in sociology. It’s also in philosophy. It’s also in anthropology, all of those. All of those are all part of the whole, the whole discussion.

VS: Ida B. Wells. Look at her. She’s one of the top sociologists. She was born in 1862 and died March 1931, an American investigative journalist, educator and an early leader in civil rights movement. People like that. Let’s learn more about those people. If we’re going to stop, you know, if you’re gonna actually develop the curriculum, so it becomes decolonized, use other people.

Dr Nicole Brown (UCL IRIS page) is a lecturer in the department of Culture, Communication & Media. She has been a co-chair of LTC since 2018 and is known for her work on inclusion and challenging ableism in academia.

JPD: Welcome, Nicole. Tell us who you are and what your role is, and perhaps one or two sentences about your interests as an academic.

NB: OK, thank you. So my name is Nicole Brown and I’m a lecturer in education at the Institute of Education, and I have been since 2008 – so for quite a while! And my role as a lecturer is teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and also supervising doctoral students. In terms of my own research interest, I’m very interested in personal lived experiences and that’s really how all of my research has started, in terms of trying to identify ways of how we can explore lived experience and developing different kinds of research methods to capture those lived experiences, and obviously, as part of that research, you look at different people’s experiences. And in my case it was about academics and professional services staff as well as doctoral students’ experiences with disabilities, chronic illnesses and neurodiversity in higher education.

How that’s come about is that I actually started out doing my own doctoral research into fibromyalgia and the construction of academic identity. Fibromyalgia is a condition that’s characterized by widespread pain, cognitive dysfunction, sleep disorders, psychological disorders and disturbances, and all of that obviously means that it has an impact on people’s identities.

in academia, there is quite a lot of expectation of having a body and mind that work at full capacity at all times

But I was interested specifically on the academic side of the identity because as academics we are required to be productive, effective, excellent in so many different ways. And a lot of our work is the scholarly work, is cerebral, and fibromyalgia has got one of those symptoms where ‘brain fog’ creeps in, that’s the cognitive dysfunctions where people suddenly have memory problems or word retrieval issues, or they forget about sequencing, and I was interested in seeing how the bodily experience would impact academic identity. And I guess everything just grew from there because I was looking at the lived experiences and as part of that I then discovered more about how, in academia, there is quite a lot of expectation of having a body and mind that work at full capacity at all times. And the reality is that not everybody experiences that because of the chronic conditions they have or because of invisible disabilities people may be diagnosed with. And that’s really where the research took on a slightly different course, and obviously that’s where I started looking at disabilities in academia more widely.

JPD: Thank you. I know particularly well that you ran a conference a couple of years ago now, in UCL, which got an extraordinary response. Tell us a little bit about how you got that set up, what you learned from doing that, and perhaps some of the long tail of impact and effect that it’s had.

NB: Yeah, but how that started is actually quite sad. I mean, I’m laughing about it now, but really, it was quite appalling really. At the time – that was going back to 2017 in the autumn, and in America; there was a book launch of the book by Jay Dolmage, ‘Academic Ableism’, and I was interested in that book, and I was interested in being part of the book launch and I contacted the organizers, saying, ‘Oh, I’m obviously not in America. Can you let me have the livestream so that I can join from abroad?’

And they emailed back saying ‘we don’t do livestream.’

So I emailed back and said ‘fair enough, you don’t do livestreams, but could I have the link to the recording afterwards, so that I can watch it on YouTube?’

And they emailed back and said saying ‘oh we don’t do that either.’

So I said, ‘well, in that case, what about having at least, I don’t know, the slides that are going to be used or some excerpts of that book?’

I got a message back saying ‘we don’t do that either.’

that was a conference or book launch on academic ableism, and effectively the only people that could access it were the people in the room

So that was a conference or book launch on academic ableism, and effectively the only people that could access it were the people in the room – so it wasn’t accessible at all! You know, you’re talking about academic ableism, and yet you are expecting people to turn up on that specific day, in a specific place. So, I was just frustrated and I left it at that, but then somebody else on Twitter, who’s part of my Twitter network, also piped up saying, ‘oh, I just contacted them and this is the most inaccessible book launch on ableism! I think we should do something about that.’

