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Research Theme 2021-22: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion within the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
The cluster was set up to identify specific actions to promote Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) at the early career research stage in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (AHSS).
Original Brief (March 2021)
Over the past decade a series of surveys of ECRs in AHSS subjects, for example Philosophy and History, has shown that the transition from PhD to post-doctoral work is a crucial stage at which inequalities increase markedly. Economic constraints clearly play a major part here, especially precarity of employment, as does discriminatory behaviour, including micro-aggression. Yet it has also become evident that there is a range of other, less obvious, factors that prevent or hinder people from non-traditional backgrounds from establishing academic careers in AHSS in the UK, or - if they do so - from feeling at home in these fields. Such barriers include biases, preconceptions, expectations, conventions, modes of behaviour and assumptions about what is “obvious” and therefore is not taught or even deemed unteachable. Barriers can be epistemological, cultural, social, institutional or disciplinary.
To take a foundational example: PhD programmes are very often based on implicit, long-established and unquestioned conventions about what constitutes legitimate knowledge, research, argumentation or debate. Where research to date has attended to such factors, the emphasis has usually been on the psychology of the individual rather than on the pathology of the knowledge communities they inhabit. In light of the additional pressures caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is all the more urgent to identify and put in place policies to counter these hidden but highly powerful biases with discriminatory or exclusionary effects. Even if vaccination programmes enable working life to return to normal, the pandemic’s negative effects on equalities will remain to be addressed. In any case, the current moment offers an opportunity that universities should seize to rethink in fundamental ways.
2021 EDI Projects by Samantha Evans, Jacob Fairless Nicholson, Lydia Gibson & Hannah Walters
Living the Project
We are a group of early career academics who came together at the IAS in the spring and summer of 2021. Our original brief as Research Fellows was to conduct four research projects investigating issues of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in early academic careers and produce a report. But, the serendipitous outcome of a newly centralised ethical process (which meant we could not start our project three months into a four-month contract) led us to Plan B.
Plan B, we called Living the Project. As early career academics, occupying a complex web of both marginalised identities and privileged spaces, we reflected and shared our own insights and experiences. As researchers in this field we produced a series of methodological toolkits as recorded sessions and resources. This focus on both lived experience and a developing methodological expertise enabled us to find point of connection with our Creative Fellows.
Original Project Outlines
Samantha Evans: The ideal early career researcher: know-how; know-why; know-who'
I am researching class as a dimension of EDI, taking an emic approach (Tatli & Özbilgin, 2012) focussing on context as well as characteristic. I will use a discursive methodology to critically examine the ‘ideal’ early career research path, how ways of being and having are (implicitly) valorised, and how these may be classed or exclusionary. Class is arguably a dominant discourse by which economic and symbolic value is attributed to constructed categories (gender, race, disability) particularly in the workplace (Romani et al., 2020; Zanoni, 2011). Career capital is a concept developed by career researchers to look at the know-how; know-why and know-who required to get on within careers (Arthur et al., 2005; Defillippi & Arthur, 1994). Know-how relates to technical knowledge, know-why relates to self-knowledge and know-who relates to networks (Defillippi & Arthur, 1994). Whilst this concept has been updated to account for precarious work environments (Brown et al., 2020) it has been less examined for issues of equity, diversity or inclusion. As such it is ripe for critical examination.
Jacob Fairless Nicholson: 'First-in-family pathways: investigating barriers to post-doctoral study'
With a focus on the experiences of students that identify as first-in-family, this research project investigates how discourses of exclusion or inclusion shape pathways into research careers for students from non-traditional backgrounds studying Geography and cognate disciplines (Social Sciences, Anthropology, Urban Studies, and Area Studies) at UCL. Employing a qualitative research methodology that combines semistructured interviews with surveys, the research project is concerned with pinpointing the institutional and quotidian mechanisms that influence experiences of inclusion and exclusion. The research hopes to clearly identify appropriate guidance for university departments striving to successfully implement and maintain effective equity-based approaches or inclusive design and planning for ECR communities.
Lydia Gibson: 'The economic, social, and psychological conditions created by lack of access to PhD funding'
I am exploring the PhD funding available across nontraditional routes, that can bring the underserved and underrepresented back into academia. Using FoI requests to UKRI, I seek to disaggregate and analyse recipients of research council funding by age, ethnicity, caregiving status, and educational background. I will also conduct an online survey of PhD students without research council funding to understand how they fund their PhD, the time it takes from their research, and how it impacts their PhD. We know that the numbers of underrepresented minorities decreases with each qualification level; if serious attention is not paid to the funding of non-traditional pathways, the door shown to, or perceived by, many marginalised students will always be firmly and systemically locked behind them, while the spectacle of racism keeps our attention from the structural violence imparted by academic funding and upon the familiar images of individual instances of discrimination.
