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Racial inequalities persist in spite of decades of legislation aiming to promote equality and end discrimination. Suki Ali suggests that recentralizing racism and reengaging difference offer an important way to negotiate more just educational futures.

Image courtesy of interviewee. June 13, 2024

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This video is a transcript of a discussion about managing racism in higher education, highlighting the challenges and failures institutions face in advancing racial and ethnic equality. The speaker, Suki, reflects on the limited success of various initiatives despite multiple attempts to address these issues. She emphasizes that while some inequality gaps are narrowing, significant disparities persist in access, participation, and experiences of racism among minoritized groups in the educational environment.

The conversation touches on historical and structural barriers to higher education, such as elitism, low aspirations associated with specific racial groups, and the detrimental impact of deficit models that blame groups for their own lack of success. Moreover, Suki discusses the evolution of equality, diversity, and inclusivity (EDI) initiatives, noting how they often become co-opted by universities as branding tools, thus failing to bring about meaningful change. The commodification of education and the focus on job preparation over radical transformative learning are also critiqued.

Finally, Suki suggests that the future of education may require rethinking the structures of universities and exploring alternative forms of learning that prioritize community and creativity over traditional institutional frameworks. She calls for further research into how ideas for change are diluted within university systems and stresses the importance of understanding real-world experiences in driving effective reforms in higher education.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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There have been a number of initiatives over many years.

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There have been a series of sort of significant,

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initiatives, policy changes, setting up the office

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for students, new, new kind of acts

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around higher education and research.

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And yet we find ourselves with awarding gaps with,

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access

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and participation unequal between, racial

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and ethnic groups, depending on your language.

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Um, outcomes are, you know, predictably

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narrowing a little bit in terms of equality,

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but for the most part, even though, to be fair,

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the statistics are showing some narrowing

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of the inequalities between largely

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white British students.

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I'm talking more about home domicile students.

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So those gaps have been closing a little bit around

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awarding gaps, outcomes and access.

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They are still significant

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and, you know, recent, work by the, equality

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and Human Rights Council showed

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that it's not just about outcomes, it's the environment.

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The environment for minoritized groups

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is incredibly hostile, and that is the staff and students.

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And so the experience at university, can be

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extremely difficult, an impact on, on,

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the entire, trajectory of, you know,

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starting at the beginning of a degree or at school,

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and then coming out at the end of a degree,

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he was a late non-traditional student entering university.

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Um, and I can absolutely see things have progress,

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but there are areas that are incredibly stubborn

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and that, remain a real problem

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for minoritized students.

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And that also I think is impacted

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by other kinds of social difference.

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So my own perspective is, black feminist,

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post-colonial feminist research.

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And, you know, that to me is important gender

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and race, class race,

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and they're not an endless series of links in the chain.

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They're all impacting on each other.

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So it's a complicated picture, it's a complicated thing

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to do anything about.

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There's been a, a lot of research over time

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that has become kind of critical race

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and education studies or race ethnicity

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and education studies.

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And most of that work has been trying to

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develop, first of all to really show

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through research

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and data collection the inequalities around,

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race, which were pretty much hidden to,

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to really ask also about

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what does a category like black mean, how can we,

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break that down so that we really understand more about,

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for example, the difference between black Caribbean

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and black African, students.

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So the most important thing, I think has been bringing

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to bear the wider kind of histories of racism in the UK

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into the educational environment.

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So higher education institutions are institutions like many

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other, they're structured in, in similar ways.

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Of course, their remit is somewhat different.

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Um, but, you know, we understand racism in higher education

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as we would racism in wider aspects of British society.

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And that's what these previous race scholars, I think,

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have done, is to say, well, you know, we, we know

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how racism is structured in British society.

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We know where it came from,

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and we can understand higher education by drawing on some

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of this prior knowledge

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and looking explicitly at different aspects

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of the educational experience.

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So that's the kind of work

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that I've been looking at over time.

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Um, and largely, yeah, I would say it's people who are,

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people of color, people

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who are minoritized racially themselves,

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whose work I've found most influential prior education,

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social status, elitism,

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you know, the kind of myth of meritocracy,

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a number of things.

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And then they have been,

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particular discourses about particular groups.

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So around,

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minoritized racial groups, ethnic groups.

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It's been a number of things like low aspirations,

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low ability, I mean, you know, absolutely the kind of race

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and IQ debates from several decades ago.