I then pitched in and said ‘well, actually, I agree with you; I do think that we should do something but show them that this can be done properly and well, so that everybody can access it.’ And that’s really how the idea was born, and we got several people on board from different universities, and we had quite a lot of funding from different universities as well: the University of Nottingham, UCL, and the Institute of Education; we had the University of Kent on board; we had NADSN (that’s the National Association for Disabled Staff Networks). We had Chronically Academic and so we had a wide range of different groups of stakeholders involved in this. And that’s how I was able to then organize it.

Initially when I first floated the idea, we were looking at different rooms at UCL that would be accessible, and I had chosen a room that would have allowed 40 people in the room and I was thinking at that stage already that we would have short, lightning talks – really short and snappy presentations – and that I would probably have something like 10 speakers, so therefore the 40 tickets would be limited to 30 participants. And then those 30 tickets went within 24 hours on Eventbrite so, straight away, we realized that was obviously not a big enough room and we needed more. And it basically just mushroomed from there.

In the end we had a room in IOE that catered for 80 delegates. We also had a livestream at the University of Manchester, the University of Kent, the University of Birkbeck who were watching the livestream as things happened. Obviously, with the livestream, anyone who was around the world – not just in the country but everywhere – could join. We also made the link available afterwards as a YouTube recording, so that’s still available for people to watch. And it was a magnificent day. I mean, we had thought of everything possible to make this accessible; in terms of food, for example: a lot of the conferences, if you’ve got food issues, you end up with a plate of salad and not much else. And it’s not very nice for most delegates who’ve got food issues, because you can either be gluten-free or you can be diabetic, or you can be dairy-free, but you can’t be both (let alone all three) because people don’t cater for that.

it actually meant that people could generally network, irrespective of what kind of mobility issues they would have had.

And we had food that was all of that, and it was hot, and so people actually got a hot meal at lunchtime and we had it delivered from Ned’s noodle bar, and basically what we did was, we took the bags and the pots of food delivery boxes to the people on the tables where they were sitting in the room, so there was no lunchtime queue. Hum, there was no scrambling for the plate that is named yours, just in case anyone else takes it before you actually get there, and it actually meant that people could generally network, irrespective of what kind of mobility issues they would have had.

At most conferences, people have to navigate the lunchtime with a glass of wine in one hand, the plate in the other hand, and I don’t know how they then deal with their mobility aids because they might not have enough hands. But how we’ve done it, we’ve said to all of our delegates, ‘stay where you are, stay seated. Be comfortable, we’ll come around with the box that is your specific box of food and you can then eat it on your table’.

We also had different kinds of tables, different kinds of chairs, height adjustable ones. We had 3 British Sign Language interpreters in the room. We had live captions. Any kind of food, snack foods, that were available throughout the day were presented in their original boxes so that people would be able to look at the labeling and would be able to identify whether they can eat those things or not. We made available and fruit and water throughout the day for everyone, as and when they wanted it. We had a quiet room with blindfolds, socks, blankets, cushions, pillows, again to make people comfortable. Eventually we took some of those into the main room and people used them there. Some people felt cold, so they needed the blankets. Other people wore shades, sunglasses because it was too bright for them in there in the room. We had people taking a break in the quiet room as well, so all of those things were really really well used and well received, we even had a bowl there in case a person with a guide dog turns up, so that we could actually provide some drink and water for the guide dog. So, we literally had thought of every opportunity to make sure that everyone is welcome and feels that they are part of this, and they are important. Here is a write-up from a delegate, for example.

The conference itself was incredibly powerful, from the lightning talks. They were all held by people who are specialists in their field, but not necessarily specialist in disability studies. The specialism in disability, if you like, was their personal experiences and that made those talks even more powerful. And the discussions that happened there in the afternoon were very important in terms of creating the outline of different recommendations and guidelines which I have produced, as one set of recommendations in an open-access book that’s coming out in October. The impact of that work was absolutely tremendous, and it wasn’t something I had anticipated at all, but there were lots of people contacting me – and still contacting me now – saying that that conference was the first one that they could access in decades simply because it was accessible via livestream and most other people couldn’t do it.

In the end, the one thing I would say also is actually making things accessible in many cases isn’t about huge amounts of money.

