I’d like to thank my group and the tutors: Catherine Smith, Kwame Baah, and Lindsay Jordan. I could not have completed it without your ongoing support, faith and an immense amount of patience. I can’t emphasise it enough and just wanted to say I really, really appreciate it. I learnt a lot from you and thanks to you, and I wish I could have given more attention to the course and complete it on time. I mostly really enjoyed it; felt thought-provoked, curious and inspired in classes, I made some friends and overall consider it a very important, meaningful and highly educational experience. Thank you.

Positionality statement

I’m a white, Polish, queer cis woman from a lower middle class family. I’m 29, educated to a double Masters level, and am hoping to start a PhD soon. I work in academia and have previous experience in the creative technology sector. I’m an atheist raised in a Catholic environment. I’m an immigrant to the UK, but am not subject to most limitations faced by immigrants due to my EU status. While pursuing higher education, I could count on the financial support of my parents, who are still together, are educated to a Masters and PhD level, and work(ed) in traditional professional occupations. When I was growing up, my parents had additional caring responsibilities due to disability in the family. English is my second language, but I speak it well enough to teach at university in the UK. I’m neurodivergent and have experience of disability. I consider myself European but not fully ‘Western’ due to cultural, social and economic differences between Eastern Europe and the West while I was growing up.

Proposed intervention

We propose create a collective database of creative computing practitioners from underrepresented backgrounds. The ‘database’ word here is a placeholder and refers to a collection of resources about these creatives which aims for easier access to inclusive diverse and representative examples of creative work for teaching materials within UAL CCI.

This is a project which I started in Autumn 2023 with an AL colleague Adam Cole but it has been put aside due to lack of time. I’m hoping to revive it for the PGCert, with feedback from the academic community at CCI. This report is my individual reflection on the process and an on how it could be redesigned in a more ethical and inclusive way.

Adam’s positionality: queer AL on the MSc Creative Computing course, tries to bring that perspective into the classroom and extra-curricular activities.

Adam and I are both light-skinned and Western(ish). The way I feel it, it places more responsibility on us to address the issue of diversity and representation in the curriculum. The idea is that we would build a technical framework in the form of a website / wiki to display knowledge collected voluntarily contributed by the academic community at CCI. When we’ve gathered some data, the project could be shared with a wider audience.

Before we initially invited the CCI staff to contribute to the form, we asked a few colleagues from backgrounds different to ours for their opinion. My manager at the time volunteered and helped us refine the wording of the form and the data we collect. I’m not sharing their positionality use to lack of explicit consent and easy identification.

After collecting the first few form entries, I wrote a Python script which automates data processing from an Excel sheet and formats it into an .md (Markdown) file, which can be displayed on UAL GitHub (Cole and Tańska, 2023).

We decided to publish the early prototype on UAL GitHub as an internal resource for teaching and learning purposes, as we were not sure how the information we collect and share about the creative practitioners relates to GDPR and Copyright.

Appendices

The work-in-progress “Creative Computing Canon”. To view, please log in with UAL details.

Form to contribute to the database. The contributions are manually reviewed in an Excel file, and the display page is updated by running a Python script. Please note: Question 5: “5.How does this person’s presence increase the Diversity, Equality and Inclusion of the Creative Computing curriculum?” was added later after collecting feedback, hence the answers are mostly empty.

Why the intervention is needed

• As Associate Lecturers, my colleagues and I either teach from someone else’s materials or are expected to prepare class materials from scratch on a very limited (paid) timeframe.
  
• Existing class materials are often not nearly good enough in terms of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, which is recognised by the lecturers and some managers. They also do not represent the plurality of voices in our field (Creative Computing), or the student cohorts we teach. I can confirm the same as a graduate of 2 Masters courses at UAL.
  
  
• Access to information about work by people from underrepresented backgrounds is limited due to structural discrimination, publication language, etc. As a consequence, searching for diverse references takes additional time. It requires a conscious effort and determination to do that.
  
