Watch the YouTube conference playlist here.

UKC Students of colour will be launching their #DecoloniseUKC Manifestousing data collected through focus group cafes with students discussing their experiences of belonging and in/ex-clusion in the classroom and on campus. Specific themes covered included ableism and racialisation, international students’ experiences, minoritised religion and PREVENT as well as decolonising the curriulum more generally.

The DecoloniseUKC students will giving their recommendations and be in conversation with a number of leading academic/activists in the field. It’s going to be informative, transformational and creative!

Limited tickets – students and staff welcome. STAFF – get involved in building an anti-racist classroom!

KLS Decolonising the Curriculum Conference Programme (Subject to change)

11 – 12.30 Roundtable for PGR students: The ethics of research and writing about marginalized community/people with Karen Salt, Miri Song, Alex Hensby and UKC PhD students

Main Conference Session – open to all:

1 – 2.30 Students as Change Actors

– Welcome remarks – Chloé Gallien (Keynes College Master)

– #DecoloniseUKC Manifesto (Lisa, Jasmyn, Anthony and Wahida) /Decolonising Keynes (Anamika Misra)

– DVC for Education – April McMahon

– Keynote speaker: Karen Salt (Chair: Toni WIlliams – Head of Kent Law School)

– Questions

2.30 – 3 Cookies/Fruit Break & Spoken Word – Aaron Thompson (Kent Union President)

3 – 3.30pm Building the Anti-Racist Classroom Collective (BARC) TASTER (staff particularly welcome)

3.35- 4.45pm (Em)Powered through Education Roundtable:

Deborah Gabriel, Jason Arday, Francesca Sobande, Kim McKintosh, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, #DecoloniseUKC (Joy, Ufnaan, Elsie, Jazmin, Kieran, Evangeline) & Kent Union Officers

4.45-6.30: Reception & Final Slam (Chair: Dave Thomas – Sports School Student Success Project Manager)

– Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan (spoken word)

– Azeezat Johnson & Remi Joseph-Salisbury (The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence)

6.30-8pm Cultural Food Festival organized by Kent Union (Rutherford Dining Hall)

More details on: www.DecoloniseUKC.org

Speaker bios:

Dr Deborah Gabriel is a Senior Academic based in the Faculty of Media and Communication. Her work is largely focused on embedding social justice and equality into teaching, research and professional practice. Her background is in journalism and strategic communication, especially in terms of critiquing inequalities within the media, social activism and counter hegemonic practice. She specialises in social justice pedagogy and critical race pedagogy, teaching from a critical race/gender standpoint. She developed the 3D Pedagogy Framework to decolonise, democratise and diversify the higher education curriculum and is expert in qualitative-interpretative research using critical, transformative and emancipatory paradigms, heavily informed by Black feminism and critical race theory. She is the Founder and Director of Black British Academics, an influential network of intellectuals and scholar-activists focused on tackling racial inequality in higher education. She also leads on strategic, whole institution approaches to advance race equality at the University as Co-Chair of the Race Equality Steering Group and co-editor with Shirley-Ann Tate of groundbreaking book: Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia. 2017. London: Trentham Books. See also: http://deborahgabriel.com/

Dr Karen Salt is an interdisciplinary scholar with strong interests in transnational American Studies and Afrodiasporic studies. A significant portion of her work investigates how black nation-states have fought for their continued existence within a highly racialised world. As this work has developed, Dr Salt has considered the relationship of sovereignty and race to environmental consumption and protection, enabling her to craft new research on racial ecologies. In addition to this work, she currently leads or co-leads projects on reparative trust, collective activism, racial equity and transformative justice politics.

Building the Anti-Racist Classroom Collective (BARC) is an international collective of women of colour scholar activists. We aim to build anti-racist pedagogic communities of students and university workers through sustained collective organizing, collaboration and radical thinking. We raise funds to put on workshops, events and interventions that facilitate mutual learning between established and new faculty while working closely with students of colour. Our practice is led by our commitments to critical theory, intersectional feminisms and decolonizing frameworks. See: https://barcworkshop.org/

Dr Jason Arday is a Senior Lecturer in Education at Roehampton University, School of Education, a Visiting Research Fellow at The Ohio State University in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion and a Trustee of the Runnymede Trust. Jason’s research focuses on Race, Education and Social Justice. He is the Co-Editor of two policy publications with Professor Claire Alexander (University of Manchester) and Dr Debbie Weekes-Bernard (Joseph Rowntree Foundation) which have been disseminated within UK Parliament from the Runnymede Perspectives collection funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC); Aiming Higher: Race, Inequality and Diversity in the Academy (February, 2015) and The Runnymede School Report Race: Education and Inequality in Contemporary Britain (September, 2015). He has also completed a report for University and College Union (UCU) entitled Exploring Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) Doctoral Students’ perceptions of a career in Academia: Experiences, Perceptions and Career Progression published in June 2017. Jason is author of the forthcoming titles: Considering Racialised Contexts in Education: Using Reflective Practice and Peer-Mentoring to support Black and Ethnic Minority educators (Routledge); Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the dominant discourse (Palgrave); Exploring Cool Britannia and Multi-Ethnic Britain: Uncorking the Champagne Supernova (Routledge). He has recently completed an edited collection with Professor Heidi Mirza (Goldsmiths, University of London) entitled Dismantling Race in Higher Education: Racism, Whiteness and Decolonising the Academy (Palgrave). Jason is the Lead-editor of an upcoming book series on Race and Education (Palgrave) with Professor Michael Peters (University of Waitako), Professor Paul Warmington (University of Birmingham), Professor Vikki Boliver (Durham University), Professor Zeus Leonardo (University of California) and Professor James Moore III (The Ohio State University).