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Um, you know, very crude and,

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and didn't stick around in the uk I don't think.

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But, certainly this idea of lower aspirations,

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less, ability, let's put it that way.

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And, those kind of deficit models as they were called.

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The problem is within the groups themselves,

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and that's their barrier in higher education.

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So there are structural things,

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but there are also these kind of discourses are myths around

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what education is, how you can access it,

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and how you can succeed.

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And some of that is overtly discriminative

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and others are more of this kind of covert

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things like the hidden curriculum as they call it.

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You need some of the knowledge to, to get in and to do well.

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A very visible form

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of equality work was actually gender equality.

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And there were very clear initiatives throughout the 1980s

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that, led to this kind of pushing of, of,

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women into various areas and so on.

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And it was probably a little later than that

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that race equality sort of became very important.

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And an important moment was the race relations amendment

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act of, of 2000.

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And at that point, people were inquired

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to review their provision

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and, you know, do some data collecting and so on.

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So I think that it's possible to sort

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of trace from there this attempt to do, to

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eradicate, discrimination

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and to talk about equality of opportunity, which was the,

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the gender term.

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And it became a, a kind of race term.

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We need equality of opportunity that became unpopular

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because it was more about outcome,

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and then it was more about not equality, but equivalent.

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We shouldn't treat everyone the same

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and say, everyone needs the same opportunity

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to get into higher education.

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We need to look at the

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particularities for particular groups.

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So there was a, a whole, I think, range of debates about

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where equality of opportunity was taking us

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and that it needs some kind of refinement.

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And that moved into this idea of positive,

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engagement with issues of diversity, inclusivity,

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that these are, this collectively, with

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equality, diversity and inclusivity,

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and more recently equity,

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which I think is a really interesting development

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because equity is about fairness

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and justice equality was about, let me show you, you know,

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our outcomes are the same for, all of our students.

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Whereas equity is about, it's more about the policy

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and the implementation.

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You know, we treat our students fairly, we ensure

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that they have fair and equal provision,

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but it's a slightly different language.

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And, you know, for some people this has been a flattening

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of, you know, actually the kind of more

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activist and anti-racist approaches that were

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more common earlier in the, the nineties

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and so on, eighties and nineties.

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And this move into this EDI,

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landscape and decolonization sort

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of follows similar patterns, I think

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because EDI had, you know, as an agenda

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for higher education, obviously was meant

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to make things better, you know,

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and then I, one of my, favorite

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concerns bug bears is about the ways in which institutions

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manage to take over co-opt commod,

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what have been seen to be, you know, important initiatives

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for good institutions kind of take over and swallow.

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Um, you know, what were apparently, beneficial

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models for change.

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And they become,

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incorporated into the institutional structures in ways that

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render them ineffective.

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This is part of the kind of audit culture,

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neoliberal university,

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and that language whereby, once

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an idea becomes a policy, it loses its power.

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Policies are always, audited

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and they have to be quantified and sized.

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Everything is counted.

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You have to have, ambitious but achievable targets.

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And of course, that bypasses the actual mechanisms by which,

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say racism itself,

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what has been called a scavenger ideology,

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as in it will, you know, it shifts and changes.

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So they, they kind of don't address

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that in any meaningful way.

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EDI then becomes, a branding exercise

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and, decolonial, approaches

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to education have gone the same way, sadly,

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from radical student led in initiatives, projects,

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protests, to really challenge the whole basis of education,

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not just the institutional structures,

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knowledge itself to say, what do we know

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and how is knowledge itself unequal maintaining inequality?

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A very radical idea turned into something

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that was indeed about, you know,

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let's have a look at our reading list.

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In fact, let's not us have a look at it.

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Let's pay somebody else to have a look at our reading list,

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IE you know, research students or something,

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and to make our reading list more diverse.

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Well, clearly that doesn't actually invest in the crux

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of the matter, which is about challenging the, the kind

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of knowledge that we prioritize

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and bringing that into our own work.

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You can pay someone to put some books on your reading list,

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not really read them, not really change what you're teaching

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or why you are teaching it or how you are teaching it.

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And it has no effect whatsoever.

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You've so-called diversified your reading list,

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but you haven't changed the ways in which the

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university operates, whose work is valued,

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the representation issue

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around who's teaching you and so on.

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So I think that's why they don't work, is they come in

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with some energy to change

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and they gradually get sort of co-opted into institutional,

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markers of,

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equality that are used to market the institution.