  Example: I opened Google in incognito mode and searched for “creative coding artists”. The 2018 Medium article “Algorithmic Beauty: 10 Artists Pushing the Boundaries of Code” was the second search result. All featured artists and the article author have traditionally masculine, Western or European names (Bezic, 2018).
  
• UAL represented by line managers limited by budget set by higher-level management refuses to pay us for the extra work.

Why the intervention is a good fit

• The lack of diversity in the Creative Computing industry is a well-known problem.
  
• The need for this intervention came from mine and the project co-facilitator’s experiences as both students and lecturers at UAL CCI. The consulted colleagues agree with this and declared they would be likely to use these resources in their teaching practice.
  
• The project is relevant for both my teaching practice and the Inclusive Practices unit.
  
• The project has a significant potential impact on my and my colleagues’ work,, as well as the student experience within CCI.
  
• Apart from increasing the DEI of the teaching materials, the intervention can help ALs, who are often disadvantaged at work due to limited paid preparation time.

Peer feedback

As a part of this assignment, I talked to two colleagues and discussed the project with them. They both started teaching at university within the last year. Due to a limited timeframe, I decided to ask people I know well, in order to be able to ask them for their time on a short notice. They were both happy to contribute their insights and agreed for their data to be used in this report.

Person 1

Positionality (in own words):
Turkish woman, Associate Lecturer

General feedback:
P1 has found the project potentially very useful. She has previously struggled with finding representative examples of creative work for creative coding classes and has asked colleagues, including myself, to share resources. She agrees this project is needed, particularly for ALs, who are often expected to develop teaching materials without sufficient time.

Suggestions:

• Rephrase the DEI question in the form. Suggested allowing for more contributions and assessing whether this question needs adjusting based on people’s answers.
  
• Filtering based on thematic tags would increase usability. Requested more tags relating to specific class topics such as computational music.
  
• Asked for improved navigation through the database.
  
• Asked for ensuring more examples to make the database usable, as well as for including creative practitioners working with diverse media rather than focusing on coding for visual art.
  
• Pointed out the need for the examples to be representative of CCI students, and particularly to add Chinese artists to the database.

Person 2

Positionality (in own words):
Polish woman, Acting Senior Lecturer on the MSc Data Science and AI for creative industries course, experience as a software developer in the music industry, PhD student

General feedback:
The project is useful and has a very straightforward, focused output, which was complimented. She agrees with overrepresentation of white men in the Creative Computing industry, and also struggles with finding examples of work by more diverse authors for the teaching materials. She said she would use this database in her teaching practice if developed further.

Suggestions:

• Make the GitHub repository into a full website to ensure easier navigation.
  
• Ensure enough data at the beginning to avoid tokenisation of the few featured creatives.

Challenges and ethical considerations

1. I’m currently not able to develop the database into a fully usable resource on my own. I believe a workshop / work session to develop the database alongside colleagues / students could be helpful. Drawing from the Design Justice framework (Costanza-Chock, 2019) and Codesign methodology (Cizek & Uricchio, 2022), if we treat the codesigners / participants as experts in the field we’re investigating or designing for, they should be equally credited and profiting from the project. If we want to invite academic staff or students to participate, we should be able to provide them with some form of compensation. Provided funds are secured, full-time staff members are still not allowed to accept hourly contracts from UAL. This could be solved through for example offering shopping vouchers instead of employment contracts.
   
2. The value of the workshop will depend on the diversity of participants and the different perspectives that are represented. It is often the case that people from most underrepresented groups are tokenised, under too much pressure or expectations, and it’s unethical to expect additional work from them. They should be compensated for their work if they agree to participate; but they should have the option to say ‘no’ and it should be respected.
   
