Managing racism? Race equality and decolonial educational futures

The Office for Students is now holding UK universities to account for their failures to address racial inequalities, and the Teaching Excellence Framework is bringing the student experience to the fore in assessing higher education institutions. Racial inequalities persist in spite of decades of legislation aiming to promote equality and end discrimination. The paper considers two main areas of racial equalities work, namely, (1) anti-racist and (2) decolonial initiatives. It suggests that the rise of managerialism and in particular, audit cultures, have allowed racism to flourish in spite, or because of, the need to account for equality, diversity and inclusion in global markets for higher education. Auditing requires a focus on identities, and cannot take into account the complex ways in which race, race thinking and racism are maintained in knowledge production. The lack of consensus around what decolonial education should be undermines attempts to produce educational social justice. From a feminist postcolonial perspective, the paper suggests that recentralizing racism and reengaging difference offer an important way to negotiate more just educational futures

Managing racism? Race equality and decolonial educational futures

The Office for Students is now holding UK universities to account for their failures to address racial inequalities, and the Teaching Excellence Framework is bringing the student experience to the fore in assessing higher education institutions. As the twin crises of Covid- 19 and the murder of George Floyd have highlighted in an unprecedented way, racial inequalities and injustices persist in spite of decades of legislation aiming to promote equality and end discrimination. The paper considers two main areas of ‘racial equalities’ work, namely anti-racist initiatives and decolonial initiatives. It suggests that the rise of managerialism and in particular, audit cultures, have allowed racism to flourish in spite, or rather because of, the need to account for equality, diversity and inclusion in global markets for higher education. Auditing requires a focus on identities, and cannot take into account the complex ways in which race, race thinking and racism are maintained in knowledge production. The lack of consensus around what decolonial education should be undermines attempts to produce educational social justice. From a feminist postcolonial perspective, the paper suggests that recentralising racism and reengaging difference as a way to negotiate more just educational futures

Discussing gender: an interview with Dr Suki Ali

by Aisling Sweeney, second-year sociology undergraduate. Dr Suki Ali is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the LSE. She previously taught at Goldsmiths College, the Institute of Education and the University of Greenwich. Her main theoretical interests focus upon feminist postcolonial theory, psychoanalysis, research methodologies, visual culture, and theories of identification and embodiment. Her work centralises the interplay between gender, sexualities, ‘race’ and class and she has published work that engages these issues through research in education and family life. I caught up with her to get some of her views on the complex field that is gender

Forming gendered 'mixed race' identities in educational and familial contexts

Abstract: This thesis explores the meanings of 'race' and racism in the identity work of young, 'mixed-race' children aged between 8 and 11 years old. Using feminist ethnographic methods, it interrogates the ways in which children in three schools are negotiating discourses of 'race', nation, family and home in order to form multiply positioned flexible identifications. The children, parents and teachers interviewed all show the failings of existing theories of 'race' and ethnicity for understanding what it means to occupy multi-locational positionalities. In addition, it reveals the gap between current academic discourses and everyday use of language in contemporary contexts. Terms such as 'ethnicity' and 'culture' are not replacing 'race'; multiculturalism is often seen as issues of representation; and 'racism' in its crudest form is commonplace to the children in this study. In order to operationalise spaces for themselves in their daily cultural practices, children are using readings of popular culture and discourses of family to insert themselves into more ambiguous and flexible matrices of identity. Collective use of popular culture and narratives of self and home are deployed in creative and unique ways by the heterogenous groups of children who took part in the project. The findings show that the children of this age are becoming aware of a politics of 'race' being one of 'singularity', and are happy to subvert it. It also reveals that one of the most important factors to negotiating a politics of 'race' and culture, is 'class'. The ways in which ethnicity interacts with classed positions forms the basis for the interrogation into the production of the normative sexualised gender identifications of the children in the study

What Constitutes Intermarriage for Multiracial People in Britain?

