Last week the UK government published its Trade Bill,
which formally starts the process of moving towards an independent trade
policy. Member states of the European Union (EU) are part of a customs union. This means they operate a unified trade policy, which includes common external
tariffs on imports from outside the EU. The UK government has already made it
clear it intends to leave the customs union as part of the Brexit process.
Prior to the start of the legislative process, the Department for International
Trade published a Trade
White Paper on 9 October 2017, which set out the principles guiding the
UK's future trade policy. This included numerous references to stakeholder
engagement and as part of a consultation exercise it included an invitation for
submissions on all aspects of the developing approach set out in the White
Paper.
In this post I outline the major points of my submission to
this consultation process. The deadline was Monday 6 November 2017 and it was
therefore with some surprise that I discovered the following morning that the
government was publishing its Trade Bill in parliament. This led to criticism
from trade unions and NGOs who had also contributed to the consultation. For
example, War on Want
argued that given the timing of the publication of the bill it was clear
that 'the input of thousands of responses from members of the public could not
have been considered'.
Given my long-standing research interest in the EU’s trade
and development policy to African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states, my
response focused in the main on the fourth of the five principles outlined in
the White Paper, namely ‘supporting developing countries to reduce poverty’. In
doing so, I also explored some of the tensions between this ambition and the
other four principles ('trade that is transparent and inclusive', 'supporting a
rules-based global trading environment', 'boosting our trade relationships' and
'ensuring a level playing field').
My criticism of the White Paper ultimately rests on some of
the problematic assumptions it makes about the relationship between trade and
development. These assumptions were also demonstrated in an important speech
made by Liam Fox, the Secretary of State for International Trade, in Manchester
on 29 September 2016, where he suggested that ‘free trade is often a ladder to
the top’. A similar claim was made by former International Development
Secretary, Priti Patel, in her speech
at the Conservative Party conference on 3 October 2017, when she boldly claimed
that 'trade, investment and free markets provide the route out of poverty'.
These claims are advanced in the first half of the White
Paper where the role of trade in the global economy is discussed. The
conclusion one is supposed to draw from this is that free trade was at the
heart of the historical development of the British economy and hence this is
something that should be recommended to developing countries today. However, as
respected economist Ha-Joon Chang has convincingly demonstrated, Britain
employed tariffs for a significant period before it was able to adopt a regime
of free trade during the nineteenth century. Chang notes that ‘the overall
liberalization of the British economy … of which trade liberalization was just
a part, was a highly controlled affair overseen by the state, and not achieved
through a laissez-faire approach’ (Ha-Joon Chang, Kicking Away the Ladder,
p.24). Hence, what the White Paper suggests are protectionist measures (such as
subsidies for domestic industry) could conversely be understood as legitimate
development strategies.
The section of the White Paper on UK trade policy and how it
can support developing countries includes a commitment that as the UK leaves
the EU it ‘will maintain current access for the world’s Least Developed
Countries (LDCs) to UK markets and aim to maintain preferential access of other
(non-LDC) developing countries' (p.32). This is to be welcomed. However, the
aim of replicating the EU’s existing Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) is
much more problematic. It is clear to anyone who has followed the EU’s
negotiation of EPAs with ACP countries, that they met significant resistance
from both many ACP governments, and civil society organisations (CSOs) across
Europe and regions within the ACP. In part, their concerns relate directly to
the assumptions noted above about the ‘policy space’ needed for development.
Both the Tanzanian and Nigerian governments have indicated that they are
concerned that signing an EPA will undermine their ability to adopt government
policies to support industrialization. In Nigeria, the Manufacturers
Association of Nigeria has been particularly effective in lobbying against the
EPA, arguing that it will harm the domestic industrial sector.
Moreover, they have also voiced concerns over attempts by
the EU to introduce the so-called ‘Singapore Issues’ (competition policy,
transparency in government procurement, equal treatment for foreign investors,
and trade facilitation measures) that were rejected at the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) in 2003 at the Cancún
Ministerial. There is therefore a potential conflict of principles in the
White Paper between the expressed concern for developing countries and the
suggestion that the ‘UK will look to secure greater access to overseas markets
for UK goods exports as well as push for greater liberalisation of global
services, investment and procurement markets’ (p.27). These are precisely the
issues that African states and CSOs have identified as problematic because
they would constrain the ability of ACP states to seek to diversify their
exports and support the development of an industrial sector.
