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Sidestepping: my experience as a female Black tutor

by Olajumoke Orebamjo

I have been teaching for over 16 years (with the last 10 years in the tertiary sector) and I have had the pleasure and sometimes, unfortunately, the displeasure of interacting with individuals from diverse backgrounds, races and perspectives. Lately, my role, amongst others, entails one-to-one supervision sessions. This is a role like many other university roles which is repetitive and sometimes mundane in nature. Nevertheless, I particularly enjoy working with mature adult learners as I find my interactions with them intellectually stimulating. The sessions often deviate from the topic of focus to other issues that are not necessarily relevant, but what is gained from these interactions is not just a fulfilment of the aims of the meeting but also a general sense of wellbeing that is cerebral in nature.

The ‘dance’

Because most students of colour have had little or no interaction with a successful individual from a minority ethnic group, what often ensues is what I like to call ‘side-stepping’, as we initially engage in a mental dance around each other, trying to determine each other’s thoughts, and oscillating between ‘prey’ and ‘predator’. This is a natural reaction of defended subjects; ever vigilant and ready to ward off potential threats. We spend some time on this preamble before one of us goes on the attack, which would usually be the student, who would ask the question I’ve heard countless times: ‘how did you get this job?’. There is the assumption that I could only have attained this position by questionable means. The perception of the student is that I’m ‘culturally suspect’ (Orebamjo, 2024) and a possible stumbling block to their academic success. I have even been ascribed the moniker ‘oreo’ – black on the outside but white on the inside – by students who felt the need to express their disappointment that I was not Black enough for their liking or that I ‘act white’ (Orebamjo, 2024). 

The students’ negative reactions never come as a surprise as I have become accustomed to this form of ‘friendly fire’ (Philip, Rocha and Olivares-Pasillas, 2017). It was a recurring phenomenon I endured while delivering the top up degree programme in health and social care in a London-based university. My attempt to mitigate the academic challenges of the mature students, who were all from minority ethnic groups, was met with fierce opposition from the students. In their view, my actions, as a Black tutor, not only exposed their inadequacies, it simulated the unrealistic, unfair and discriminatory practices of a hegemonic system (Orebamjo, 2024).  The students’ thinking was that my being Black meant I would have a better understanding of their lived experiences.

It is therefore no wonder that any encounter with students of colour automatically triggers the ‘caution’, ‘get ready to attack’ and ‘attack!’ or ‘stand down’ (in that order) signal within me. I spontaneously assume a defensive persona, with a corresponding reaction in the student.  Each encounter is the same, commencing with psychological dance; the student undulating between delight (of sharing the commonality of ‘minority’), suspicion (that judgement is looming) and disappointment (that no hoodwinking can take place). I’m also mentally prancing; assured of the semblance of authority I believe I possess, wary of the fact that a ‘deadly’ attack may occur at any moment, while at the same time, trying to convey to the student that ‘you are in a safe place’.

It is what it is

As a Black woman, I am aware of all these defensive tactics from global majority students and my experiences mirror those of colleagues from minority ethnic groups. The reactions of this profile of students are taken for granted and are ‘to be expected’. I do however tread carefully in these interactions because I do not want to fulfil the students’ negative expectations and so spend more time than necessary salving their sense of self-worth in a futile attempt to dispel all negative perceptions they may have about me. It’s like I’m saying, ‘hey I’m one of you so don’t judge me too harshly!’. Eventually though, I resign myself to thinking, ‘it is what it is’.

The racial tension between Blacks and Whites is a common occurrence that is often presumed. Hence it is difficult, if not impossible, to explain these experiences to my White colleagues as these actions and reactions are born of the simple reality of an ’other’ interacting with another ‘other’ within a highly hierarchical higher education arena. Each one is engaged in a constant mental negotiation with the dominant values that pose a threat to their individuality and self-worth, whilst attempting to justify their membership of a seemingly hostile establishment that has no appreciation of their individuality (Tormey, 2021).

Constant reflection, together with extensive engagement with literature on mature learners from minority ethnic groups in higher education, has given me in-depth knowledge and understanding of the educational challenges of this erstwhile marginalised group of students and so I am well equipped to manage the students’ attitudes and emotional baggage. Of greatest value is my engagement with intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), which has given me an awareness of how social identities such as race, class, social economic status and gender intersect and overlap to result in complex experiences of disadvantage or privilege. Many students of colour would have experienced multifaceted oppression resulting in defensive attitudes, which they end up bringing into their learning environment (Orebamjo, 2024). To therefore come face to face with a Black individual with some level of authority – especially in a university that has a demographic footprint of almost 100% White – is reason enough for the student to call in the ‘defence calvary’.