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I find it an absolutely fascinating area

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because I do think that the, the marketization

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of higher education has a lot to do with it.

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And, and the managerialism,

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the audit cultures accountability.

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Great idea. But what does that do?

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And it means that you, you know, I I actually think

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that Mark marketing departments, the comms departments,

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the strategy departments, you know, are

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grabbing onto these things

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and they turn them into, as I say, a branding tool.

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For example, you know, statements on the front of

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the landing page of every university will talk about

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how welcoming, open, equal, whatever the words are at

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that buzzwords at that time.

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What it's become. Increasingly, the university is a place

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where you learn things that can help you get jobs.

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You know, we are seeing courses that do actually,

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generate more creative ways of thinking being cut,

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and you know, it's somewhere where you can choose it,

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like you would choose anything else, you know,

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in a shop, an education shop.

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And that's what I think the ed, you know,

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the university has become,

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even if it is wrapped up in grandiose terms about, you know,

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educating for the future

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or whatever,

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what should it be?

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I'm not sure now that it's come this far, I,

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I'm sort of sliding towards the abolitionists saying,

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we can't, we can't save it in this current form.

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And that's the sort of tinkering argument.

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We are just in a place where trying to,

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make the institutions less hierarchical, more, more open,

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more, radical in their thinking

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is practically impossible,

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and that we should be, if we're gonna open up these

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questions about knowledge, who produces it,

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what do we understand as knowledge, what's valuable

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to us at the moment?

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The value is what kind

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of job you get afterwards a lot of the time.

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Also, part of my answer is saying,

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and why wouldn't it be, you know, if you are in a, a, a kind

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of capitalist job market, you know,

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highly competitive, of course people want to have that kind

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of an education, and I, you know, I'm not pushing them down

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for wanting that, but where does that leave us around sort

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of radical new ways of imagining education

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in its broader sense?

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Uh, that's where I think a lot of people are now saying,

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well, we have to just abolish the university as it is.

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We have to just start thinking of different ways to open up

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education for everyone in different forms. Mean,

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Can you, can you, have you

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had any thoughts on those forms?

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Can you give us any kind of ideas

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that aren't the university as we know it?

15:57.735 --> 16:00.675
Oh, I, you know, it would be great to consider all,

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all diff loads of different spaces for learning,

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you know, creative spaces.

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Obviously people like, Palo Frere

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and other, you know,

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educationists who've constantly tried to open up

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education for everyone.

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And that, that means education is a process of relation

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as much as anything else.

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So it might be dance education.

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There's a lot of work around education and drama, actually.

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Um, it's local communities.

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That's a, that's education.

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What local communities are doing now is education.

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Education encompasses everything that we know and do really.

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So, I think it would take many,

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many different forms at different scales, you know, local

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through to, we live in a connected world, so, you know,

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different forms now of connection across the globe.

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So I wouldn't say, well we've just moved

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to smaller local colleges.

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I don't think it's gonna look like that.

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I think we have to really rethink what it is

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that we want education to be what it's for.

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I think there's still a lot of research

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to be done about the ways, as I was saying, that,

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the business of universities empties out the,

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you know, the radical potentials of some

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of these initiatives.

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I think there should be much more work

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about how does this happen?

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You know, it's clearly not so conscious

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and intentional that someone evil is sitting in an office

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somewhere saying, ha ha, how can we, you know,

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sc a decolonization.

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That's an area of research.

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And within that smaller pockets of work on

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the ways in which certain buzzwords come to be,

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there should be absolutely more work around what people

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actually experience and people are actually doing.

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And what we can learn from that in order to make change

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across a whole range of issues in higher education.

"Persistent Inequalities in Higher Education: An Analysis of Racial and Ethnic Gaps"