I appreciate with COVID things have changed and there’s a lot more that’s available online now, but at the time, our conference was quite at the forefront of it, and that was something…we didn’t move it online specifically, simply because we also wanted people to have the experience and the opportunity of the experience in the room, but at the same time we didn’t want to exclude anyone, which is why we had all of those breakout rooms and breakout events at other universities. So it was generally, very, very well received and I’m quite humbled by how much people are still sort of talking about that and still getting back to me to explain what we’ve done and how we’ve done it. In the end, the one thing I would say also is actually making things accessible in many cases isn’t about huge amounts of money.

Yes, we did have quite a bit of money behind us, but actually things like microphone etiquette, for example, to make sure that people that are in the room are using the microphones that are there – that doesn’t cost anything. It’s just that most people just turn up at the lecture and think ‘oh you can hear me without using the microphone’ because they don’t like to hear their own voices over the loud speakers (and I’m one of them too!) but at the same time you are excluding a number of people; and that is just making people aware and actually saying ‘no, we want you to use that microphone’ and that doesn’t cost anything because the microphone is already there anyway.

So I guess it’s those little bits that were kind of the most impactful in terms of shifting people’s awareness that actually, yes, we are quite ableist in our behaviour, even when we perhaps don’t want to be, and we – we’re not intentionally trying to discriminate against others, but in reality we do. For example, one of the things that was part of the presentations as well was about the ‘stairway conversations’ after meetings, when everybody leaves the building, people walk down the staircase together. But what about the person that can’t do that? What about the person that has to use the lift? Not because they’re lazy, not because they don’t want to walk down it – just because they cannot. That person is automatically excluded from the networking and the more social elements of walking down the stairs. And that’s something that that conference was very good at in terms of highlighting how those little things make a massive difference to the experience of the individuals.

JPD: I’ve been nodding. I was at that at the conference and what I do want to say is that…I’m in my 50s; I’ve been to academic conferences since I was about 23, in various different disciplines, and I’ve never known an atmosphere like that. The intensity, the razor-sharp focus…the level of generous engagement that the audience had. So I remember particularly someone speaking about being colourblind [Oliver Daddow]; I had no idea about most of the things he was explaining but, you know, someone who is sitting there, perhaps in a wheelchair or with an internal invisible issue, was just as focused on his issues as he was. And then when someone else spoke about the difficulties of – basically if your guts aren’t working very well, let’s be polite. A 9:00 o’clock lecture at another university is an absolute disaster because you can’t access proper facilities on the way, and so it’s something that for other people is an inconvenience, became absolutely a mountain to climb for her.

NB: Yes.

JPD: It was a long day, but it wasn’t tiring like – most conferences are quite tiring, and in this case it was more a sort of ‘well, I do need a rest, but I don’t want to stop.’ So that’s my firsthand account of being one of the participants. I know you must have put a huge amount of work in.

NB: I appreciate you saying that because actually I myself didn’t see much of the day myself because I was constantly rallying around making sure everybody was comfortable, that everybody knew where they were going and that the food got delivered. I wasn’t actually in the room for much of the time. I was able to catch up on the day on YouTube, but obviously the atmosphere was something that I kind of glimpsed but didn’t really experience as part of a delegation because I wasn’t in the room all of the time. So hearing that from you is actually really nice.

JPD: I absolutely mean it, it was unique. I’ve been to many, many conferences, many of them very good, but the focus and the sense of inclusion that the sense of ‘this matters’ and the level of attention was unprecedented for me. As you say, people hadn’t been able to attend conferences for decades, and they were damn well going to make the most of this one.

it wasn’t about trying to show off the research you’ve done. It was about trying to find common ground

NB: I think that’s the reason why that was, why everybody was so focused on it, was because the issues were at the heart of people’s concerns. It wasn’t about profiling yourself as an academic, it wasn’t about trying to show off the research you’ve done. It was about trying to find common ground and finding ways forward so that we could actually have recommendations that universities can implement. So there was this sense of, almost like an activist sense of urgency of trying to, trying to, come up with something that we can all do together.

JPD: Have you heard of conferences that followed, that took the guide that you then published? And then write back to you and said all that ‘I wouldn’t have thought of this, it was really helpful’ or ‘actually this didn’t work’. Given that your conference was an extraordinary success, was there anything that perhaps didn’t work or you might have done differently?