And so, the dance continues!

Dr Olajumoke (Jumie) Orebamjo is a lecturer in Practice Development: Health and Social Care and Paramedic Practice at University of Cumbria where she oversees undergraduate and graduate research projects. She’s also a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a committed academic with over 12 years of experience teaching and supporting students to overcome academic challenges by developing agency. Proven record of designing and effecting teaching and learning methods that develop students’ skills particularly in metacognition.


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Professor Farid Alatas on ‘The captive mind and anti-colonial thought’

by Ibrar Bhatt

On Monday 2 December 2024, during the online segment of the 2024 SRHE annual conference, Professor Farid Alatas delivered a thought-provoking keynote address in which he emphasised an urgent need for the decolonisation of knowledge within higher education. His lecture was titled ‘The captive mind and anti-colonial thought’ and drew from the themes of his numerous works including Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon (Alatas, 2017).

Alatas called for a broader, more inclusive framework for teaching sociological theory and the importance of doing so for contemporary higher education. For Alatas, this framework should move beyond a Eurocentric and androcentric focus of traditional curricula, and integrate framings and concepts from non-Western thinkers (including women) to establish a genuinely international perspective.

In particular, he discussed his detailed engagement with the neglected social theories of Ibn Khaldun, his efforts to develop a ‘neo-Khaldunian theory of sociology’. He also highlighted another exemplar of non-Western thought, the Filipino theorist José Rizal (see Alatas, 2009, 2017). Alatas discussed how such modes sort of non-Western social theory should be incorporated into social science textbooks and teaching curricula.

Professor Alatas further argued that continuing to rely on theories and concepts from a limited group of countries—primarily Western European and North American—imposes intellectual constraints that are both limiting and potentially harmful for higher education. Using historical examples, such as the divergent interpretations of the Crusades (viewed as religious wars from a European perspective but as colonial invasions from a Middle Eastern perspective), he illustrated how perspectives confined to the European experience often fail to account for the nuanced framing of such events in other regions. Such epistemic blind spots stress the need for higher education to embrace diverse ways of knowing that have long existed across global traditions.

Beyond critiquing Eurocentrism, Professor Alatas acknowledged the systemic challenges within institutions in the Global South, which also inhibit knowledge production. He urged for inward critical reflection within these contexts, addressing issues like resource constraints, institutional biases, racism, ethnocentrism, and the undervaluing of indigenous epistemologies through the internalisation of a ‘captive mindset’. Only by addressing these intertwined challenges, he concluded, can universities foster a more equitable and inclusive intellectual environment, and one that is more practically relevant and applicable to higher education in former colonised settings.

This keynote was a call to action for educators, researchers, and institutions to rethink and restructure the ways in which sociological and other academic canons are constructed and taught. But first, there is an important reflection that must be undertaken, and an acknowledgement, grounded in epistemic humility, that there is more to social theory than Eurocentrism.

There was not enough time to deeply engage with some of the concepts in his keynote; therefore, I hope to invite Professor Farid Alatas for an in-person conversation on these topics during his visit to the UK in 2025. Please look out for this event advertisement.

The recording of this keynote address is now available from https://youtu.be/4Cf6C9wP6Ac?list=PLZN6b5AbqH3BnyGcdvF5wLCmbQn37cFgr

Ibrar Bhatt is Senior Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences, Education & Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland). His research interests encompass applied linguistics, higher education, and digital humanities. He is also an Executive Editor for the journal ‘Teaching in Higher Education: Critical Perspective’s, and on the Editorial Board for the journal ‘Postdigital Science & Education’.

His recent books include ‘Critical Perspectives on Teaching in the Multilingual University’ (Routledge), ‘A Semiotics of Muslimness in China’ (with Cambridge University Press), and he is currently writing his next book ‘Heritage Literacy in the Lives of Chinese Muslim’, which will be published next year with Bloomsbury.

He was a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research into Higher Education between 2018-2024, convened its Digital University Network between 2015-2022, and is currently the founding convener of the Society’s Multilingual University Network.

