Intervention and Reflective Report: Design an intervention to enact intersectional social justice in your context.
Introduction, Context, and Proposed Intervention
Following on from the Microteaching Task: Object-based Learning along with relevant resources in the TPP and IP Units, this intervention proposal synthesises my reflections on intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1990) from Blog task 1: Disability, Blog task 2:Faith, religion, and belief and Blog task 3: Race. Drawing from Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (a spatial autobiography), I probe Perec’s yearning for “An idealised scene. Space as reassurance.” For the student transitioning from the university culture into the industry landscape, however, the corporate creative sector can be a space of alienation rather than reassurance.
In my role as a Diploma in Professional Studies (DPS) Placement tutor supporting BA Jewellery and Textile Design placement students at Central Saint Martins (CSM), I often encounter how physical objects and digital spaces mirror student and staff intersecting identities. For example, my own tutorial gym ball (disability), the student prayer mat (faith, religion, and belief), and the role-switching function on UAL Moodle (Race) may serve as live case studies of how ordinary objects and virtual learning spaces operate as nuanced material metaphors of identity, care, and embodied defiance. This proposal merges Foucault’s spatial heterotopias with Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space, transforming abstract accommodations into physical and digital sites of intersectional negotiation to navigate real-world workplace scenarios.
To enact this in practice, the proposed intervention takes the form of a cross-cohort workshop that holistically evolves into a shared teaching and learning resource, titled ‘Space as Reassurance: Navigating Identity and Access Needs in Creative Workplaces’. Designed for BA Jewellery and Textile Design students undertaking the Diploma in Professional Studies (DPS) across the CSM JTM programme, it utilises Object-Based Learning (OBL) to scaffold the ambiguous, liminal passage from university into industry as a threshold concept (Meyer and Land, 2005). Shifting away from conventional, individualised CV tutorials, this small-group intervention brings multiple cohorts together – integrating first-year, second-year, DPS, and final-year students to open up a dialectic space where returning placement students share lived counter-narratives with incoming learners, potentially shaping a preliminal community of practice and support network.
Inviting participants to select an everyday artifact anchoring their complex, intersecting identities, the workshop applies Judy Willcocks’s exercise on the ’emotional or extra-rational reading of an object’. Through collective inquiry, students draft a literal ‘Curriculum Vitae of an Object’ that echoes their own spatial autobiographies within future workplaces and intersectional access requirements. By analysing how physical objects are ‘rendered employable’, participants are encouraged to bring their full selves into a shared, intersectional space to potentially demystify their workplace rights and protections under the UK Equality Act 2010. The intervention is logistically feasible as the workshop repurposes existing briefing sessions. It also draws upon the CSM Museum and Study Collection, rendering a static archive as a living, post-workshop resource for independent student research and continuous peer network development.
Inclusive learning and Rational:
Operating through an intersectional framework, this intervention synthesises invisible disability, faith, social class, and race. My positionality fundamentally drives this focus, informed by the intersections of social class, migration, chronic illness, and family caregiving. Coming from a working-class background and migrating from Greece to the UK in my 30s, I have firsthand experience navigating unfamiliar, elite institutional norms without inherited social capital. This outsider perspective is entwined with a lifelong proximity to disability; I have intimately witnessed how ableist societal structures pathologise and marginalise families.
Students from marginalised backgrounds frequently confront career precarity and covert institutional barriers, creating intense pressure to “save face”. This material precarity is grounded in the university’s own UAL Ethnic Representation Index (2023), which explicitly documents how minoritised students continuously fall behind their white peers in relation to institutional belonging and university experience. Whether masking a chronic illness, concealing religious beliefs, or navigating socioeconomic vulnerability to conform to dominant corporate norms, students internalise these unequal structures as a personal and professional failure rather than a systemic gap. This intervention aims to voice these silent challenges, moving learners away from professional masking and the fear of academic or professional pathologisation.
