Garrett 2024 Imagined Futures Of Racialised Phds
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.
The paper highlights the fact that academia is a very exlusionary space, particularly for the context of the paper - for ‘racialised’ individuals and points out some alarming statistics[1] .
One of the main aims of the paper is to emphasis that increasing diversity within academic institutions is not enough, and that more cultural and structural change is needed to ensure that ‘racially minoritised’ (to use the paper’s terminology) feel less alienated and might genuinely feel comfortable and supported. The paper links the impacts of race within academia limiting the imaginations of 'racially minoritised’ PhD students, specifically in referenace to whether or not they decide to stay in academia. The paper details accounts from a number of racially minoritsed PhD students who express various experiences that have made them feel that a career in academia is not one that they want to do in the long term, due to microaggressions, lack of support, precarity in jobs etc.
A key aspect of the paper was exploring the notion of whiteness. Crucially stating that it is not just an ‘optical privilege’ but an ‘ecology of hostile structures and practices that shape what we consider daily ‘norms’. This has powerful implications in academics institutions, particularly because of the history that underpins many institutions:
‘Colonial histories of UK institutional landscapes shape the identities we consider to be ‘normal’ and form cultural and social practices in the image of whiteness (Jones and Okun 2001). Most UK universities began as religious or private foundations, with some Russell Group universities associated with elite social reproduction and served to educate colonial administrators (Holmwood 2018).
– Garrett (2024)
Within this context the paper states that ‘racially minoritised’ students need to mask or assimilate in order to function in these spaces.
General thoughts connected to this:
Currently LLM’s seem to threaten something about the education system. This is something that feels inherently tied to elitist, racist etc. structure of institutions, knowledge and ideas of ‘intelligence’
How might these changes be compounded to worsen the above stated elitism, racism, exclusion?
These thoughts tie deeply into my positionality
Professorship Demographics:
White professors: 90.1%
Asian professors: 4.0%
Chinese professors: 2.3%
Mixed professors: 1.6%
Other professors: 1.4%
Black professors: 0.7% (AdvanceHE 2022)
Representation of Heads of Institutions:
White: 92%
Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME): 7.4% (AdvanceHE 2022)
Black Female Professors:
Only 61 out of almost 23,000 professors (HESA 2019; WHEN 2023)
Academic Career Pipeline:
White student and academic progression to professor increases every year.
BAME student and academic progression decreases every year.
The greatest disparity is for Black and Black mixed-race students (Williams et al. 2019).
Institutional Attendance:
Black students are more likely to attend post-1992 institutions, negatively affecting their chances of entering PhD programs that favor Russell Group candidates.
Intersectional Disadvantage:
Racialised minority women face a ‘triple burden’ of oppression due to classed, gendered, and ethnic identities (Bhopal and Pitkin 2020).
Neurodiversity and Race:
Black scholars often negotiate both race and neurotypical hegemonic practices in UK higher education (Lewis and Arday 2023). ↩︎