3. Introducing the values of representation, diversity and inclusion at a more systemic level, expressed through the whole teaching structure rather than just examples of creative work that teachers can use. D’Ignazio and Klein (2018) describe the often unintentionally discriminatory decision-making process as privilege hazard – lack of competence and experiential knowledge to imagine how the decisions taken may impact underrepresented groups. In some ways, I am the privilege hazard. The whole teaching system has the privilege hazard deeply embedded, is still quite authoritative and not diverse and inclusive enough, and the university staff is not representative of the student cohorts we teach. We need to work together to make things better, but we are not working equally unless everyone is equally credited and compensated, and more voices are included in the debate.
   
4. Do we need to rethink the DEI question in the form? How do we ensure DEI while avoiding tokenisation and reducing people to labels? How do we celebrate diversity while respecting the artists’ privacy and only use information that they freely and publicly share? Should we highlight labels of artists from underrepresented groups in teaching materials if the label is not obvious? This poses further questions like: is the presence of creatives from underrepresented backgrounds enough if we don’t acknowledge the label? How do we ensure plurality of voices without it? Do we want the teaching materials to just be diverse, equitable and inclusive, or also for them to be obvious about it?
   
   Guyan (2022) describes the impact of predefined labels which do not accurately reflect people’s experience may lead to further exclusion and lack of visibility. This concerns particularly minorities within minorities and identities which are plural (intersectional). I’m very much internally conflicted about using labels. At the same time, lack of highlighting particularly intersectional perspectives can have serious real life consequences. The intersectional approach is over 30 years old and has its source in Black feminist theory (Crenshaw, 1989). As Buolamwini’s seminal work on intersectional testing of face recognition models shows, these perspectives are still widely not considered in computing and can have serious consequences (2019).

Proposed improvements and further development

• Based on peer feedback, I’d like to explore if the initial document can be exported to a website or other public resource, depending on Copyright and GDPR rules, and respectful and ethical use of the artists’ freely and publicly shared information.
  
• I’d like to develop the technical side further, include more tags relating to the topics and media of work, filtering options using these tags, pages with more details, and clearer formatting.
  
• Further development should involve a more diverse group of collaborators.
  
• For the resource to be useful, we need a bigger number of examples for a start. This could be done for example during a collaborative workshop session with CCI staff and/or students.
  
• Set up a maintenance routine for reviewing new submissions and updating the document.
  
• Maybe instead of including specific labels, we could introduce a more affirmative approach through blog posts linking to the artists info focusing on group representation? Ideally, this would include guest contributions with proper crediting and compensation.
  
  For reference:
  Six Trans Programmers Who Shattered the Lavender Ceiling by the Coding Space (The Coding Space, 2023).
  Honoring Black Computational Histories (Martinez, 2023).

References

Bezic, V. (2018). Algorithmic Beauty: 10 Artists Pushing the Boundaries of Code. Available at: https://medium.com/feed-fatigue/algorithmic-beauty-10-artists-pushing-the-boundaries-of-code-2d55b58aedea (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Buolamwini, J. (2019). Gender shades. Available at: http://gendershades.org/ (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Cizek, K. and Uricchio, W. (2022). Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Cole, A. and Tańska, M. (2023). Expanding the Creative Computing Canon at UAL CCI. Available at: https://git.arts.ac.uk/mtanska/cc_canon_parser (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Costanza-Chock, S. (2019). Design Justice. Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Crenshaw, K. (1989). “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” In: University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1., pp. 139-167.

D’Ignazio, C. and Klein, L.F. (2020). “The Power Chapter”, in: Data Feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Guyan, K. (2022). “Queer Validation”, in: Queer Data. London: Bloomsbury.

Martinez, S. (2023). Honoring Black Computational Histories. Available at: https://sfpc.study/blog/black-computational-histories (accessed: 19.01.2025).

The Coding Space (2023). Six Trans Programmers Who Shattered the Lavender Ceiling by the Coding Space. Available at: https://www.thecodingspace.com/blog/2022-03-01-six-trans-programmers-who-shattered-the-lavender-ceiling/ (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Intervention plan

Identified problem:

• As Associate Lecturers, my colleagues and I either teach from someone else’s materials or are expected to prepare class materials from scratch on a very limited (paid) timeframe.
  