00:00:00 - There have been a number of initiatives over many years. There have been a series of sort of significant, initiatives, policy changes, setting up the office for students, new, new kind of acts around higher education and research. And yet we find ourselves with awarding gaps with, access and participation unequal between, racial and ethnic groups, depending on your language. outcomes are, you know, predictably narrowing a little bit in terms of equality, but for the most part, even though, to be fair,
00:00:45 - of the inequalities between largely white British students. I'm talking more about home domicile students. So those gaps have been closing a little bit around awarding gaps, outcomes and access. They are still significant and, you know, recent, work by the, equality and Human Rights Council showed that it's not just about outcomes, it's the environment. The environment for minoritized groups
00:01:27 - And so the experience at university, can be extremely difficult, an impact on, on, the entire, trajectory of, you know, starting at the beginning of a degree or at school, and then coming out at the end of a degree, he was a late non-traditional student entering university. and I can absolutely see things have progress, but there are areas that are incredibly stubborn and that, remain a real problem
00:02:06 - And that also I think is impacted by other kinds of social difference. So my own perspective is, black feminist, post-colonial feminist research. And, you know, that to me is important gender and race, class race, and they're not an endless series of links in the chain. They're all impacting on each other. So it's a complicated picture, it's a complicated thing to do anything about. There's been a, a lot of research over time that has become kind of critical race and education studies or race ethnicity
00:02:49 - And most of that work has been trying to develop, first of all to really show through research and data collection the inequalities around, race, which were pretty much hidden to, to really ask also about what does a category like black mean, how can we, break that down so that we really understand more about, for example, the difference between black Caribbean and black African, students. So the most important thing, I think has been bringing
00:03:36 - into the educational environment. So higher education institutions are institutions like many other, they're structured in, in similar ways. Of course, their remit is somewhat different. but, you know, we understand racism in higher education as we would racism in wider aspects of British society. And that's what these previous race scholars, I think, have done, is to say, well, you know, we, we know how racism is structured in British society.

"Rethinking Equality in Higher Education: Exploring Discourses of Race, Opportunity, and Inclusivity"

00:04:13 - and we can understand higher education by drawing on some of this prior knowledge and looking explicitly at different aspects of the educational experience. So that's the kind of work that I've been looking at over time. and largely, yeah, I would say it's people who are, people of color, people who are minoritized racially themselves, whose work I've found most influential prior education, social status, elitism,
00:04:56 - a number of things. And then they have been, particular discourses about particular groups. So around, minoritized racial groups, ethnic groups. It's been a number of things like low aspirations, low ability, I mean, you know, absolutely the kind of race and IQ debates from several decades ago. you know, very crude and, and didn't stick around in the uk I don't think. But, certainly this idea of lower aspirations,
00:05:40 - And, those kind of deficit models as they were called. The problem is within the groups themselves, and that's their barrier in higher education. So there are structural things, but there are also these kind of discourses are myths around what education is, how you can access it, and how you can succeed. And some of that is overtly discriminative and others are more of this kind of covert things like the hidden curriculum as they call it. You need some of the knowledge to, to get in and to do well.
00:06:19 - of equality work was actually gender equality. And there were very clear initiatives throughout the 1980s that, led to this kind of pushing of, of, women into various areas and so on. And it was probably a little later than that that race equality sort of became very important. And an important moment was the race relations amendment act of, of 2000. And at that point, people were inquired to review their provision and, you know, do some data collecting and so on.
00:07:03 - of trace from there this attempt to do, to eradicate, discrimination and to talk about equality of opportunity, which was the, the gender term. And it became a, a kind of race term. We need equality of opportunity that became unpopular because it was more about outcome, and then it was more about not equality, but equivalent. We shouldn't treat everyone the same and say, everyone needs the same opportunity to get into higher education. We need to look at the
00:07:42 - So there was a, a whole, I think, range of debates about where equality of opportunity was taking us and that it needs some kind of refinement. And that moved into this idea of positive, engagement with issues of diversity, inclusivity, that these are, this collectively, with equality, diversity and inclusivity, and more recently equity, which I think is a really interesting development because equity is about fairness and justice equality was about, let me show you, you know, our outcomes are the same for, all of our students.

"From Activism to Assimilation: The Co-optation of EDI and Decolonization in Higher Education"

