In this third blog task you will consider various approaches to addressing racism:
Addressing racism within Higher Education learning spaces through an anti-racist lens exposes the fraught tension between the institutional rhetoric of equity and the reality of exclusion. To explore inclusivity within art institutions is to admit exclusivity: Drabble and Gridneff’s (2025) spatial analysis frames art schools not as neutral, but as physical environments with race, class, and gender affiliations fundamentally interwoven with colonial extraction legacies and dominant Eurocentric, social, and political norms. Drawing upon a Lacanian framework, Drabble and Gridneff argue that art institutions function as a direct extension of the self and identities of students, intersecting interior emotions, the unconscious, or creative drive with physical space. This spatial organisation creates a profound systemic paradox: while no other discipline promotes raw self-expression and identity exploration to the same extent as the creative arts, the underlying built environment, educational policy design, and institutional infrastructures simultaneously operate as exclusionary spaces that inhibit true equity, rendering initiatives such as widening participation, freedom of speech, and decolonising the curriculum tokenistic.
At the heart of this paradox sits educational policy. Drawing on Stephen Ball’s policy sociology and Foucault’s notion of discourse, Bradbury (2020) frames policy-making not as an outcome, but as an ongoing, unstable, and interactional process. This discourse establishes its “own specific rationalities,” making the Eurocentric operation of power and its subsequent undercurrents of unrecognised racial inequality appear as “common sense” and “true” from early childhood. In practice, this process further disadvantages bilingual or EAL learners and lower-income students by pathologising them as problematic, forcing them to navigate unchanged, systemic barriers that estrange minoritised children from the fantasy of an idealised white norm. School cultures inbuilt within institutional whiteness driven by ‘colourblind’ ideologies, frequently cause children to view their underprivileged backgrounds and languages as ‘inferior, undesirable or illicit’ (Welply, 2017). This systemic omission of authentic self-expression sets in motion lifelong educational and career trajectories of spatial precarity, directly undermining what Garrett (2024) delineates as the ‘imagined futures’ of racialised minority PhDs as they transition through higher education.
To disrupt this normalisation requires tools that transcend performative diversity checklists. Intersectionality and Critical Race Theory (CRT) frame white organisational spaces not as an objective truth, but as a social construct maintained through daily, mundane interactions. Garrett (2024) draws on Frantz Fanon to remind us that race itself operates as an imagination of colonial minds designed to preserve Western authority as a collective psychosis.
Addressing these tensions, Orr (2022) argues that the ‘Freedom of Speech Act’ stands in contrast to anti-racist, structural critiques, which he describes as ideological indoctrination. However, within my own teaching context as a DPS placement tutor, my PgCert tutor’s formal feedback evaluating my recorded progress tutorials within the TTP Unit 1 Record of Observation (ROT) directly exposes the flaw in this abstract defence of expression. The true barrier to a student’s voice is the systemic conditioning of the hidden curriculum that forces marginalised, working-class learners into a precarious psychological state of “saving face.” To demonstrate they are coping with full-time unpaid placements alongside part-time employment, students mask their exhaustion during tutorials and internally suppress their discomfort. Authentic freedom of speech is therefore often impeded by structural silence. True equity cannot be realised through mere optical representation; it requires cultivating critical thinking within supportive dialectic spaces that empower students to challenge institutional barriers and advocate for themselves both in the university and in real-life professional settings.
Facilitating inclusionary spaces demands what Asif Sadiq (2023) defines as continuous, experiential unlearning, where educators and students act as co-learners becoming “comfortable with being uncomfortable.” The potency of this experiential unsettling is exemplified by The School That Tried to End Racism (Channel 4, 2020), where children experienced an active awakening only when they physically encountered inequality and the reality of white privilege during a sprint race. Translating this into true anti-racist, equitable educational spaces entails this mutual, creative unsettling that allows students to navigate industry thresholds as ‘spatial transitions’.
By centering student counter-narratives and lived experience to expose the non-neutral structures of higher education and industry norms, creative education can foster a democratic learning environment where intersecting identities are safely integrated, valued, and made visible. Challenging the unrealistic rhetoric of sudden systemic transformation, Garrett (2024) argues that significant moments in career trajectories and the potency of ‘imagined futures’ stem from mundane, everyday interactions in institutional spaces. By actively playing out the power dynamics within these micro-spaces, staff and students can genuinely envisage new realities and creative practices suitable for now.
Reference List:
Bradbury, A. 2020. A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: The case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England. Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(2), pp.241-260.
Drabble, N. and Gridneff, R. (2025) Architectures of art and design education: an exploration of UK and international design schools. London: Routledge.
Garrett, R. (2024). Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, pp.1–15.
Orr, J. (2022) Revealed: The charity turning UK universities woke. The Telegraph [Online]. Youtube. 5 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRM6vOPTjuU
Sadiq, A. (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right. TEDx. Youtube. 2 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw
Channel 4. (2020) The School That Tried to End Racism. Youtube. 30 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I3wJ7pJUjg
This post is full of interesting concepts and clearly well researched. One comment stands out: ‘initiatives such as widening participation, freedom of speech, and decolonising the curriculum tokenistic.’ I would be interested to know if students who have been part of widening participation or staff who have been involved with the decolonising the curriculum have the same opinion.
I think it is unfortunate that the UK HE sector is not funded by the government in the same way as some other countries, meaning that we do rely on students paying tuition fees which ultimately creates barriers for students from lower income backgrounds. It’s sad to hear the struggles they are then experiencing on placement as well.
I’m very interested to watch the C4 program mentioned in this post, this seems to link perfectly with the topic of racism and education.
Thank you, Kayleigh! To clarify my reflection on tokenism, I believe these initiatives become tokenistic when they lack meaningful institutional backing and are not holistically integrated into the student experience.
Widening participation shouldn’t just mean over-recruitment if the actual burden of delivering equitable teaching falls solely onto academic staff without systemic support. In the same way, decolonising the curriculum needs to be more than just adding diverse names to reading lists; it calls for a radical opening up of institutional structures so artistic knowledge can be co-constructed by people from all backgrounds. (On this you may find relevant: Broadhead, S. Disaggregating the Black Student Experience, Access and Widening Participation in Arts Higher Education: Practice and Research, Springer International Publishing, pp 51–68).
True institutional backing means real resources, funding and policies designed by people with lived experience who bring knowledge, insight and motivation to make changes – it shouldn’t just be up to students and staff to sustain equitable higher education environments. I hope you find the Channel 4 programme insightful!