Dr Francesca Sobande is a Digital Media Studies Lecturer (Cardiff University). Her research focuses on issues concerning race, gender, media and the marketplace. Francesca is the co-editor with Akwugo Emejulu of To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe (Pluto Press, forthcoming 2019). She is also the author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2020). Francesca has written about the role of Black feminism in decolonising university curricula and her work involves drawing on creative, collaborative and auto-ethnographic methodologies, as a means of pushing against normative notions of knowledge-production and scholarship. She is involved in a number of academic, artist and activist led networks, including the Race in the Marketplace (RIM) Forum — a transdisciplinary and international research network which seeks to collaboratively advance our understanding of the role of race (and its intersecting socio-political constructs – e.g. class, gender, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality) in the marketplace. More recently, Francesca has been exploring how the language of decoloniality is being absorbed by the neoliberal market logics of higher education.

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is a writer, spoken-word poet, and educator invested in unlearning the modalities of knowledge she has internalised, disrupting power relations, and asking questions around narratives to do with race, gender, Islamophobia, state violence and decoloniality. With a background in History at Cambridge, and MA in Postcolonial Studies from SOAS, alongside a wider education from the epistemology of Islam and work of women of colour and anti-systemic thinkers from across the world, her work has been featured in the likes of The Independent, The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, BBC Radio 4, and she has performed her poetry at TEDx conferences, music festivals, mosques and British Universities, as well as international slams and venues. Suhaiymah has worked with lots of SU’s and iSocs throughout Islamophobia Awareness Month but also more generally giving poetry performances and talks/workshops on “Beyond the Good Muslim/Bad Muslim Binary” as well as Islamophobia 101. You can find more info on her work and poetry at: https://thebrownhijabi.com/about/

Aaron Thompson is the President of the University of Kent Students’ Union 2018/19 and is in his second year in office after serving as the Vice President (Activities) last year. He is an elected member of the NUS Black Students Campaign Committee 2018/19 and has ambitions to go into social activism/social change fields of work due to his passion for equality. He studied Accounting and Finance with a Year in Industry while at the University of Kent and graduated in 2017 with First Class Honours. During his time as a student he was an active member of the Kent Dance Society, being part of the committee in his second year and President in 2016/17. He occasionally judges regional dance competitions and has experience of being an entrepreneur through running his own dance company in the past.

Kimberly McIntosh is the Policy Officer at the Runnymede trust and Race on the Agenda (ROTA). Previously Kimberly worked for the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) as their Trainee Policy and Public Services Officer. Here, she worked on their Freedom of Information response and managed the ‘Day in the Life’ scheme with the Civil Service. Kimberly holds a Master’s degree in International Migration and Public Policy from the London School of Economics and a First Class Honours Degree in History from the University of Manchester. For her Master’s thesis, Kimberly explored the relationship between integration and identity of the Jamaican diaspora in the UK and Jamaica’s development policy.

Dr Remi Joseph- Salisbury was Senior Lecturer at Leeds Beckett University before moving to the University of Manchester in 2018 to take up the position of Presidential Fellow in Ethnicity and Inequalities. Remi’s first book ‘Black Mixed-Race Men’ was published by Emerald in 2018. His co-edited collection ‘The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence’ is out now! Remi has published in national and international journals on topics covering his broad interests including race, racism, anti-racism, the ‘post-racial’, mixedness, masculinities, and education. As well as his academic outputs, Remi writes regularly for media outputs and is the ‘Race and Resistance’ columnist at Red Pepper Magazine. Remi serves on the editorial boards of The Sociological Review and Race Ethnicity and Education, and speaks regularly at national and international conferences, as well as public and community events. Committed to bridging the gap between scholarship and activism, Remi is a trustee and organiser with the Racial Justice Network, and a steering group member of the Northern Police Monitoring Project.

Dr Azeezat Johnson is a social geographer, interested in developing conversations about Black (and) Muslim geographies which pushes against the racialisation of our bodies as Other to a neutralised White Self. Her PhD research (completed at University of Sheffield in 2017) grew from this vein of thinking: it used the clothing practices of Black Muslim women in Britain to explore how the performance of one’s identity changes as we move through and interact with different objects, bodies, gazes and spaces. This pushed against a static reading of Black Muslim women (that are too often constructed as either Black or Muslim). It also moved beyond the hypervisibility of the headscarf within academic and popular debates by pointing to the multitude of different presentations that are used. She is currently working on a book manuscript developing this work, and is co-editer of the collection ‘The Fire Now: Anti-Racist Scholarship in Times of Explicit Racial Violence’ out now! She is also preparing for future research on the British grammar of race and the RAFA2 BME attainment project.

Supported by:

– University of Kent Teaching Enhancement Small Support Awards

– Kent Law School @50 & Keynes College @50

– KLS Centre for Sexuality, Race & Gender Justice (SeRGJ).

– University of Kent Student Success Project

– UNISON & UCU UoK Branch

– University of Kent Race Equality Champion