00:08:26 - and the implementation. You know, we treat our students fairly, we ensure that they have fair and equal provision, but it's a slightly different language. And, you know, for some people this has been a flattening of, you know, actually the kind of more activist and anti-racist approaches that were more common earlier in the, the nineties and so on, eighties and nineties. And this move into this EDI, landscape and decolonization sort of follows similar patterns, I think
00:09:11 - for higher education, obviously was meant to make things better, you know, and then I, one of my, favorite concerns bug bears is about the ways in which institutions manage to take over co-opt commod, what have been seen to be, you know, important initiatives for good institutions kind of take over and swallow. you know, what were apparently, beneficial models for change. And they become,
00:09:55 - render them ineffective. This is part of the kind of audit culture, neoliberal university, and that language whereby, once an idea becomes a policy, it loses its power. Policies are always, audited and they have to be quantified and sized. Everything is counted. You have to have, ambitious but achievable targets. And of course, that bypasses the actual mechanisms by which, say racism itself,
00:10:35 - as in it will, you know, it shifts and changes. So they, they kind of don't address that in any meaningful way. EDI then becomes, a branding exercise and, decolonial, approaches to education have gone the same way, sadly, from radical student led in initiatives, projects, protests, to really challenge the whole basis of education, not just the institutional structures, knowledge itself to say, what do we know
00:11:19 - A very radical idea turned into something that was indeed about, you know, let's have a look at our reading list. In fact, let's not us have a look at it. Let's pay somebody else to have a look at our reading list, IE you know, research students or something, and to make our reading list more diverse. Well, clearly that doesn't actually invest in the crux of the matter, which is about challenging the, the kind of knowledge that we prioritize and bringing that into our own work.
00:11:56 - not really read them, not really change what you're teaching or why you are teaching it or how you are teaching it. And it has no effect whatsoever. You've so-called diversified your reading list, but you haven't changed the ways in which the university operates, whose work is valued, the representation issue around who's teaching you and so on. So I think that's why they don't work, is they come in with some energy to change and they gradually get sort of co-opted into institutional,

"Rethinking the Purpose and Structure of Higher Education in an Era of Marketization"

00:12:39 - equality that are used to market the institution. I find it an absolutely fascinating area because I do think that the, the marketization of higher education has a lot to do with it. And, and the managerialism, the audit cultures accountability. Great idea. But what does that do? And it means that you, you know, I I actually think that Mark marketing departments, the comms departments, the strategy departments, you know, are grabbing onto these things
00:13:20 - For example, you know, statements on the front of the landing page of every university will talk about how welcoming, open, equal, whatever the words are at that buzzwords at that time. What it's become. Increasingly, the university is a place where you learn things that can help you get jobs. You know, we are seeing courses that do actually, generate more creative ways of thinking being cut, and you know, it's somewhere where you can choose it, like you would choose anything else, you know,
00:14:00 - And that's what I think the ed, you know, the university has become, even if it is wrapped up in grandiose terms about, you know, educating for the future or whatever, what should it be? I'm not sure now that it's come this far, I, I'm sort of sliding towards the abolitionists saying, we can't, we can't save it in this current form. And that's the sort of tinkering argument. We are just in a place where trying to,
00:14:44 - more, radical in their thinking is practically impossible, and that we should be, if we're gonna open up these questions about knowledge, who produces it, what do we understand as knowledge, what's valuable to us at the moment? The value is what kind of job you get afterwards a lot of the time. Also, part of my answer is saying, and why wouldn't it be, you know, if you are in a, a, a kind of capitalist job market, you know, highly competitive, of course people want to have that kind
00:15:24 - for wanting that, but where does that leave us around sort of radical new ways of imagining education in its broader sense? that's where I think a lot of people are now saying, well, we have to just abolish the university as it is. We have to just start thinking of different ways to open up education for everyone in different forms. Mean, Can you, can you, have you had any thoughts on those forms? Can you give us any kind of ideas that aren't the university as we know it? I, you know, it would be great to consider all, all diff loads of different spaces for learning,
00:16:06 - Obviously people like, Palo Frere and other, you know, educationists who've constantly tried to open up education for everyone. And that, that means education is a process of relation as much as anything else. So it might be dance education. There's a lot of work around education and drama, actually. it's local communities. That's a, that's education. What local communities are doing now is education. Education encompasses everything that we know and do really.

"Rethinking Education: Exploring Diverse Forms and the Need for Radical Change"

00:16:50 - many different forms at different scales, you know, local through to, we live in a connected world, so, you know, different forms now of connection across the globe. So I wouldn't say, well we've just moved to smaller local colleges. I don't think it's gonna look like that. I think we have to really rethink what it is that we want education to be what it's for. I think there's still a lot of research to be done about the ways, as I was saying, that,
00:17:33 - you know, the radical potentials of some of these initiatives. I think there should be much more work about how does this happen? You know, it's clearly not so conscious and intentional that someone evil is sitting in an office somewhere saying, ha ha, how can we, you know, sc a decolonization. That's an area of research. And within that smaller pockets of work on the ways in which certain buzzwords come to be, there should be absolutely more work around what people actually experience and people are actually doing.
00:18:15 - across a whole range of issues in higher education.

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