I begin by outlining my positionality as the author of this thesis for readers to know how my identity and experience has informed my approach to the projects and this research. I am the offspring of a white, English mother and a brown, Panjabi father born in Kenya in 1960, a nation then under British rule. My father’s parents moved from the Panjab to Kenya and then the UK as political/economic migrants with British passports, taking advantage of opportunities created by the British Empire. They never returned to the Panjab or had the desire to, seeing the UK, London specifically, as their desired destination, the land of opportunity, with their social status changed as Empire subjects. This is a similar story for many racially minoritised people in the UK today. However not all Empire subjects have been treated the same. While all have experienced forms of racism and discrimination, those who migrated from the Caribbean as part of the Empire Windrush have suffered distinct injustices, historically and more recently with the Windrush scandal (Teffera, 2023). In this respect I am privileged, not only in being British born but to Panjabi, Sikh immigrants, a model minority aligned to whiteness (Kaur Life, 2020). As my parents separated, I was brought up by my white mother, in a white, working-class suburb of east London. I was not encouraged to practice Sikhism or speak Panjabi; my father rejected these and masked his ethnic difference to assimilate into white British culture, prompted by frequent experiences of racism and racial violence. Even with my White/Panjabi privilege, light brown skin, English first name and native English accent, I have still experienced racism through my life, most recently in 2019.
Panesar, L. (2007) ‘The Smoking Suffragettes’
Experiencing and witnessing prejudice and discrimination based on race, class and gender, informs my commitment to racial and social justice, something underpinning my career to date. My work as a Fine Art undergraduate responded to issues of social hierarchy and control and after graduating I practiced live art to directly engage people with such issues. This included ‘The Smoking Suffragettes’ (2007), a public intervention based on the history of female liberation being used to sell cigarettes to women, and ‘Good Vibrations’ (2007), a faux market research exercise that interrogated treatments for female mental illness. In 2011, I was employed by Louis Vuitton to run The Academy of Youth Mythology, a summer school for young people in London to explore live art as a vehicle for addressing social issues (Dazed Digital). I initially worked in HE to fund my artistic practice and I taught art and design students how to think and write critically about historical and contemporary practices. I enjoyed lecturing and supporting students to develop socially conscious practices, so I stopped making art to teach full time and complete an MA in Creative Arts Education (2014-16). It was then that I learnt about the then-called ‘attainment gaps’ and calls for decolonisation, and for my first MA project I tested the ‘Campus Cultural Climate’ (Ancis et al, 2000; UCOP, 2014) through an anonymous survey with students I was teaching. For my final MA project, I completed a statistical analysis of students attending study support sessions based on their ethnicity and found students categorised as ‘BAME’ to be attending sessions more frequently than white students, despite the common perception that BAME student attainment would improve if students in this group engaged more with study support. I felt compelled to act on what I had learnt from this research, so after publishing my MA study (Panesar, 2017), I turned my attention towards staff and curriculum development.
Panesar, L. (2007) ‘Good Vibrations’
In 2017, I was employed as an Educational Developer (Diversity and Inclusion) for UAL’s Teaching and Learning Exchange, a senior academic role in which I worked with students as partners for project 1: Decolonising the Arts Curriculum Zine 1 (2018). I then moved to UAL's London College of Communication (LCC) to lead staff-student projects aimed at co-developing anti-racist, decolonised curricula, including project 2: LCC Changemakers and project 3: Decolonising Wikipedia Network. These projects made space for diverse stories and histories to be shared, including stories of marginalisation, discrimination and more within arts HE. It was my responsibility to create and hold these spaces, to support contributors and to take care of their contributions. At the time, I was not approaching the work as research and did not have the view to later frame it as practice research for a PhD by Portfolio. I had thought about taking the projects into a more traditional PhD programme, and had a proposal accepted for a practice-based PhD at UAL to investigate the 1911 Festival of Empire (which eventually became part of project 3). However, I did not want the pressure of doctoral study influencing the development of the projects.
The projects had their own life force and energy, shaped and fuelled by the interests and passions of those involved. I believed then and I still believe now that framing the projects as PhD research at the time would have compromised that energy and momentum and exacerbated any power imbalance between me and those involved, as it would have positioned others as objects of study, their experience being extracted for my gain. This did not and still does not align with my ways of working, as a practitioner more interested in collective action than individual analysis, inclined more towards practice and action than academic writing. And so, I parked the idea of a PhD and I chose to follow the momentum and my intuition to lead one project into the next, with each evolving through opportunity, circumstance and the energy and indignance of those involved. In July 2022, I left UAL to be a Lecturer in Higher Education at the University of Kent where I continue to play an active role in academic and curriculum development, and where I have had the distance and space to critically frame and reflect on these three projects in retrospect.