NB: So in terms of what people have come back to me about was actually…people appreciated that as part of the publication, we’ve also got like a one page summary of recommendations, if you like, and people really appreciated that one page summary and the honesty with which we talked about organizing the details, and thinking about all of the details. Also, in the end, the money wasn’t such big part of the consideration; there were more practical things that were more important, and people really appreciated that.

So things like having a quiet room, for example, that needs to be accessible with enough room to actually manoeuvre a wheelchair because it’s no good if people can only go in; they also need to be able to turn around in there. So it’s all of those little things that people were like, ‘oh yeah!’ Actually, if you’re not in a wheelchair yourself, you may not realize that turning the wheelchair requires quite a large area because you’re pivoting a massive gadget. So it’s those kind of little things that people really appreciate.

Also I think people were and still are appreciative of the fact that I’m not out there to say, to lecture people on how they have to be more inclusive and how they are doing things wrong. I’m saying, ‘well, let’s try and do things correctly, and right, within the kind of given circumstances that we have’. If we’re honest, it is not feasible to say you’re going to be 100% accessible at 100% of the time for 100% of the people; that is impossible and I can give you an example, as we’re talking about on [Microsoft] Teams. People who’ve got neurodiversity concerns and sensory overload, they want their videos off and they want everybody’s video off because it’s just overloading them with information and their brains can’t cope with that very well.

On the other hand, we’ve got a group of people who are hard of hearing who rely on lip reading. They will want the speakers video on. You can’t have the video on and off at the same time. There’s always going to be some compromise that needs to be made, and in this case, obviously the compromise is that the speaker keeps the video on and everybody else keeps it off. But it’s not ideal, it’s still a compromise, and this is the kind of message that we got across with all the things that we’ve done.

I’ve done a number of talks as well, not just the publications, but also talks, and I’ve had conversations with Springer Nature, Wellcome, with the British Museum. So, on the basis of our conference, I was able to connect with all of these different, bigger groups of people where I’m constantly reminding people to say, actually, we know that you’re not maliciously, intentionally trying to exclude anyone, but we also know that there is a realistic expectation that you know what? 80% or 90% of accessibility should be met, not 100%, because that’s not possible, but 80% or 90% is something we can work towards, and that realistic target is something that’s really important to people, and I think that’s probably because I’m not lecturing. ‘You have to, you must’. That’s probably kind of had the most impact. So out of the flyer and the publication people basically just pick and choose, if you like, the things that make most sense to them in their circumstances.

Obviously some people are able to cater and provide different kinds of catering; other people are able to include British Sign Interpretation, for example, but not everybody has got the finances to do both, and that’s fair enough too. So you’ve got to make that kind of decision on where you compromise, but at the same time, we are giving people the tools to make that decision and to find the compromise that’s feasible, and I think that’s that’s really been kind of the most impactful element of it.

In terms of people getting back to me what didn’t work; there have been some people that got back to me saying about live captions, that that was difficult and we found that on the day ourselves that the live captions were problematic at times – for all sorts of different reasons, but one of them is the technology. We had two speeches that were pre-recorded and the captioners couldn’t hear them very well, so they were struggling to keep up with it. Captioning sometimes isn’t done by people, but it’s done automatically and those auto functions, although they get better and better, they struggle to recognize different accents. They struggle to recognize expert or specialist jargon and vocabulary and those kinds of things are then decreasing, if you like, the experience somewhat, but at the same time, everyone who was there acknowledged that we tried to cater for everything.

We ’ve got many, many different needs. But let’s just try and find what the common needs are.

And that’s what it’s, that’s what it’s really, all about in terms of the disability activism that’s going on in higher education. People just want to be recognized as a demographic group of people, that isn’t forgotten. That’s all it is. People aren’t asking ‘oh you must do this, you must do that and and if you don’t, then you are exclusionary.’ It’s not like that, it’s just like, well here is us as a group. Yes, as we are not a homogeneous group. We ’ve got many, many different needs. But let’s just try and find what the common needs are. And let’s try and meet those, ’cause then we can meet most people’s kind of expectations and we can help most people at the same time.

That goes back to things like PowerPoint presentations, black writing on white background. I mean, black writing on white background for anyone with sensory processing issues or dyslexia or Irlen’s is quite difficult. Well, let’s just put the black writing on blue background; for those people that don’t have dyslexia, it doesn’t matter. They don’t really care. Most people wouldn’t even notice that the background isn’t white, but the people for whom that is a necessary adjustment, it’s something that’s incredibly valuable and really, really helpful. So again, actually quite a low-cost way of dealing with it.

