Sannah Gulamani’s career at UCL has spanned teaching, research and professional services, connected by a belief that language is central to access, equity, identity and belonging.
Born to a British Pakistani family in North-West London and diagnosed as deaf at the age of five, Sannah’s mother was told by doctors that she was ‘unlucky’. However, she disagreed, fighting for Sannah and her sister, who is also deaf, to have access to British Sign Language (BSL), later becoming a qualified BSL interpreter.
Aged 13, Sannah marched to campaign for BSL to be recognised as a language and hand delivered a petition to 10 Downing Street.
Being deaf taught me about identity, and how it’s complicated. Deafness and ethnicity feel like a weighing scale. My identities are layered, shifting depending on context.
Sannah went on to complete a degree in Music and was often asked by classmates, and even the deaf community, to explain how she could study the subject. These experiences, together with her campaigning work, cemented her passion for linguistics, access and inclusive education.
After her degree, she worked with charity Deafax to develop sexual health education resources for deaf young people and professionals. This work was nominated for the UK Sexual Health Awards’ Sexual Health Media Campaign / Storyline of the Year.
Sannah had never thought about pursuing an academic career until she joined UCL’s Deafness Cognition Language Research Centre. Here, she worked on projects like BSL Corpus, a national video-based record of sign language use, while studying for an MA in Applied Linguistics and Communication at Birkbeck.
She has worked across disciplines and departments since, bringing together research, education strategy, and student experience.
We have so many different people here at UCL, with different histories, identities and routes into education. That is one of our greatest strengths and privileges: the chance to learn from one another and be changed by it.
Currently, she’s on secondment as a Lecturer (Teaching) in Inclusive Education at UCL Arena, where she supports the development of inclusive education practice across UCL, with a focus on disabled and neurodivergent students.
Previously, as part of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, she helped to enhance the student experience through impactful events and initiatives, and led on the UCL REP Toolkit: a university-wide, co-created resource to support inclusive, confident and sustainable Academic Rep practice.
I know from lived experience that inclusion determines whether people can participate, be understood and feel that they belong.
Sannah hopes “UCL continues to be ambitious about what inclusion means in practice, taking pride in what we’ve achieved but being honest about still what needs to change.”
