Literature is drawn upon here to offer a definition of key terms used in this thesis.
Arts: ‘Modes of expression that use skill or imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others’ (Britannica, 2024). The Arts could be seen to suggest a fixed, solid, unchangeable or impenetrable idea of what art is, should or can be.
BAME: An acronym representing Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people, commonly used for statistical purposes within UK HE to monitor ethnic diversity and inequalities, despite calls to abandon this aggregation for masking variations between specific ethnic groups (Singh, 2021; Malik et al, 2021). Alternative terms include racially minoritised, racially marginalised, People of Colour, and Global Majority. Ahn, Quinlan and Adewumi (2023) ‘use the terms racially minoritised and people of colour synonymously to refer to a broad, socially constructed category’ including ‘people of apparently African and Asian descent.’ In this thesis, I mainly use the term racially minoritised and marginalised but I sometimes use terms from in the projects and literature.
Counter-Storytelling: A Critical Race Theory method ‘of telling the stories of those people whose experiences are not often told... A tool for exposing, analyzing, and challenging the majoritarian stories of racial privilege. Counter-stories can shatter complacency, challenge the dominant discourse on race, and further the struggle for racial reform’ (Solorzano and Yosso, 2002, p.32).
Curriculum: ‘The subjects studied in a school, college, etc. and what each subject includes’ (Cambridge, 2024). In the context of Higher Education, curriculum is ‘a process for connecting and integrating university learning and teaching into coherent and meaningful educational experiences for students’ (Hicks, 2018).
Decolonisation: An unsettling process enabling the ‘repatriation of Indigenous land and life’ in which the ‘real and symbolic violences of settler colonialism’, past and continued, are not overlooked (Tuck and Yang, 2012, p.2). In the context of Higher Education, decolonisation mainly entails the restoration of knowledge suppressed or destroyed by colonialism (aka epistemicide). Complete decolonisation is seen as incompatible with the neoliberal enterprise of the contemporary university (Thomas, 2020, p.1) which ‘remains principally governed by the West for the West’ (Bhambra et al, 2018, p.5-6).
Decoloniality: Based on the premise that ‘coloniality survives colonialism’ (Maldonado-Torres in Ortiz, 2023) and requires an epistemological ‘delinking’ from knowledge structures imposed by the West (Tsang, 2021). Decoloniality calls for ‘a practice of imagining and acknowledging alternative ways of knowing, sensing and being’ (Ortiz, 2023) as well as the intertwining of these states.
Degree Awarding Gap: A term referring to differentials in attainment between different student groups, e.g. between White students and racially minoritised students. Sabri (2023) explains how ‘earlier studies refer to ‘achievement’ and ‘under-performance’ of Black and minority ethnic students and following these ‘the attainment gap’ became widely adopted’, a term that has subsequently been seen to promote a deficit view. The term ‘degree awarding gap’ is currently used to prevent such deficit thinking by focussing attention on university academic processes instead of students.