• Existing class materials are often not nearly good enough in terms of Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion, which is recognised by the lecturers and some managers. They also do not represent the plurality of voices in our field (Creative Computing), or the student cohorts we teach. I can confirm the same as a graduate of 2 Masters courses at UAL.
  
• Access to information about work by people from underrepresented backgrounds is limited due to structural discrimination, publication language, etc. As a consequence, searching for diverse references takes additional time. It requires a conscious effort and determination to do that.
  Example: I opened Google in incognito mode and searched for “creative coding artists”. The 2018 Medium article “Algorithmic Beauty: 10 Artists Pushing the Boundaries of Code” was the second search result. All featured artists and the article author have traditionally masculine, Western or European names (Bezic, 2018).
  
• UAL represented by line managers limited by budget set by higher-level management refuses to pay us for the extra work.

Proposed intervention:

• Create a database of computational arts and design practitioners from underrepresented backgrounds. This is a project which I started in Autumn 2023 with a fellow AL Adam Cole but it has been put aside due to lack of time. I’m hoping to revive it for the PGCert, with feedback from the academic community at CCI.
  
• As we are both light-skinned and Western(ish) and the way I feel it, it places more responsibility on us to address the issue of diversity and representation in the curriculum. The idea is that we would build a technical framework in the form of a website / wiki to display knowledge collected voluntarily contributed by the academic community at CCI. When we’ve gathered some data, the project could be shared with a wider audience.

Key references for the intervention:

Costanza-Chock, S. (2019). Design Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Martinez, M. (2023). Honoring Black Computational Histories. Available at: https://sfpc.study/blog/black-computational-histories (accessed: 19.01.2025).

University of the Arts London (2021). UAL Anti-Racism Action Plan. https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0032/296537/UAL-Anti-racism-action-plan-summary-2021.pdf (Accessed: 19.01.2025)

References

Bezic, V. (2018). Algorithmic Beauty: 10 Artists Pushing the Boundaries of Code. Available at:
https://medium.com/feed-fatigue/algorithmic-beauty-10-artists-pushing-the-boundaries-of-code-2d55b58aedea (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Post comments

reply to Anna Schlimm’s post on race:

Your post really resonated with me and I can see we posed similar questions regarding particularly the systemic maintenance of white privilege at university (Bradbury, 2020)

“This [Bradbury’s framework for Critical Race Theory policy analysis] might help reveal and challenge inequality by redirecting focus from proving that white privilege exists, to examining how it is being structurally upheld”

You cite Asif Sadiq’s ‘active anti-racism’ (20 as a proposed answer to structural racism in HE, and propose asking difficult questions in the classroom referring to bell hooks’s experiential knowledge sharing and “Teaching to transgress”. According to Sadiq, the answer to abstract or persona-based EDI training is bringing in real people and individual stories instead of promoting stereotypes. I can see how merging this approach works well with bell hooks’s mutual teaching and learning in the classroom (1994).

I wish this was something we did more of in classes. I often teach subjects related to data and programming. While teaching technical subjects, I find it quite difficult to find space for sharing experiential knowledge while helping the students achieve the LOs referring to technical knowledge. Instead, I try to search for and highlight examples with an intersectional approach, such as Dr Joy Buolamwini’s project “Gender Shades” revealing intersectional discrimination in testing Machine Learning models (2019). I try to apply Critical Race Theory and Intersectional Feminist theory to teaching about data and programming, and the Design Justice Framework to the wider technology design context, as well as discuss other risks of AI relating to privacy, profiling and discrimination (example: the AI model for classifying people as ‘straight’ or ‘gay’, Wang and Kosinski, 2017). We then try to apply these theories to analyse biases and power relationships in technological contexts traditionally dominated by white cis men, as I try to encourage students to exercise critical thinking alongside gaining technical skills.

References

Bradbury, A. (2020). “A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: The case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England”. In: Race, Ethnicity and Education, 23 (2), pp.241-260. 