The White Paper’s strong support for the conclusion of the
Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) also undermines the claim to be supporting
developing countries. TiSA has emerged as a separate arrangement after talks on
services stalled within the WTO due to resistance from developing countries.
They have expressed concerns that it would allow transnational corporations to
turn essential public services into commodities that can be traded.
It is therefore highly likely that the UK will meet
significant resistance if it seeks to simply replicate EPAs. African states
have been able to demonstrate significant agency in the EPA negotiations and
there would be greater scope for this in negotiations with the UK. They have
made it clear that rather than deep and comprehensive trade liberalisation,
what they want is a gradual process of engagement with global markets, which if
it is to be developmental, needs to be facilitated by state support. Therefore,
a much better alternative would be for the UK to introduce an improved Generalised
System of Preferences that goes above and beyond the EU’s current ‘Everything
but Arms’ agreement with LDCs. Hence, I would support the recommendations made
by Traidcraft in its February
2017 report for the adoption of 'a preference scheme offering
duty-free, quota-free market access to imports from economically vulnerable
countries, including but not limited to the least developed countries' (p.16).
My final concerns relate to the democratic accountability of
any future UK trade policymaking. These were reinforced by the superficial
nature of the process of consultation on the White Paper itself. While it is
reassuring to note in the White Paper that there is a plan for regular
engagement with stakeholders, it is unclear what is meant by the phrase ‘we
will ensure that Parliament, the devolved administrations, devolved
legislatures, business and civil society are engaged throughout’ (p.29). Prior
to this there is reference to the need for a legislative framework that allows
for the quick negotiation and ratification of trade agreements. Trade
negotiations are notoriously long and difficult to conclude and this desire for
speed should not come at the cost of democratic accountability. As I, and 54
other academics have argued in a recent letter
published in The Telegraph on 20 October 2017, modern trade agreements
cover a wide range of policy areas. It is therefore vital that government makes
a clear and unequivocal commitment that parliament and the devolved
administrations/legislatures will have a say in both formulating negotiating
mandates and ratifying any future trade agreements agreed by the UK. Moreover,
information related to trade negotiations should be made public so that
stakeholders are able to provide proper democratic input into the process.
This month's blog post features the work of one of our undergraduate students, Harry Gable, and a summary of his prize winning dissertation. The Politics external examiner considered it to be worthy of publication. Below is a synopsis of the main arguments.
In
a recently written dissertation, I conducted research which sought to add to
the scholarship around the complex and often contradictory effects of modern globalisation
on national identity, using contemporary English society as a case-study. To do
this, qualitative analysis was carried out based on the public Twitter
discourses surrounding both Remain and Leave campaigns in the immediate
build-up to the UK’s referendum on membership of the EU on June 23 2016. The
utilisation of social media was central to the aims of the research, since
Twitter has become an accessible medium for the recorded expression of opinion
across an increasing variety of topics and demographics (Park and Kaye
2017:174). Although there are limits to the reliability of views expressed in a
maximum of 140 characters, it provides researchers with a tool for accessing a
previously unquantifiable body of public opinion. This helps to broaden
understanding of public discussion around complex social phenomena in a way
that analysis of conventional policy and media discourse cannot provide. This
blog will briefly summarise the key trends evident from the Remain and Leave
data-sets (30 Tweets were taken from each side, using Twitter searches of
#VoteRemain and #VoteLeave from 22 June 2016). From here, I will consider subsequent
implications for the future of English national identity in an increasingly
globalised world, before detailing what further research would deepen
understanding of this important dynamic.
It
is clear from my research that national identity represents an increasingly
sharp social divide in contemporary England. Identity politics has become
pervasive influence on modern English socio-political culture, and debate over
the future of the nation occupies a prominent position in this discourse
(Reeves, 2016). The Referendum provided an unusually direct forum for
observation of this phenomenon, and it is my contention that the discourse
surrounding it is a reliable indicator of significant trends in public
perceptions of English national identity, facilitating discussion of
globalisation, supranationality and modernity.
Overall,
my research revealed that Remain voters on social media appear to have a
positive conception of modern globalised realities, embracing the prosperity it
has brought and the need to accept that no country can succeed in isolation.
