The Promise and Problems of Race Equality Work Within UK Higher Education

This paper provocatively asks not what do academics need to do to tackle institutional racism within higher education, but rather, do we even know what institutional racism within higher education looks like? Hill Collin’s (2009) delineation of a Black feminist epistemology rallies us to dismantle power structures which privilege Eurocentric knowledges and invalidate other ways of knowing such as lived experiences, emotion, and dialogue as criteria of meaning. Drawing from research and events organised as part of a student-staff collaborative Community Building and Belonging project that I co-supervised, this paper explores what an anti-racist higher education institution might look like if we take seriously our students as ‘agents of knowledge’ (Hill Collins, 2009, 285) as a means of decolonising, not just the curriculum, but experiences of higher education