Buolamwini, J. (2019). Gender shades. Available at: http://gendershades.org/ (accessed: 19.01.2025).

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge.

Sadiq, A. (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw (accessed: 03.05.2025).

Wang, Y. and Kosinski, M. (2017). “Deep neural networks are more accurate than humans at detecting sexual orientation from facial images”. In: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2018, Vol. 114, No. 2, pp. 246 –257 Available at: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/hv28a_v1 (accessed: 03.05.2025).

Reply to Lamprini Tzanaki’s post on disability:

I strongly agree with your thoughts and sentiments in this post around the social model of disability and respect for disabled people’s autonomy. Referring to the interview with Ade Adepitan (2020), you point out the societal, systemic and structural discrimination of disabled people, which makes it more difficult for them to achieve their full potential.

Later in the post, you refer to your own experience of intervening during a workshop, when your colleague made an assumption about a deaf student and decided for them about their mode of class participation, leading to exclusion form a group exercise. You comment on the situation:

“Creating a safe space and a community is really important in education. Listening to the student needs is a key element to create a space that is inclusive and accessible and sees and understands intersectionality.”

‘Nothing about us without us’ is a slogan used by the disability rights community since the 1980s (Costanza-Chock, 2019), which was adapted by many other communities. Good intentions often aren’t enough and true equity and freedom can only be achieved while everyone’s respectful of other people’s autonomy and if there’s mutual trust that everyone knows best what they need. This should not be a reason for exclusion, but rather for a promoting plurality of voices, and celebrating diversity as a community. In the fields I work in, design and technology, this has produced community-oriented design approaches such as co-design (Cizek and Uricchio, 2022), which treat the co-designers as experts in their needs, demanding respect, acknowledgement and credits for their contribution. In a pedagogical context, I can see a parallel to bell hooks’s “Teaching to transgress” and in-class exchange of experiential knowledge (1994). Perhaps that is the way the way to introduce co-design to classroom environments not just in terms of knowledge sharing, but also creating inclusive environments?

References

Adepitan, A. (2020). Ade Adepitan gives amazing explanation of systemic racism. Interviewed by Webborn, N. for ParalympicsGB. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAsxndpgagU (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Cizek, K. and Uricchio, W. (2022). Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Costanza-Chock, S. (2019). ‘Design Practices: “Nothing about Us without Us”‘. In: Design Justice. Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge.

In this post, I’d like to reflect on 2 things related to race and racism in my teaching practice: teaching international cohorts including Chinese students who learn English as an additional language, and inclusivity of teaching materials and lack of representation at UAL CCI.

The conversation at UAL around teaching Chinese students who learn English as an additional language is well-established. It is common practice at UAL to accept students (particularly at Masters level) who cannot communicate or learn in English, while maintaining that English is the language of instruction at UAL. The pursuit of traditional lecturing and submission methods actively disadvantages these students, who the university profits from substantially through sky-high international tuition fees. I know from my teaching experience that many of these students in question are capable of outstanding work surpassing course expectations, but majority of that happens through self-directed learning. How can racial justice be in place while the university profits from Asian students while maintaining a learning environment which systemically disadvantages them?

As Garrett (2023) points out, ‘whiteness’ is not just a racial category, but rather a cultural one as well. This impacts the students’ ownership of, comfort, and participation in university spaces. My friend recently graduated with a Masters degree from CCI (from which I also graduated and used to teach on) mentioned that in the face of limited exhibition spaces for the final showcase, majority of the slots were taken by Western / growing up in Western culture students despite majority of the year being Chinese. I can see several parallels between this and the text by Bradbury, which points out the racism in British primary schools assessment policy systematically underappreciating children who learn English as a second language, and lack of affirmation for their subject-relevant knowledge in other languages, as well as systemic disregard for the needs of those students (2020).