The cohort collectively lends support to the modernist conception of national
origins and promote a civic brand of nationalism. In line with the theory that
social organisation is a fluid product of macro-economic forces (Gellner 1964,
Anderson 2006), the Remain data demonstrates that globalisation is definitely
altering, while not necessarily eroding, the nature of English national
attachment.
The
effect of globalisation on national identity appears to be less transformative
among Leave voters; the sample strongly affirmed an emotional commitment to the
future prosperity of the nation, although there were many different visions of
who should be included and what this prosperity should be based on. In line
with the scholarship, the data-set revealed a division between patriotic Leave
voters who conceived of a prosperous nation as outward looking and globalised,
but “independent” and in complete control of its political affairs, and those
of a nationalistic primordialist disposition, who perceived globalisation as a
threat to national culture led by a compliantly corrupt elite. The latter
argument lends support to Jung’s conception of ‘resistance identities’
(2008:581). On the whole, the split in the data-set between those who were
sceptical of the supranationality at the heart of the EU but broadly supportive
of economic interconnectedness and those who espoused a brand of
anti-globalisation nationalist populism was marked. The fact that opinion was
divided in this way serves to demonstrate the complex, evolving and divisive
effect of globalisation on English national identity, polarising even among
those with a shared scepticism of supranationality.
Although
the two campaigns represent a logical dividing line in the debate around
English national identity and its relationship to globalisation, there was a
surprising degree of similarity between certain aspects of both groups, as well
as significant tensions within each cohort. First among these observations was
the prevalence of patriotism (see Viroli 1995) within the two discourses.
Though they disagreed on the merits of EU membership, the majority of both
data-sets espoused a strong commitment to the future of the nation, marked by a
desire for economic prosperity and political strength. The existence of such
views among the Remain cohort demonstrates a comfortable co-existence between
national pride and an endorsement of supranationality, vindicating the
conclusions of previous cross-national studies (Antonsich 2009, Jung 2008). On
the Leave side, the distinction made by many between supranational union and
globalised modernity is extremely important. Crucially, this cohort of the
data-set seemed equally keen for the nation to profit from the economic
opportunities of globalisation as the Remain sample, but saw supranational
cooperation as an inhibiter of this, rather than a facilitator. Contrary to
some post-referendum analysis, these views do not demonstrate a belief that the
nation should retreat from globalisation (Cowell, 2016), and are more in-line
with Hahn’s notion of civic nationalism, as opposed to its ethnically-driven
alternative (Kohn in Smith and Hutchinson 1994:163).
This
said, there was a very wide spectrum of views across both data-sets, in places
revealing a seismic difference in perception of the English nation. This trend
could have significant implications for future discourse, suggesting that the
intensification of globalisation is having divisive and contradictory effects
on elements within English society (in-line with Ariely 2012:462). For some,
globalisation appears to be directly weakening national attachment while
cultivating global cosmopolitan identities, while those at the opposing end of
the scale see globalised modernity as threatening the cultural integrity of the
English community. Again, this observation vindicates previous analysis of the
effects on globalisation on national identity, which has found that it can
precipitate both a resurgence in insular nationalism and a growth in
cosmopolitanism across developed societies (Ariely 2012:464).
In
the case of England, it looks as if populist nationalism will continue to grow
while cosmopolitan attachments remain on the fringe, (In-line with Jung 2008:
581), a trend with perhaps profound implications for future national political
discourse (Jones, 2015). While both my research and that of other academics
indicate that civic patriotism based on a broad acceptance of globalisation
remains the dominant opinion, the growing electoral popularity of nationalist
parties in England and across Europe shows no sign of abating (Lucassen and
Lubbers 2012:552). If this trend holds true, the tensions between civic and
ethic conceptions of the English nation evident in the data-sets can only be
expected to widen, further exacerbating the political centre-ground and
dragging political discourse to the ideological extremes, a phenomenon that can
already be observed in British politics (Helm, 2016). In many ways, Kohn’s
(1945) civic/ethnic dichotomy is representative of this divide, as the
cleavages separating civic and ethnic identity attachments are neatly
encapsulated by the differences between the modernist and primordialist
positions respectively (Gellner 1983, Geertz 1963). Since it is almost
impossible to conceive of a complete reversal of economic globalisation (Beck
2005:4), these tensions between contradictory visions of the English nation
could become irreconcilable, with the potential to seriously disrupt the
existing parameters of democratic politics and national discourse.
