The Professional Context
The production of knowledge is highly political. In my own experience as a lecturer and student, universities are widely seen as the place where ‘knowledge’ is produced by certain people, and by extension where certain types of knowledge and research that meet certain standards are legitimised. As a black female lecturer and student, I have found myself minoritised in the space of the academy, from the moment I entered as an undergraduate, through my Masters and now, as the only black woman with a permanent lecturing contract in the Performance department. This minoritisation is not a rare experience, rather is the norm across universities in the UK. The professional context in which we learn, generate and legitimise knowledge is overwhelmingly white and middle-class.
This reality and the consequences of this for learning and research, or knowledge production have been studied by several black academics, most prominently by bell hooks in her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1993). hooks describes how white women and men academics formed alliances ‘to formulate and impose standards of critical evaluation that would be used to define what is theoretical and what is not. These standards often led to appropriation and/ or devaluation of work that did not “fit,” that was suddenly deemed not theoretical – or not theoretical enough’ (hooks, 1993). There was a ‘turning away of white feminist scholars from fully respecting and valuing the critical insights and theoretical insights of black women or women of color’: a cementing of ‘intellectual elitism’ (hooks, 1993). As I explored during the IP unit (and elaborated on and published here), hooks’ analysis of the professional context of academia, written over 30 years ago, still resonates with my own experience of the university as a socially and intellectually hegemonic environment. This intellectually elitist environment makes it difficult for black teachers, students, and so also the knowledge and methodologies that come from these communities, to attend and stay in university, let alone to thrive (Uddoh, 2023). Specifically the consequences of for research are: black and indigenous forms of research such as oral and lived experience are marginalised, the classroom can be a traumatic rather than a healing environment, and a false distinction between theory and practice is upheld (hooks, 1993). This undermines the real potential of education as a space for healing and the practice of freedom (hooks, 1993).
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, a certain kind of ‘intellectual elitism’ – racism- has been implicitly acknowledged by many universities as a problem they have and that they wish to fix. For example, in UAL’s antiracism strategy, states that a key aim is ‘a sustained agenda which brings decolonisation into the heart of all curricula’ (UAL, 2021). Implicitly, by describing decolonisation as part of ‘a sustained agenda’ that they are working towards, there is an acknowledgement that colonial attitudes towards knowledge were still live in UAL in 2021, and in my experience continue in 2023 (Uddoh, 2023). UAL still has a 11% attainment gap between white and Black students (UAL, 2022). These long-held imperial, elitist and racist attitudes towards knowledge exist simultaneously with a push led by minoritised academics and students, especially those of colour, towards a more inclusive, anti-racist and decolonial academic practice.
Rationale
So that’s the professional context under which I undertook this Action Research Project. For this project, I wished to look how students understand and define ‘research’. That is: I wanted to understand which types of sources students considered as legitimate sources of knowledge, which places they excluded and which places they included. With my interventions, I then wanted to test how I might expand these definitions of research to make it less hegemonic and more varied, with a skew towards sources which might intersect more with students’ everyday life beyond academia and the turnstile of the university.
In my experience, PDP students rarely cite this type of research in ‘word and image documents’ (our version of a dissertation on Performance: Design and Practice). By default, students mainly cite books, articles and artworks that they can find online. With my ‘research trips’ I wanted to practically show students how to use different sites for research, such as an archive, an art gallery and an area of nature.
With my own research and interventions as a part of this, I hoped to begin to challenge the separation of theory and practice, instead to encourage a symbiotic relationship between students’ university life and their life outside the university. In this political climate, learning from black feminists, I’m keen that students explore research as a tool they can use to understand and make a difference in the world.
My research questions are:
‘What do Stage 1 Performance: Design and Practice students classify as ‘research’ at the beginning of their undergraduate degree?‘
Limitations
I conducted this research with Stage 1 Performance Design and Practice students during Unit 2, which takes place in the first term. I have taught in PDP for four years and I, along with my colleague Kane Husbands, am unit coordinator for this unit, which is the only unit this group of students are taking for the period of the research. This has a few implications for the research that I could see from the beginning: the data I collect will tell me specifically about PDP students’ attitudes to research, very early in their university career, so answers would probably be shaped not only by the UAL environment, but also various and differing secondary school/ college curricula for the majority of students, who are recent school leavers. That said, as I was the unit coordinator, I was in a position of authority and one of the teachers they saw most frequently during this period, so was in a position to have quite a big impact with my intervention.
Finally a further limitation/ factor is y own positionality. Though I’m in a position of authority as a teacher, the class is majority white with a one black and more asian students. I’m aware, from experience that, I’m the first black woman teacher the students have been taught by, and I’m also young. This could be a limiting factor to how ably I’m able to legitimise non-traditional forms of research and knowledge production. At the same time, another limiting factor to how successfully I can challenge imperial ideas of knowledge is that I’ve been educated in the UK education system, and remained in the education system for most of my life. There will be assumptions and prejudices within my own idea of research that will still need to be challenged and may be better done so by students in the class who have learned in other, more radical contexts.