The ethics of accepting students who can’t efficiently learn in English into a university course taught in English with mostly traditional teaching methods while charging tuition fees is a topic for a separate post. But, if the university accepts them, we as the academic community are responsible for creating a welcoming and nurturing learning environment. I know many lecturers want to do that but struggle with the language barrier and lack of teaching materials which would help facilitate more meaningful interactions. There is firstly not enough representation amongst the teaching staff to bring in the cultural and experiential knowledge representative of our students; secondly, the majority-AL teaching staff already struggle with preparing teaching materials of sufficient quality while being underpaid according to their contracts. I addressed some of the possible solutions, such as more independent, project-based and open-ended learning, as well as some changes to the communication in the classroom, in the TPP case studies, but I believe we need a deep systemic and institutional change to successfully address this and many other racial justice issues at UAL and academia in general.

References

Bradbury, A. (2020). “A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: The case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England”. In : Race Ethnicity and Education, 23 (2), pp.241-260. 

Garrett, R. (2024). “Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education”. In: Globalisation, Societies and Education, pp.1–15.

Rekis (2023) observes that “religious citizens may think it a matter of faith and integrity to not sever their public and private selves on political issues”. Having been raised Catholic, I understand how this may be the case when defining an omniscient god as a source of absolute morality. Experiences from my birth country which I attribute to this worldview still fill me with anxiety. I grew in Poland, a country with an overwhelming Catholic majority and a huge impact of the Catholic church on politics, in a religious Catholic family, while having queer friends, and realising as an adult that I’m queer myself. As an adolescent woman, I remember the anger and fear that I felt when it was acceptable and normalised that in educational environments to deny my reproductive rights; to spread discrimination, and sometimes even hate against my queer friends; to spread a view of supremacy over atheists or other religions; finally, to hear Islamophobia lined with racism spread in mainstream Catholic communities. In an intersectional context, it seems that whether it’s radical faith or radical secularism as also pointed out by Rekis (2023) the mainstream group seems entitled to make decisions about women’s bodies – whether it’s reproductive rights (which can also concern trans and non-binary people, often facing further discrimination), policing of clothing, profiling, or pre-defined social roles.

Just as faith or religion can be an identity-defining characteristic, I embraced separation first from religion, and then from religious faith, as a core part of my identity. I lay my faith now in respecting diversity, in standing up for my friends, and trying to do my part in creating communities of care and kindness to humans and more-than-humans.

There is a fine line between the freedom of religious expression and allowing or even encouraging repeated unwanted behaviour towards others. I know my fears of religious expression without boundaries are shared by many queer and trans friends who grew up in certain religious communities.

I sometimes envy the religious parts of my friends’ cultures and how they can see themselves represented and cherished. One of my friends is a queer Indian woman. When talking about queerness in her culture, she mentions that despite the impact of British colonialism and the imported religion that contributed to the exclusion of formerly traditionally embraced queer and trans people in Hindu beliefs, she enjoys their representation amongst amongst Hindu deities. I’ve heard similar positive things about the beliefs of many cultures of Indigenous Americans and the Pacific peoples, similarly shunned by colonisation.

When I see strong expressions of religious identities, including in class, I still feel anxious if the expression is Christian. I watch myself closely to not let the students notice. I know this experience is not universal. I’m well aware of the different context here in London, and do not suspect my students or colleagues of any intrusive intentions. As Asif Sadiq notes in their talk, in the context of faith, DEI is contextual and hyperlocal, and thus should not be discussed in a single cultural context (2023). I’m aware that UAL is far from perfect, but I am glad that so far each time I’ve seen expressions of religion in the classroom, my students have been seemingly supporting each other (such as: acknowledging each other’s excitement for religious community, inviting each other to prayer, or sharing supportive words during Ramadan) and openly discussing their practices and faith. If there is anything I would like to bring to the classroom or learn from my students and friends in the context of faith, it would be mutual support and celebrating diversity, including the queer and trans representation and joy not present in the religious environment I was raised in.