At
the core of these tensions sits the inherent conceptual ambiguity of
globalisation, and the unequal distribution of benefits and costs across
national societies. Consequently, globalisation, and its institutions like the
EU, become symbolic of an immense variety of both opportunities and threats,
dispersed among different social groups. In Ariely’s words, “different
operationalisations of globalisation and national identity yield very different
results” (2012:477). My research has very strongly vindicated this idea in
relation to England, suggesting that without amelioration of the systemic
economic and social inequalities that characterise modern globalisation,
observers can expect the fundamental tensions between globalisation and English
national identity to continue unabated. If the nation remains the primary unit
of social and territorial organisation, it will be the logical vessel for the
expression of grievances against globalisation, since it remains a tangible
cultural entity in an increasingly uncertain world (Calhoun 2007:8). For this
reason and based on my research, I expect nationalism to play an ever more
prominent role in English political discourse in the coming years.
Further
research is required to further explore the trends highlighted in this
dissertation. The utility of a social media based discourse analysis has been
discussed above, but this research model needs to be enlarged upon to
comprehensively validate my conclusions.Foremost among this should be a considerable expansion of the sample
size and search parameters to facilitate investigation into the large cohort
across both data-sets that espoused an acceptance of globalisation alongside a
politically powerful, patriotic nation-state. If the current theorisations
about the incompatibility of these two beliefs are proved correct and
globalisation continues to undermine the formal capacities of the state (McGrew
and Lewis 2013, Mann 1997), tracking the changing views of this cohort using
tools like social media, will be crucial to understanding future political
developments. Indeed, if contradictory interpretations of the nation can be
explained by the differing formulations of globalisation subscribed to, more
research is needed to isolate specific visions of globalisation in detail, and
their direct relation to conceptions of the nation.
As the 2016-2017 coordinator
for PETAL (Peer-Enhancement of Teaching and Learning) in Politics, IR and
Sociology, I organised on 17 February 2017 at Oxford Brookes University an
event entitled ‘Uncomfortable Pedagogy: decolonising and diversifying the
curriculum in Politics, IR, and Sociology’. This event was aimed at students
and teaching staff in our subjects and in follow up of some of the conclusions
from the previous PETAL project on ‘The experience of ‘BME’ students at Oxford
Brookes’.
The event was
attended by approximately 30 people, one half made up of academic staff and the
other of students. It was livestreamed on Facebook, with approximately 150
views on the day and currently well over 400. The panel of speakers consisted
of 5 individuals: Claire Vergerio, a past Associate Lecturer at Brookes and
University of Oxford DPhil candidate involved in curriculum reform; Michaela
Opoku-Mensah, a graduate from Brookes and now studying for an MA at the
University of Edinburgh in African Studies; Mend Mariwani, a writer and editor
working in London for media platforms dedicated to writers of colour such as Media Diversified, Skin Deep, and Bare Lit; Dalila Da Silva Lopez, a current Brookes Level 6 BME student and
Politics and IR representative; and myself as a member of our teaching staff.
This blog entry
discusses the context in which the structure of the event emerged, some of its
main discussion points, and some future directions for both the PETAL and
Diversifying the Curriculum projects being pursued at Brookes. Overall, the
event was a successful opportunity to engage the student body on a pressing and
timely subject that unites teachers' pedagogic and institutional concerns with
broader social and community needs. Response from students speaking and
participating from the audience was extremely positive and they had
expectations and demands for more similar events to take place.
Yet the event also
highlighted the complexity, confusions, and broader implications and interpretations
of diversifying and decolonising, for which future initiatives and events
should be attentive to by narrowing down the scope of discussion to specific
areas of implementation. For example, future events could separate discussions
regarding the representative constitution of programmes, modules and staff at
institutional level from discussions regarding content, textbooks, and
disciplinary requirements.
Overall, the aim
that most strongly emerges from my analysis and experience of leading this PETAL
project is to continue improving communication and transparency between
teachers and students on 'what should my curriculum be?' and 'whose job is it
to shape the curriculum?' Networking locally and nationally with student union
officers, staff trade unions and other campaigns and initiatives would seem an
appropriate way to move the project forward and find ways to institutionalise
and protect the gains achieved while avoiding overburdening teaching staff
without sufficient resources and support.
