We need to be equitable about the redistribution of power with Chrisann Jarrett

Chrisann Jarrett came to social change activism earlier than many.

“In 2013, at the age of 18, I secured a place at the LSE to study law,” she recalls. “I was informed that despite living in the UK since age eight, I was classified as an international student. After being denied a student loan, I was hit with tuition fees of £17,000 a year, with no alternative financing.”

This was not the result of some bureaucratic error. It was the direct consequence of intentional policymaking.

“I later found out that I was one of the 2,000 young people each year from migrant backgrounds who had to watch their peers progress to higher education, and be left behind due to the fact that we were not British citizens, nor did we have settled status,” Jarrett explains.

Devastated, no one could have blamed Chrisann Jarrett for giving up on her dream to go to university. But instead, she built a campaign for change. She talked to teachers, to the press, to lawyers willing to help out, and found many others in the same situation. She organised with them and convinced them to campaign together. Eventually, their cause reached the UK Supreme Court. And they won. A career focused on how young people can play a leading role in changing the policies that shape their lives began.

Now, as CEO of the migrant youth-led organisation We Belong, Jarrett reflects on what different groups can bring to the cause of social justice and social change. She appreciates that the expertise of university research matters. After all, she has seen first-hand how it can shape opinion in the courts and in Parliament. But she also has concerns about how research is still too often conducted.

“The exclusivity of the research process can lead to tokenism,” she says. “From my perspective, research should require the direct experience of those impacted by the issues. This helps with credibility and overall fact finding — both essential components if we are to speak ‘truth of power’.” But that research process can also easily go wrong. Research, Jarrett tells us, “can be very extractive, if the communities being asked for their experience are not engaged in the development and different phases of the research itself.”

The preferred alternative is clear, Jarrett believes. “Research should be collectively owned. The problem with researchers is that they often make researching social justice issues an academic exercise. It needs to be more than that; it needs to be equitable and about the redistribution of power.”

Creating that alternative in practice requires real commitment from all concerned. “A better relationship accommodates open and honest conversations between universities, researchers and organisations doing the direct work,” Jarrett says. “Research is sometimes a very opaque process where groups can feel like their oppression is simply being ‘studied’ and there is understandably a lot of scepticism about the impact of the research findings.”

“What is needed is for researchers to be open minded about the process and not make assumptions,” she continues. “The whole brief needs to be co-produced.” And when it is, attitudes begin to shift too. “Often when working on policy change, we are asked ‘what is the scale of the issue?’ It becomes very inhumane and about statistics,” she explains. But it can instead be built on the mutual respect required to “develop and aid the narrative for social change.”

This transformation of research practices and research culture might take time, of course. But Jarrett is hopeful nonetheless about what can be achieved. And that is because of all she has seen and experienced in the last decade. “Put simply,” she concludes, “I am hopeful for the future because I have seen the goodness of humans and the willingness of many to demand change.