References

Alatas SF (2009) ‘Religion and reform: Two exemplars for autonomous sociology in the non-Western context’ In: Sujata P (ed) The International Handbook of Diverse Sociological Traditions London: Sage pp 29–39

Alatas SF (2017) ‘Jose Rizal (1861–1896)’ in Alatas SF and Sinha V (eds) Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon London: Palgrave Macmillan pp 143–170


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Ethicality in academic knowledge production

by Dina Zoe Belluigi

‘Research cultures’, and their problematics, have received sufficient attention to have been delineated various definitions by authoritative groups within the university/ research ecology in the United Kingdom, and amongst scholars in our field of enquiry. Raising questions about ethicality within research cultures, in a recent paper I explored dys/consciousness and its effects on research production and the formation of academic researchers. The focus of the empirical component was on one part which falls within the United Kingdom – Northern Ireland (NI).

How to conceptualise thinking and seeing for the study of UK universities?

The paper begins with a mapping of conceptualisations of consciousness. It does so through their application, by those who have studied dynamics of racism in universities and educational institutions in the United Kingdom and the USA. The mapping includes scholars’ arguments about the persistence of not unconscious but dysconscious racism, the limits of critical consciousness, the necessity for anti-racism, and the constraints to realising decolonisation, when faced with janiform approaches to structural, institutional and scientific racism in academia.

Methodological approach

The conceptual mapping served as a sensitisation device through which to explore academic research cultures, about enquiry on social groups who were and are marginalised due to perceptions of their ‘otherness’ to dominantly-placed Northern Irish groups. Difference is indexed through constructions of ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’ and ‘migration’, underpinned by whiteness.

A Critical Discourse Analysis, undergirded by Critical Race Theory, was undertaken of 200 published research items that related to this area of enquiry, which were found to extend from 1994 to 2022, and were spread across disciplines. These were sourced from the repositories of the research-intensive universities in Northern Ireland. Qualitative reflections enriched the analysis. These included the participation of the related academic-authors, and report-and-respond insights from institutional research officers, and non-academic partners of such studies (n=37). Combining these sources was to probe more deeply the ways in which such outlier practices of knowledge production reinforced, evaded or resisted dominant frames and norms of conduct.

Signs of dysconsciousness

The paper’s analysis unpacks 5 signs of what was interpreted as dysconscious racism and xenophobia-ism in the context. The first sign was the under-study and under-funding of local research enquiry on/ about/ and by so-called ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘migrants’. Secondly, were the skewed dynamics within the politics of participation and of authorship, wherein those studied were rarely positioned as authorities of knowledge produced. Thirdly, the ethicality of authors’ interests and motivations in undertaking such research were found to be complicated and undermined by strategic, and often self-serving, goals imposed by the academic research ecology. Problematics in the data collected and held by public authorities, was the fourth sign. The article culminates in the fifth sign: that the threats of risk, social sanction and double-speak related to such research, were not only exogenous to universities, but endogenous too.

Insights for further explorations

In the current neoliberal milieu, the enablers of research – such as funding, social validation or career rewards – were of such a techno-rational nature that the depth of theorisation, complexity and intellectual debate necessary to challenge the existing dysconscious racism and xenophobia-ism remained under-supported. Moreover, the article confirms observations that – rather than enrich or catalyse criticality and plurality within the dominant formations of academic knowledge and of scholars – risk-avoidance of (perceived) controversial issues is compounded when institutions are situated within complicated local socio-political conditions. This places limits on, and indeed de-idealises, promotional social responsibility imaging of ‘anchor’ universities.

Participants’ counter-narratives provided insights about the production of enquiry despite, and in some cases because of, such dominant dynamics. Of interest is that many of the authors were women (in far higher proportions than the staff composition of those institutions); and many of the authors self-identified as migrant academics. In addition to external migrants to the British Isles, this included those from the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, providing a sense of how alienated ‘outsiders’ were often made to feel within that academic ‘community’. Avoiding hero narratives, the article points to the politics of authorial agency within academic practices when individuals negotiate insider-outsider, minority-majority dynamics of academic research cultures hostile to such enquiry.

The article concludes by raising questions about the mantle of ethical responsibility to justice, truth, and dissent within such constraining, homogenising conditions. While it is tempting to read this as an exceptional or peculiar case, references to related studies are included throughout the article to demonstrate that similar problematic dynamics within research cultures have been observed across university spaces in the Global North, and warrant further enquiry.

Professor Belluigi is a Council member of SRHE; Professor of Authorship, Representation and Transformation at Queen’s University Belfast; and a Visiting Professor at Nelson Mandela University.