The BME/BAME Staff
Action Group supported by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, which is discussed
below and emerged in parallel with - but independently from - the PETAL event,
is a promising example of how to continue pursuing some of these goals. Other
ideas could be applied to rethinking Brookes's Core Attributes and the Higher Education Academy's UK Professional Standards Framework by including more
diversity and decolonising criteria to their requirements.
Background and Broader Context
The event was
shaped in continuation of the 2015-2016 PETAL project and one of its major
conclusions that 'diverse and alternative perspectives should be included and
integrated more thoroughly into the curriculum'. This project was led by Dr.
Victoria Browne, and assisted by Dr. Tamsin Barber, who conducted focus groups on
‘The experience of ‘BME’ students at Oxford Brookes’. These took place on
Wednesday 13 April 2016 and were attended by 10 students from across Politics,
IR, Sociology, Geography and Psychology. Their aim was 'to find out more about
how ‘BME’ students experience life at Oxford Brookes, and if there are any ways
that we as academic staff can improve their experience and education.'
The
need to diversify the range of social backgrounds and ethnic origins of
students and staff in academic institutions is based on serious discrepancies
in the attainment gap
of BME students.[1] Recent figures
show that 'only 60 per cent of ethnic minority learners at
English universities achieved a first or a 2:1 in 2013-14, compared with 76 per
cent of their white peers.'These national trends
are also observed at Oxford Brookes University.[2]
The fact that some of these students are not performing as well as their
colleagues can be partly attributed to an institutional context in which it is
more difficult for them to reach university and they have less resources to
insure their success. Moreover, the focus groups also revealed the added
negative psychological impact that awareness and pressure from the attainment
gap can produce. One way in which this problem can be remedied, alongside
making more resources available, is to counter the assumption that BME students
cannot perform well by making institutions actively promote universities as
spaces less dominated by white students and staff.
Towards
this end, the event was focused on discussing how such efforts can lead to what
Laura Routley has inspired me to call 'uncomfortable pedagogies'. Routley stresses
the ‘importance of both teachers and students remaining uncomfortable’,
because, with the example of the African context:
‘Teaching Africa
within IR carries a responsibility to engage students with the power relations
that dominate Africa’s global position and ‘western’ knowledge of the
continent… Who is in the class room particularly matters when teaching material
embedded in ongoing colonial relations. Disrupting student’s assumptions, such
as their alignment with Western actors who will ‘solve’ Africa’s problem, may
therefore involve disempowering them. By doing so, it is possible to
potentially establish more productive starting points for learning about Africa
within IR.’[3]
In other words,
uncomfortable pedagogy needs to be understood as the realisation of certain
inequalities and disturbing facts and ideas about one’s position in the world -
and in the classroom – in order to provide an alternative - and arguably more
productive - starting point for teaching and learning.
Concern with the
curriculum also follows from a national campaign by the NUS called ‘Why is my
curriculum white?’ and other campaigns such as 'Why isn't my
professor black?' These occurred in parallel to a series of more local campaigns, led by
students and staff across the UK organising events and societies around the
challenge of decolonising and diversifying curricula, such as notably the
Oxford Rhodes Must Fall campaign and others at LSE, SOAS, Queen Mary, Leeds,
Sussex, UCL, Edinburgh, Warwick, and Goldsmiths. These campaigns all relate to
supporting learning in terms of diversity and explore different pedagogical
approaches to delivering content. They also provide the basis to a potentially
deeply transformative and wide-ranging movement about the structure and values
of higher education. This potential movement has implications at a pedagogical
and political level by ensuring widening participation, and acknowledging that
supporting learning is a dialectical process that must involve teachers and
students.
