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Both our research projects are preoccupied with conceptualising EDI as processual, and implicit in the everyday encounters with university structures and systems
Image credit: 'Teeth Gritting in Progress', Darren Cullen www.spellingmistakescostlives.com
Moving the modes of encounter: Embodying (in)equalities in the university
Dr Alexandra Baybutt
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.
Transforming brick walls: Exploring barriers to belonging and progression experienced by trans students in Higher Education
Dr Lo Marshall
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.