Drawing from Alison Shreeve’s (2008) framework of “pedagogy as art practice,” I integrate my role as a DPS Placement Tutor with my identity as an artist. My creative practice explores how repurposed, fragmented, and ordinary found objects are never neutral; they hold memory, witness loss, and carry living narratives. This pedagogical lens, rooted in my previous Microteaching Task: Object-based Learning, directly informs how I experience this systemic precarity, designed to address the silent challenge of non-disclosure and the deep fear of losing employment opportunities.
To scaffold this liminal transition, I use my own lived experience as an embodied pedagogical tool. Due to a chronic musculoskeletal condition, I bring a gym ball to CSM tutorials as a direct replacement for rigid institutional seating, actively normalising reasonable adjustments. By openly disrupting ableist university structures, I physically show students that claiming space is a fundamental right, not a personal or professional failure.
Reflection and Action:
Building on Daniel Miller’s premise that “things make people as much as people make things” (Miller, 2010), the workshop functions as an active, theatrical dialectic space. Integrating Paulo Freire’s critical pedagogy with Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, students use their chosen identity objects as physical props to role-play workplace scenarios. Enacting these scripts as active “spect-actors,” students shift from passive subjects of the industry hidden curriculum into collective agents of change.
This framework proposed for the initial intervention proposal task generated highly constructive feedback from my tutor and peers. While validating the object-led approach, questions were also raised in relation to student vulnerability, tangible takeaways, and ongoing community support. These prompts directly support the intervention proposal design:
Are the objects always related to identity, and what if students do not want to share personal details?
To safeguard student protected characteristics and minimise emotional exposure, the workshop design focuses on setting personal boundaries. Building a pedagogical safety valve, the choice of object is dissociated from identity disclosure. In the workshop briefing, participants are encouraged to: “Select an object that represents a boundary you want to maintain, a routine that keeps you grounded, or a reasonable adjustment you require.” By framing the activity around ordinary, mundane artifacts – such as a tool, a pen, a water bottle, or a digital interface – this approach creates an impetus for participants to explore workplace adjustments not as an imposition or transactional favor, but rather as a lived physical practice and human right.
What do the students take away, and how are they supported to prepare for their placements?
To address what students can potentially take away to navigate industry thresholds, the workshop experience translates the premise of the ‘Curriculum Vitae of an Object’ into a tangible, physical ‘Placement Access Rider’. This takeaway document is derived by the real-world Access Docs for Artists framework. Rather than leaving empty-handed, students project their object’s material needs onto real-world workplace scenarios. For example, requesting time and private space for prayer during intense project deadlines is not an abstract idea. In these fast-paced creative environments, the essence of religious accommodation is rarely a given, but rather something that must be actively negotiated by the individual student. If a student’s prayer mat requires a quiet space, their physical Rider can equip the student with the professional language to request that space from a Placement Host, turning a theatrical metaphor into a practical self-advocacy tool.
Is there community building and support network development?
To foster authentic community building, the small-group workshop could evolve into a continuous, cross-cohort support network. To sustain this connection across the physical distance of the placement year, this network could possibly extend into an online archive via UAL digital interfaces, such as Padlet, a UAL Blog, or Moodle site. While away from the university undertaking industry placements, students can document and upload photos of their objects in situ at the Creative Workplaces – such as the student with the prayer mat – shaping a one-off workshop session into a living, cross-cohort peer network.
Evaluation of Process and Conclusion:
“Question your tea spoons… How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them down rather, how to flush them out, rescue them from the mire in which they remain stuck, how to give them a tongue, to bring them to speak of what is, of what we are.” — Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces
What I have learned through this process is that inclusive teaching practice is an ongoing discourse in itself. Reflecting on my challenges within my role as a placement tutor is not enough; the reality of social inequality is objectively overwhelming without tools to identify small actions not as a fixed outcome, but as an ongoing, unstable, interactional process. Simple next steps grounded in daily practices and mundane, micro-space interactions to create the conditions for actual change. Facilitating equitable learning spaces calls for continuous experiential unlearning and mutual creative unsettling, where students and educators act as critical learning partners.