For example, these
campaigns have led to broader public debates in national and international newspapers and various
blogs (Media Diversified and Verso Books). As Claire
Vergerio, one of the contributors to the event, raised in her talk, attempts such
as Professor Karma Nabulsi's project on the Palestinian Revolution are a prime example of efforts to develop
teaching resources developed by staff and students to remedy the lack of
diversity and discussions of coloniality in politics and IR curricula.[4]
'Uncomfortable Pedagogy': A One Day Event on Diversifying and
Decolonising
As I introduced
the event to a crowd of both students and staff, I outlined three dimensions in
which diversifying and decolonising could be discussed: in terms of topics
listed in our curricula; in terms of the social and ethnic background of the
staff employed to design and deliver curricula; and thirdly, in terms of the
social and ethnic background of authors chosen for the curricula. I used the
contents page of a common North American IR textbook to start a discussion with
the audience of how they would go about diversifying and decolonising its topics.[5]
Questions asked by
myself and by the audience to the speakers included: What is decolonisation in the context of
education? How has it impacted your work and study? Do you think there is a
growing movement across the UK, and elsewhere forming out of it and/or
influencing it? How is it linked to diversifying? What do you think of the
notion of 'uncomfortable pedagogy'? What are the main challenges facing efforts
to decolonise and diversify? What does decolonising mean for non-BME authors and staff, do they get
‘erased’ from the curriculum? What experiences in the classroom have speakers
felt were problematic?
As Claire Vergerio
explained, a crucial aspect of improving curricula is to avoid simply adding
'token' topics, staff, or authors so as to in a sense tick the 'diversity and
decolonial' box. The deeper issue at stake is epistemological, in the sense
that we need to 'change the nature of the questions we're asking' as teachers.
She used examples from her experience as part of committees and fora made up of
students and staff at the University of Oxford to decolonise the IR and
Politics curriculum. She showed on a screen a proposal that has been put
forward for how to reshape the syllabus for an intro to IR module in terms of
concepts and questions e.g. replacing the concept of anarchy with hierarchy so
as to move away from a narrow conception of the history of international
relations based on states, and instead should include more the study of empires
which is the political organisation which has overwhelmingly dominated human
political history.
Students Michaela
Opoku-Mensah and Dalila Da Silva Lopez also shared crucial experiences about
how they felt their BME backgrounds were not represented, e.g. no or too few
modules or topics on African politics, or a lack of library resources. Both
students therefore went on exchange programmes but nevertheless were often the
only black student on a course on African politics. They discussed how this
lack of collective experience was crucial to their pedagogical experience,
speaking directly to the need to improve BME staff and student ratios. For
Michaela, teaching is crucial because it shapes how we behave as individuals in
society. It is not just the opportunity to gain a degree and by extension
employment. This goes against assumptions that all students are primarily
concerned by their employability, and this makes diversifying and decolonising
curricula particularly important, as arguments against these efforts are often
made in relation to what students need to know to compete on the job market.
Discussions during
the event - from speakers and participants in the audience - proved that
students are very mature in their understanding of pedagogy as a social process
shaped by power struggles. For example, Michaela discussed the problem of how
Black history is overwhelmingly portrayed by slavery and the slave trade, in
all the institutions she has been taught at. This is a fundamental way in which
Politics, IR and Sociology need to rethink their teaching of history, and
acknowledge the implications that ignoring thousands of years of Black history
leads to determining the existence of Black people only in relation to that of
white colonisers, and only as a story of domination. It is therefore essential
to teach the diversity of Black societies and their particular political and
social experiences.
Diversifying and Decolonising at Brookes: Future Directions
At Brookes, a BME/BAME
Staff Action Group has been set up in 2016-2017 led by Mariama Sheriff as part
of the PESE2 Inclusive, Multi-Modal Learning Environment Project focused on Diversifying the
Curriculum. My participation in this group, as a representative for the department
of Social Sciences, will take into account students and staff's contributions
to diversifying and decolonising their pedagogical experiences, and will aim to
continue the work of the two PETAL projects presented here.
According to the
website, the university-wide project's aims are to:
-
increase the
visibility of BME/BAME representation in Western contexts;
- improve critical
thinking by using taught content to build conceptual frameworks to prevent
unconscious bias and challenge assumptions;
- provide varied
biographic references (spoken, visual and printed) in taught content;
- sustain work to
internationalise reading lists;
- enable all
students to gain further insight into their fields of study by looking at a
subject through a wider range of lenses (e.g. historical, legal, ethical, cultural,
social or political dimensions).
A significant conclusion
from the event was the need for more discussion between teachers and students
at the beginning of modules or in handbooks about the diversity and coloniality
of their module; to discuss what resources are available, and to have more openness
about this availability, so that students are made aware that they might need
to consult other libraries or find different types of resources. Students might
be blaming tutors, who are themselves limited by institutional resources
themselves. Therefore, we need to work towards reducing the gap between
students’ expectations and staff limitations or conflicting pedagogical
considerations.