JPD: So let me push this a bit. How much of this has made its way into the classroom, either yours or other peoples, do you think?

NB: I think again, you know it’s just basically…it’s helped me as a lecturer to lead by example, and I think that’s that’s probably the most important thing, that I was able to say ‘look, I have done that for a conference. I can do that within a 2 hour lecture as well, use the microphone’, have not-black writing on white background, little things like that. And students: you know we don’t know who’s got what needs in our classrooms and yes, OK, we get some individual education plans or whatever, but not everyone; not everyone will disclose their condition; not everyone will have an education plan, so the more we are just becoming aware of different kinds of experiences and the more we can incorporate them into our everyday practices, the more we will actually provide support for our students, even unknowingly. And that’s the one thing that I have done.

In terms of talking to the students about my ableism work; that’s something I don’t tend to do, I don’t. It’s not that I’m hiding it; it is there in the open, it’s pretty much out there, but it’s not something that I’m making a big deal of because for me it’s a matter of course to record the lecture; it’s a matter of course to use the microphone, so it’s not a big deal. And I think that’s because everything is just becoming a matter of course. Students pick up on that as well, and they do things as a matter of course in return.

If you’re entrusted with stories like that, you can’t unhear them, and you can’t just leave them there

So there is this kind of dynamic that develops from that, and that’s only possible because I have been listening to what people have been telling me. I mean, some of the experiences I can relate to, but some of them, quite frankly, I can’t because I can’t put myself in somebody else’s shoes. But by listening to what people say and by trying to, trying to picture what that could feel like, that helps to kind of get a better understanding. If you’re entrusted with stories like that, you can’t unhear them, and you can’t just leave them there; if somebody trusts me with their personal story, I feel like I need to do something with that information.

JPD: I might steal that line for the blog as a headline. It seems to me much more useful to get these stories out rather than just ‘tips’. So – come lockdown. We’ve all got online and that shifted the ground quite interestingly, hasn’t it…

First of all, there have been quite reasonable complaints from people who said ‘I asked to join meetings by Teams two years ago because of condition X, and you said it was impossible’, so I think we can probably no longer accept any excuses – even when we’re all back – if people say ‘I don’t know how to livestream’, we can say ‘where were you in lockdown?’ But, as you pointed out, some people are struggling with, for instance, overload, and then will be told to turn off incoming video, but that’s difficult when someone’s showing slides and so on. So at some point we will probably be back in rooms and not at home. What do you think’s going to persist and what will just simply revert back to what it was before? To rephrase that, what do you think are the most important things we’ve learned and that we can hopefully persist with?

NB: There are several things here. On the one hand, loads of studies have been done on COVID already and especially on the impact of COVID and the lockdown, obviously, on people’s well-being and mental health, on people’s happiness levels. I don’t think that that’s something that society will be able to ignore. When we get back to ‘normal’, whatever normal then means, I do think that all of those things that are being highlighted now as to how they’re impacting people’s health and well being, that’s something that will stay with us to a certain extent – I’m not saying to the full extent, but to a certain extent.

The other thing is also, because of lockdown and because of the issues people have encountered, They have first hand experience, now, what it feels like to be depressed. It’s not a proper depression because this is kind of, you know, it’s a temporary issue, it’s triggered by that event that’s happening at the moment. But people can’t ignore what it felt like when they had those low moods and those depressing episodes. So you know, somebody saying ‘I’ve got depression’ now is probably less stigmatized then it would have been five years ago, because a lot of people know now what it feels like to be in that position. And yes, it doesn’t compare, I’m not trying to say it does compare, it is a completely different matter and a depressive episode and proper depression is different in so many ways and at so many levels. But there is still this element that people are able to empathize more than they were ever before.

That kind of fatigue can’t be brushed off anymore.