Hannah Walters: '‘First-in-Family’ & Female? Class, gender and barriers faced by first-generation women at university'
Given the overlooking of intersectional feminine identities on the one hand, and the lack of a robust gender lens in considerations of first-in-family experiences on the other, this proposal aims to fill this knowledge gap by exploring the experiences of first-in-family women at all levels of academic study. It is already known that working-class students face a number of additional challenges at university. Living in the familial home is linked with a 10% attainment gap, and a lack of knowledge of the parents of first-in-family students makes navigating elements of university more complex (SOAS 2019). There is also evidence that how integrated students feel in the university culture impacts their academic performance (Singh 2011), and financial and material aspects of university life remain a concern for working-class students (Jeffreys 2018). Meanwhile gendered patterns disadvantage remain a key point of EDI concern in higher education, and can include issues of ‘laddism’ and ‘rape culture’, inflexible schedules around caring responsibilities, and a ‘boys club’ atmosphere whereby women are prohibited from networking and informal career advancement opportunities (Lewis et al 2018). Taken together, there are a broad range of barriers facing working-class, first-in-family women at all levels of university education. This project is designed to identify barriers operating in AHSS, investigate how they may impede successful participation by working-class, first-in-family women, and make and make recommendations to dismantle them.
2021 EDI Projects by Alexandra Baybutt and Lo Marshall
Both research projects were preoccupied with conceptualising EDI as processual, and implicit in the everyday encounters with university structures and systems. Baybutt and Marshall were interested in particular practices and forms of encounter with disembodied structures as well as affective interactions that consider how duties of care are distributed and might be distributed differently. Understanding EDI as ongoing ethical processes raises questions and conflicts about how existing policies and protocols are responded to and open to modification when faced with unanticipated events, needs and encounters. These projects seek to explore what practices of care might be when navigating barriers and the residual dualisms of the university. The contribution of these research projects will highlight specific contexts in EDI practice and theory as interconnected with issues of learning and access.
Alexandra Baybutt: Moving the modes of encounter: Embodying (in)equalities in the university
The aims of this project are to inform EDI policy-making by drawing attention to the effects of embodiment in teaching and learning contexts. Splitting body/mind has been perpetuated in many Western academic frames and departmental cultures whereby intellect and rationality are not considered embodied or kinetic. Whilst dualism has been critiqued and analysed within the Humanities and Social Sciences, it is still residual. This research aims to explore the subtle or not so subtle residues, the affordances of the body, the vulnerabilities in learning and to think through movement to challenge long-standing contentions in academic practices that perpetuate dualism, and the violence it can produce. Through mixed methods, including practical workshops with students and faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences, this research explores (self)perception and modes of encounter through embodied practices to enhance awareness and receptivity, underpinned by the notion of body as first affordance with capacity to affect and be affected. Embodied arts techniques draw attention to and address the hypervigilance of those highly aware and attuned to risk and possible violence in the everyday. They also expose the lack of awareness and attention in others by gently creating conditions for increasing sensitivity and curiosity. Embodied practices provoke remembering – that members of the individual and social body practice questions of equity, diversity and inclusion in the everyday encounters that shape what the university is and might be.
Part of her research was the facilitation of a series of workshops in May 2022 that aimed to inform EDI policy-making by drawing attention to the effects of embodiment in teaching and learning contexts.
Lo Marshall: Transforming brick walls: Exploring barriers to belonging and progression experienced by trans students in Higher Education
The project places Sara Ahmed’s thinking on ‘brick walls’ in conversation with the voices of trans students who have studied Arts, Humanities and Social Science disciplines at UK-based Higher Education Institutions (HEI) since 2010, with a primary focus upon UCL. Within an interdisciplinary approach that integrates strands of trans, queer, and feminist studies, with assemblage thinking and human geography, trans people’s voices and experiences are prioritised in this research. This approach is crucial to the project’s aim of identifying and working to redress administrative, intellectual, and social barriers, with an attentiveness to how intersecting oppressions, and how negotiating dominant social norms texture trans students’ undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate studies.
Transforming Brick Walls is a project that aims to contribute toward making UCL more equitable & inclusive by working collaboratively with participants to:
- Identify barriers to belonging and progression encountered by trans and non-binary students at UCL
- Evidence the impacts of those barriers and how they are negotiated by students
- Co-devise recommendations for redressing the barriers identified
Prioritising the voices and experiences of trans and non-binary people who have studied at UCL since 2010 is central to the project, which takes a collaborative, critical and constructive approach to analysing and addressing social, administrative and intellectual barriers. Theoretically, this research draws upon Sara Ahmed’s thinking on institutional brick walls as ‘hardenings of histories into barriers in the present’ (2017: 136), Hil Malatino’s work on Trans Care, and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality. In this project, belonging is understood as relating to acceptance and fitting in, feeling included, safe and supported in who you are within the university, and the faculties, schools, departments, groups and networks that you are/were part of. Progression refers to development and growth to as a student, which may relate to a person’s studies but could also connect with personal growth and/or participating in extra-curricular activities, groups and networks.
Methods: Workshops and/or interviews via Zoom, during May and June 2022.
Criteria: Trans and non-binary people who have studied at UCL as an undergraduate, graduate or postgraduate since 2010. In this research gender is recognised as diverse and trans and non-binary people’s identities and experiences are understood through an intersectional lens, with different ways of being trans and/or non-binary valued equally. The experiences of gender non-conforming and/or gender-questioning people are understood as being relevant to this research since they are included in the ‘trans umbrella’ and can be impacted by transphobia and disadvantaged by dominant gender norms.
Research outputs: A report that will be shared widely within and beyond UCL. Articles based on this research will be submitted to academic journals and this research will be shared through public talks and presentations in academic contexts.
Interview Participant Information Sheet (pdf)
Workshop Participant Information Sheet (pdf)