BLog post 3: Race
When I joined UAL as a student, I wasn’t expecting diversity. In my mind, I was going to go and study in a British university that was going to be mainly formed by a white British community, and I was fine with that reality. At the end of the day, you are moving to another country, so you have to accept and adapt to that. Of course, I knew that there would be some international students, but I also didn’t know that London is as diverse as it is. I loved the diversity in daily life, and to this day, it is one of my favourite things this city has to offer.
I think, for me, the problem with diversity in UAL is that the institution talks about it all the time, maybe so much that the word has lost its meaning. As a student, I didn’t see it. In my MA course at LCC, around 95% of the students were from mainland China. This is not diverse either; the fact that most students from one course are from a section of the BAME groups is not diversity. As the only Latina in the course, I felt for the first time at UAL that I was fulfilling the diversity quotas. We can get stuck in institutions by being stuck in a category. This is not to say that we cannot or do not value the work of these categories. But we can be constrained even by the categories we love. (Ahmed, 2012). Now with the Pg.Cert. I realised that international students are not even in the awarding gaps statistics. So, it’s a weird diversity quota to be in. You are in, but you are not enough to be considered truly.
A few years later, after graduation, I joined UAL as a Teaching and Learning Technician, a role that, in itself, faces a lot of discrimination. Since then, I’ve felt that my hiring has been only ticking boxes, as I literally fit in all the inclusion and diversity boxes there posibly are. Since I joined I’ve faced discrimination on being a technician, Latina, an immigrant, a woman, and on being young. All the things that UAL calls diversity. I work mainly with a team of white males over 50, and all the manager and senior roles fall into white people (mainly men, too). So, again, there are other situations in which UAL’s definition of being a diverse university is nowhere to be seen. Institutions often struggle to define inclusive education and do not have access to guidance and resources to effectively embed inclusive practice throughout their practices. (QAA Higher Education 2023).
Now, thinking in the case of my teaching, being inclusive means that all students are given an equal opportunity to succeed, independent of their background or demographic characteristics. Higher education providers have an ethical, moral, and legal obligation to ensure that this happens in practice. (Hubbard and Gawthorpe, 2023). Reflecting on all this makes me feel a bit of a hypocrite, I’m doing my best to support students equally, while I’m fighting with all these institutional issues and giving so much energy trying to shield the students from all that shit because as I’ve been told many times “it’s all about student experience”. The imagined futures of racialised individuals in academia are often limited not by capability, but by the structures surrounding them. (Garrett 2024) But then, how about staff experience? How can students be in a good and safe place if the staff is not?
I know this post is not really about reflecting on how to address diversity in my practice, but I considered that, for now, other issues were more pressing. I’ll make another post reflection on that later.
References:
Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Hubbard, K. and Gawthorpe, P. (2023) Inclusive Higher Education Framework. Inclusive Education Framework. University of Hull & Quality Assurance Agency. Available at: https://www.inclusiveeducationframework.info
Garrett, R. (2024). Racism shapes careers: Career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1–15.
Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (2023) The Inclusive Education Framework. Available at: https://www.qaa.ac.uk/membership/benefits-of-qaa-membership/collaborative-enhancement-projects/equality-diversity-and-inclusion/the-inclusive-education-framework