At the same time, we know that COVID has got quite some long-term effects on some people. Not on everybody, but on some people, especially where fatigue is concerned. So anyone with fatigue issues and anyone with disabilities and chronic illnesses and neurodiversity will know fatigue as part of their everyday life. That kind of fatigue can’t be brushed off anymore. Because people have caught COVID, they’ve experienced fatigue three months after having had the infection. So, you know, come on, if you’re saying that that’s OK, then clearly you’ve got to accept my kind of fatigue as well, if I’m telling you that just trying to navigate the day is tiring. So again, I think these first hand experiences are quite useful in terms of actually saying to people, ‘do you remember what it was like’? And yes, it’s not the same. Again, trying to walk in somebody else’s shoes is not ever possible, but trying to remind people ‘well do you remember when…?’ That’s something, that’s quite a useful tool. So in that sense, I do think that we can’t go back to everything as it was before. In terms of, you know, the kind of impact longer term, I am hoping that there will be increased flexibility around working hours and ways so that some people may want to do things on Teams even if we are able to do face to face work again.

I’m also hoping that there is more recognition on the emotional labour that certain people are undertaking and that there’s more recognition of how certain kinds of work and emotional labour outside the ordinary kind of working hours, impact working effectiveness and productivity. So I’m just looking at things like childcare duties or caring responsibilities for elders, you know, anything like that. I’m kind of hoping that will be recognized, but I think I’m also quite optimistic. At the same time – I mean the latest thing now, I don’t know whether you are aware of that; I have cowritten a position paper on lockdown and the post-lockdown situation and the kind of strategic view that universities or higher education institutions should take in terms of supporting people as we come out of lockdown. That paper is being published now in a journal – it’s part of the National Association Disabled Staff Networks, and one of the things that we mentioned in there was that there should be a ‘no detriment policy’ for staff because obviously at student levels we had that we were saying the pandemic shouldn’t impact your grades, so there should be a no detriment policy for students. But actually at doctoral level and for academic stuff, there wasn’t an explicit no detriment policy.

Well, there is now – UCL has literally just last night or the night before, published a no detriment policy, we see these things happening. They make me more hopeful and more optimistic that actually we won’t go back to what things were before.

JPD: I saw the UCL policy. I do think that UCL have handled this extremely well on many fronts. And people in other universities have not been so lucky; redundancies threatened and the like…do you think it’s going to change the landscape of working then?

NB: Yeah, I do think I do think it will change things because you know, I mean, let’s be honest about this; UCL are coming out with a no detriment policy. That means that all of the Russell Group universities are going to be under pressure of actually following that one way or another. Once all of the Russell Group Universities have done that, what are the other universities going to do? Well, they’re gonna have to follow it one way or another too, because you can’t compete with a university at that level if you don’t have something in place that’s similar.

JPD: We’ll sidestep the issue of funding and the government not particularly being…helpful… in the current situation, but that’s probably beyond our scope today. Is there anything else you want to bring in that hasn’t had a chance to come into this conversation, that you think people should know about or think about?

You explain things by listening to people’s stories and listening to people’s experiences

NB: I think – I’m not trying to criticize disability studies – but I do think that the way forward with any kind of policy-making around disabilities, chronic illnesses and neurodiversity in higher education has got to be with listening to individual experiences, not necessarily theorizations. I mean, theorizations have got their place. But you try and put forward theorizations to somebody in a Human Resources department – it’s not actually helpful. You explain things by listening to people’s stories and listening to people’s experiences. People can start connecting – ‘well actually, yes, I start understanding what they’re saying.’

That’s the way forward, of actually providing the kind of impetus that’s needed for policy making, so I think ultimately, policy making, in that sense…you require the scholarly work, you require the academic work and the theorization is obviously there for the academic outputs.

But in terms of policy making, I generally believe that the connection – empathy – those are the things that are really important, and that’s what I’m hoping to achieve with my work, is actually showing people, so the conference for example wasn’t about me putting on a conference, it was about showing people how it can be done so that it’s accessible, because I myself had that first line where people were saying, ‘well, no, you can’t access that’, and the frustration of it, so, trying to show by example and with with practical experiences and lived experiences. I think that’s the way forward.

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?

Typically it will involve a description about the context, what made you get involved in developing an inclusive curriculum more, what you did (and what didn’t work!) The idea is to give people an insight into the realities of tackling particular issues; we want to show them that it’s possibly a messy process but worth persevering with. Any student comments, feedback or things you’ve noticed will also be very welcome.

If you’re not sure how to get started, drop me a line (j.p.davies@ucl.ac.uk) and we can have a chat about what you did, I will see if I can turn it into fluent text and then run it past you to check I have represented it appropriately.