Enacting social justice within my teaching context through an object-based study intervention is dialectical rather than propositional. It is a living, continuous process focusing on how participants with intersecting identities can elicit invisible barriers and explore how systemic power affects their work and creative identity. This invites participants to challenge structures of inequity and recognise material culture as a powerful tool to play out the hidden power dynamics of both educational environments and future creative workplaces.
The scope of exploring Object CVs to be rendered employable keeps the intervention in a constant state of flux – surprising, unpredictable, creating the value base for new potentialities, future practice, the “not-yet.” It invites participants to embrace certainty as uncertainty, leaning into an open-ended query – and a pedagogy of discomfort (Boler, 1999): “I wonder what would happen if…?” The intervention functions as an active, theatrical dialectic space echoing Samuel Beckett’s ethos: Try again, fail again, fail better.
Progressing into the final PgCert Unit 3: Action Research Project (ARP), my intent is to turn the infra-ordinary learning space into a stage to see what happens when counter-storytelling unfolds, document and experiment with methods new to me – such as narrative enquiry and role play.
References and Further Reading:
Access Docs for Artists (2026) Access Docs for Artists. Available at: accessdocsforartists.com
Appadurai, A. (1986) The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bachelard, G. (1958) The poetics of space. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Barrow, M. (2006) Assessment and student transformation: linking character and intellect. Studies in Higher Education, 31(3), 357–372.
Beckett, S. (1983) Worstward Ho. London: John Calder.
Bhabha, H.K. (2008) ‘Foreword: Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition’, in Fanon, F. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by C.L. Markmann. London: Pluto Press, pp. vii–xxvi.
Boal, A. (1974) Theater of the oppressed. London: Pluto Press.
Boler, M. (1999) Feeling Power: Emotions and Education. New York: Routledge.
Coates, M. (2014) UR… A Practical Guide to Unconscious Reasoning. London: Book Works and Create London.
Foucault, M. (1984) ‘Of other spaces, heterotopias’, translated by J. Miskowiec, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, (5), pp. 46–49.
Foucault M. (1988) Technologies of the Self. Technologies of the Self, a Seminar with Michel Foucault, pp 16-49. The University of Massachusets Press.
Freire, P. (1970) Pedagogy of the oppressed. London: Penguin Random House UK.
Gordon, L. (1977) Reading Godot. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press.
‘Heterotopia (space)’ (2024) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterotopia_(space) (Accessed: 4 June 2026).
Land, R., Cousin, G., Meyer, J.H.F. and Davies, P. (2005) ‘Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge (3): implications for course design and evaluation’, in Rust, C. (ed.) Improving student learning: diversity and inclusivity. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, pp. 53–64.
‘Liminality’ (2024) Wikipedia. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality (Accessed: 4 June 2026).
McNiff, J. and Whitehead, J. (2002) Action Research: Principles and Practice. London: RoutledgeFalmer.
Miller, D. (2010) Stuff. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Osmond, J.and Tovey, M., 2015.The Threshold of Uncertainty in Teaching Design. Design and Technology Education: An International Journal, 20 (2), pp. 32-45.
Perec, G. (1974) Species of spaces and other pieces. London: Penguin Books.
Shreeve, A. (2008) Transitions: variation in tutors’ experience of practice and teaching relations in art and design. PhD thesis. Lancaster University.
University of the Arts London (2023) UAL Ethnic Representation Index 2023. London: University of the Arts London.
Willcocks, J. (2018) Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection: object-based learning and the modern art school curriculum. Judy Willcocks Copenhagen Presentation. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3O7MM5WuFo (Accessed: 4 June 2026).
Willcocks, J. (2021) Central Saint Martins Museum & Study Collection: emotional responses to objects. Available at: https://arts.ac.libguides.com/c.php?g=686452&p=4906489 (Accessed: 4 June 2026).
Willcocks, J. and Barton, (2017) ‘Object-led self-reflection’, in Chatterjee, H.J. and Hannan, L. (eds.) Engaging the senses: object-based learning in higher education. London: Routledge, pp. 43–56.