Intermarriage is of great interest to analysts because a group’s tendency to partner across ethnic boundaries is usually seen as a key indicator of the social distance between groups in a multiethnic society. Theories of intermarriage as a key indicator of integration are, however, typically premised upon the union of white and nonwhite individuals, and we know very little about what happens in the unions of multiracial people, who are the children of intermarried couples. What constitutes intermarriage for multiracial people? Do multiracial individuals think that ethnic or racial ancestries are a defining aspect of their relationships with their partners? In this article, I argue that there are no conventions for how we characterize endogamous or exogamous relationships for multiracial people. I then draw on examples of how multiracial people and their partners in Britain regard their relationships with their partners and the significance of their and their partners’ ethnic and racial backgrounds. I argue that partners’ specific ancestries do not necessarily predict the ways in which multiracial individuals regard their partners’ ethnic and racial backgrounds as constituting difference or commonality within their relationships

Deep learning for automatic segmentation of vestibular schwannoma: a retrospective study from multi-center routine MRI

Automatic segmentation of vestibular schwannoma (VS) from routine clinical MRI has potential to improve clinical workflow, facilitate treatment decisions, and assist patient management. Previous work demonstrated reliable automatic segmentation performance on datasets of standardized MRI images acquired for stereotactic surgery planning. However, diagnostic clinical datasets are generally more diverse and pose a larger challenge to automatic segmentation algorithms, especially when post-operative images are included. In this work, we show for the first time that automatic segmentation of VS on routine MRI datasets is also possible with high accuracy. We acquired and publicly release a curated multi-center routine clinical (MC-RC) dataset of 160 patients with a single sporadic VS. For each patient up to three longitudinal MRI exams with contrast-enhanced T1-weighted (ceT1w) (n = 124) and T2-weighted (T2w) (n = 363) images were included and the VS manually annotated. Segmentations were produced and verified in an iterative process: (1) initial segmentations by a specialized company; (2) review by one of three trained radiologists; and (3) validation by an expert team. Inter- and intra-observer reliability experiments were performed on a subset of the dataset. A state-of-the-art deep learning framework was used to train segmentation models for VS. Model performance was evaluated on a MC-RC hold-out testing set, another public VS datasets, and a partially public dataset. The generalizability and robustness of the VS deep learning segmentation models increased significantly when trained on the MC-RC dataset. Dice similarity coefficients (DSC) achieved by our model are comparable to those achieved by trained radiologists in the inter-observer experiment. On the MC-RC testing set, median DSCs were 86.2(9.5) for ceT1w, 89.4(7.0) for T2w, and 86.4(8.6) for combined ceT1w+T2w input images. On another public dataset acquired for Gamma Knife stereotactic radiosurgery our model achieved median DSCs of 95.3(2.9), 92.8(3.8), and 95.5(3.3), respectively. In contrast, models trained on the Gamma Knife dataset did not generalize well as illustrated by significant underperformance on the MC-RC routine MRI dataset, highlighting the importance of data variability in the development of robust VS segmentation models. The MC-RC dataset and all trained deep learning models were made available online

Mixed race politics

This article explores the possibilities and pitfalls of a specific mixed race politics in the UK. The paper considers the ways in which critics have discussed the development of 'the mixed race movement' in the US and asks why such a movement has not developed in the UK. It suggests that while the politics of recognition has been important to the development of mixedness in both countries, there is a need for a more rigorous account of historical specificities and social contingencies in the constructions of racialisation and racism in both sites. However, the paper ar gues for the importance of transnational thinking in order to develop a situated politics of mixedness

Black feminist praxis: some reflections on pedagogies and politics in higher education

This essay takes a personal, reflexive approach to the positioning of black feminism in higher education in the UK. It asks how we might best understand the political economy of black feminist knowledge in higher education. It argues that challenges for black British feminist pedagogies and embodied positionality are best explored through postcolonial paradigms, and coalitions amongst black feminists continue to be of vital importance in contemporary academic sites