References

Rekis, J. (2023). “Religious Identity and Epistemic Injustice: An Intersectional Account”. In: Hypatia, vol. 38, pp. 779–800. Available at: doi:10.1017/hyp.2023.86 (accessed: 03.05.2025).

Sadiq, A. (2023). Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw (accessed: 03.05.2025).

Discussing disability is very personal for me, especially in an educational context. PGCert is the third qualification I’ve been completing since falling ill with long COVID. At this point, I think I am mostly recovered, but the aftermath from not getting a break as a result of constantly falling behind on work and studies for the past three years still impacts me a lot.

The words of Ade Adepitan (2020) resonated with me in the context of the social model of disability (Shape Arts, no date). Adepitan claims it’s systemic discrimination that holds a lot of disabled people back rather than their conditions. They also draw a parallel to the systemic discrimination and oppression of Black people. In both contexts, Adepitan points out that society is often not willing to act towards true equality, using diversity schemes in place of systemic change.

Christine Sun Kim refers to what is considered ‘normal’ in the society, or what fits within the Overton window (2023). She mentions the conscious decision to work with art at a large scale, making an argument of how visibility contributes to inclusion.

Chay Brown discusses his perspective as a white, gay, trans, likely not-neurotypical man with experience of mental illness through an intersectional lens. He says that the mutual support and knowledge sharing about the experiences of mental struggles within the LGBTQIA+, and particularly within the trans community, as one of the ways in which he found the community helpful.

A common theme for the resources is highlighting the base for the social model of disability, providing examples of disabled people being denied opportunities and equal participation due to systemic ableism and lack of infrastructure and other resources.

In terms of disability, one thing that really resonated with me was Chay Brown’s mention of the organising team’s commitment and expertise in accessibility as one of the key factors, and provides details of how to organise an event with a range of accessibility considerations, including quiet spaces, multi-modal activities, pre-screening the space and providing information, budget considerations, captioning and BSL interpretation if applicable, and – most importantly – asking about the participants’ needs.

My own lived experience of disability and being neurodivergent has definitely made me more sensitive to the students’ needs. In terms of accessibility, I do my best to create slides that are easy to read including suitable contrast, text size, and readable fonts. I pay attention to disturbances in class, such as students talking loudly or playing media with sound during labs, and politely ask them to be more mindful about their colleagues. I became more acutely aware of these things after I started having severe issues with concentration due to long COVID. I’m always supportive of extended deadlines and extra time needed, being as helpful as I can and trying to guide the students through applying for extensions and resubmission, something I experienced many times as a student.

Unfortunately, my own accessibility needs can be a barrier and incompatible with adjustments for students, often included in their ISAs. I lose focus when students join the class late, and need a moment to get back to the lecture. If a student misses a significant part of the class, they often ask for tutorials outside of class time despite dedicated time during classes. Permanent staff members have office hours dedicated to supporting students. As someone with health issues and juggling several roles on a precarious contract, I cannot afford to schedule unpaid tutorials. My manager’s advice is to direct them to in-class tutorials, which I do. The only occasion when I offer extra tutorials is for students with extended deadlines, as they often develop work mostly after the classes finish and I do not want to leave them without crucial support. Still, I often feel bad due to my students getting less support just because I’m an AL. UAL’s casualised employment practices limit accessibility for both students and teachers.

References

Adepitan, A. (2020). Ade Adepitan gives amazing explanation of systemic racism. Interviewed by Webborn, N. for ParalympicsGB. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAsxndpgagU (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Sun Kim, C. (2023). Christine Sun Kim in “Friends & Strangers”. Feature for Art in the Twenty-First Century. Available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NpRaEDlLsI (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Brown, C. (2023). Intersectionality in Focus: Empowering Voices during UK Disability History Month 2023. Interview with Chay Brown for ParaPride. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yID8_s5tjc (accessed: 19.01.2025).

Shape Arts (no date) What is the Social Model of Disability? Available at: https://www.shapearts.org.uk/news/text-and-audio-social-model (accessed: 19.01.2025).

included in the intervention report