As participant
Mend Mariwani emphasised, the first sense in which we should diversify is in
the rapport between staff and students. Moreover, in our efforts to diversify
staff, we should avoid relying too much on what we could call 'ghettoising'
teaching and research staff, either through specialised institutions such as
the SOAS, or by expecting staff from specific backgrounds to only teach about
their background. Diversifying should instead be about ensuring that more BAME
and working class staff participate in the general curriculum reforms required,
and that all staff are involved in updating their teaching.
Mend also stressed
that a central problem with initiatives that aim to develop their own work is
unpaid labour. It is therefore crucial to institutionalise the work we do and
as Mend notes, insure 'ownership', inside and outside the academy. His work in
the media sector, for example, is particularly prone to such appropriation.
Work in this sector is essential, as Mend shockingly noted that although 30% of
London's population is constituted of people of colour, only 3% of the media
sector employs people of colour. This concern, he agued, might be more
important than diversification which has tended to not look enough into the
causes and implications of how to diversify. For Anamik Saha, 'one of the most
troubling outcomes of the commodification of diversity, as Leong outlines, is
that it pressures individuals into performing their otherness in a way that
meets with the approval of the dominant culture.’
Participation in
the Staff Action Group at Brookes and in diversifying - and decolonising - the
curriculum is therefore an essential initiative to support and provide with resources.
It will thereby be able to respond to the general and growing concern regarding
persisting inequalities of race, class and gender affecting staff and students,
and do so in a continuous, sustained and reflective way to avoid dangers of
tokenisation and quick-fix diversification. There is an urgent need for our
profession to be more aware of and able to share the various practices it is
engaging in to remedy these issues. This follows from NUS and staff-led
campaigns across UK HE institutions to acknowledge and act on staff gender pay
gaps, BAME student attainment gaps, protect low-paid and immigrant workers on
campuses, resist casualisation of teaching staff, and counter the preponderance
of Eurocentric 'white' curricula in terms of topics, authors read, and teaching
staff.
Finally, these
concerns will also be further pursued by my personal research projects on observing,
analysing and building relationships with students' 'involvement in rewriting
curricula and reworking pedagogic practice'.[6]
My past projects havelooked at student
occupations and other forms of resistance to neoliberal education, and future
ones will continue to explore radical and useful ways to produce uncomfortable
pedagogies. Mend Mariwani powerfully visualised this process in his
intervention. For him, being uncomfortable, such as in a crowded space, means
we should 'move aside' and 'make space' for others. Doing so by including more
staff and by engaging more with students will only enrich our own teaching and
research. Finally, as Dalila Da Silva Lopes also related from her experience in
class, it is not sufficient that staff 'don't have time' to cover certain
topics and regions, because 'it makes us feel as if we're not important, not
relevant'. She reminded me that uncomfortable pedagogies is also about
recognising that many students are already 'uncomfortable' everyday, to say the
least, by the narrowness of the dominant curriculum. We owe it to them to raise
these questions and act on them.
[1]Broecke, S. and Nicholls, T. (2007)
Ethnicity and Degree Attainment, Dept. for Education and Skills Research Report
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[2]'Oxford Brookes' performance against widening participation
milestones', December 2014, by Sudarshana Chaudari (Strategic Planning Analyst
in the Strategic and Business Planning Office)
[3]
Routley, Laura (2016) 'Teaching Africa, Presenting, Representing and the
Importance of Who Is in the Classroom' Politics
36: 482–94
[4] Karma
Nabulsi, professor of politics at the University of Oxford, was recently The
Guardian Higher Education Network’s 2017 Inspiring Leader award winner for her
project on The Palestinian Revolution.
[5]
Grieco J, Ikenberry GJ and Mastanduno M (2015) Introduction to International Relations: Enduring Questions and
Contemporary Perspectives. London and New York: Palgrave.
[6]Louiza
Odysseos and Maïa Pal (2017) 'Towards Critical Pedagogies of the International?
Student Resistance, Other-regardedness and Self-formation in the Neoliberal
University', International Studies
Perspectives, Online
View; Kerem Nisancıoğlu and
Maïa Pal (2016) ‘Counter-Conduct in the University Factory: Locating the Occupy
Sussex Campaign’, Global Society,
Vol. 30, Issue 2, 279-300
