Final Reflections

Through processes of critical reflection and literature review, I have developed understanding of practice research as a methodology and the ability to apply this retrospectively to the projects as practice for this PhD thesis. Following this, engagement with literature enabled me to develop understanding of Critical Race Theory, it’s key principles and the Critical Race method of counter-storytelling and to identify examples of this within the three curriculum decolonisation projects I led at UAL. Engagement with extant theoretical and methodological literature supported me to articulate synergies and distinctions between decolonial, decolonisation and Critical Race theories and methods in HE curriculum reform and to deepen my understanding of the community-building and radical space-making aspects of counter-storytelling. 

Secondary data analysis enabled me to illustrate how counter-storytelling Communities of Practice and Participatory Cultures featured across the diverse sites and spaces of the projects. The wider literature I reviewed on this has significantly increased my appreciation of how zines create ‘spaces and tools for cultural revolt and imagining different futures’ (Scheper, 2023, p.22) and offer an ‘un-mediated, personal, medium for people of colour to communicate the truth of their experiences’ (Brewis et al, 2020, p.53). I applied these ideas to the other user-generated project sites of YouTube and Wikipedia and through this recognised how the media of the projects align with their messages, more than I initially believed. Through articulating how my own identity and experiences inform my positionality as an artist, educator, curator and project leader, I have also come to recognise that counter-storytelling has always been a valuable part of my practice, an implicit logic I have been able to identify by reflecting on the projects through the lens of practice research.  

I note here some of things that I have not done in this thesis and from this identify areas for potential further research. I have not evaluated the impact of counter-storytelling on audiences, curricula, institutions and leaders, nor attempted to collate or present any new or existing data on this here, as this has been and continues to be undertaken separately at UAL. While impact assessment of such educational interventions is necessary, it needs to account for the endemic, multi-causal nature of structural racism and coloniality (Singh, 2022; Sabri, 2023), and for the many other interventions and strategies that have been attempted to tackle this. While the three projects reflected on here are distinct and were novel for UAL at the time, they are three of many such projects and interventions across UAL and the sector. The PhD by Portfolio does not require candidates to assess impact, but to instead articulate the underpinnings of selected projects, which prompted me to examine the theoretical and methodological underpinnings discussed in this thesis. 

I have presented an appreciative inquiry of such theories and methods and have not discussed much of their limitations or criticisms. I write about Critical Race Theory at a time when academics are being discouraged and/or penalised for doing so. At the time of submitting this thesis in August 2024, seven states in the US had ‘passed legislation aimed at restricting public colleges’ teaching or training related to critical race theory’, causing academics to be cancelled or self-censor for fear of losing their jobs (Golden, 2023). This situation is rapidly escalating with Trump’s return to power. The increasing resistance to CRT is concerning but not surprising or new. Warmington (2020) offers a historical timeline of CRT’s impact and opposition in the UK and explains that ‘attempts to devalue CRT have... an unfortunate resonance at a time when young activists are pressing for the decolonisation of higher education.’ He outlines some of the causes of this devaluing and opposition, some of which stems from the pessimism in CRT’s ‘stark rejection of liberal models of race equality: a rejection rooted in its understanding of racism as socially pervasive, a permanent feature of modern social formations.’ While this might be cause for pessimism, I have demonstrated here that the Critical Race method of counter-storytelling is a tool for pluriversal imagination, racial justice and harmony while also helping to evidence systematic harm and injustice. Writing this thesis has developed my appreciation for CRT and the value of its methods for racial justice work, and I feel able to advocate for CRT and accept the resistance and opposition it receives as an indication of its power to challenge and transform. 

In this thesis, I have not explicitly discussed the activist nature of this work, and how this plays out in academia. I have written about Wikipedia editing as a form of knowledge activism, in this thesis and in the article with Blumenkron and Goodall (2022). And in Changemakers Talk 2: London x Kent (2022), I talk about changemaking being on a spectrum between radical activism and discreet institutional change. I could write another thesis on activism within the academy and my own personal motivations and agenda as an educator, expanding on points raised in my positionality statement (Chapter 1). There is much literature I could draw upon to inform such reflections, looking at the university as 'a site for an activist and transformative pedagogy and practice’ (Syson, 2020) and potential for ‘academic insurgency’ to ‘transform not only knowledge production but also the academy itself’ (Risam, 2020). This resonates with the Critical Pedagogy values underpinning my practice, informed by the work of Paulo Freire and his emphasis on praxis: 'reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it' (1970, p.51).  

I am interested to know how such activism, insurgency and action-oriented practice happens within academia, whether supported by the institution or despite it. At the time of running the three UAL projects, I felt fully supported by the institution and free to facilitate a collective interrogation of the academy and its curriculum through explicit anti-racist, decolonial lenses. In fact, this aspect of the projects was often celebrated and spotlighted, and our activist intentions were openly discussed in the Changemakers Talk events and DWN panel discussion 3. I believe this reflects the radical, progressive, vanguard nature of the art school, renowned for subversion and challenging the status quo. Now that I am working with academics from other disciplines, I can see how anti-racism and decoloniality play out differently, according to the aims, cultures and histories of those disciplines and professional fields, and the influence of professional regulatory bodies on their curricula, a point I will return to. 

There are other areas of potential further research I would like to note; theories, methodologies and areas of scholarship that could be applied to the projects. Theories around staff-student partnership (Healey et al, 2014) could be applied, on the ‘symbolic and performative’ tendencies of such practices in HE (Sabri, 2023) and ‘critical, participatory and decolonial approaches’ (Islam, 2022). Theories about safety and bravery could be applied to better support partnership spaces and counter-storytelling sites (Arao and Clemens, 2013; BARC Collective, n.d.), and the use of trigger warnings to protect audiences (University of Waterloo 2023; Hanhardt and Puar 2020; Norrie 2022). Scholarship on whiteness and racial trauma in HE could be applied (Keval, 2025) and on curating as anti-racist activism and care (Krasny and Perry, 2023). Principles of compassionate (Ahern, 2019) and trauma-informed pedagogy (Harrison, Burke and Clarke, 2023) could be applied, and scholarship on the therapeutic and emancipatory potential of counter-storytelling and oral-history performance (Owusu Yeboah, 2020) and related methods from the Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 2019). I could also apply: Critical Theory to understand how the projects sought to facilitate ‘practical empowerment, freedom, equality, social justice, democracy and emancipation’ (Cohen et al, 2017, p.52); Catalytic Validity to understand how they ‘intended to act as a spur to social change and transformation’ (p.258); and Standpoint Theory as mentioned by Changemakers Talk panellists Salgado and Thomas and the work of Djamila Ribeiro (2024) to deepen understanding of intersectionality in the projects. These are all areas of interest and potential further research. 

For this practice research thesis, I chose to focus on Critical Race Theory and the Critical Race method of counter-storytelling combined with theories related to counter-storytelling communities and spaces. I decided to focus on these theories as they have not yet been written about in relation to any of these UAL projects; by applying them here I make an original contribution to knowledge and deepen the value of the projects. 

General ‘EDI’, ‘Student Success’ and ‘Attainment’ work has not yet solved the problem of persistent racism and racial inequality in HE, so more specific and specialist theories I believe are needed to understand the distinct nature of institutional racism and its historical origins. CRT offers such understanding, as does decolonial theory, and so these form my theoretical base. I consciously focus on the methods these theories offer for transformation and alternative ways of being, and for inspiring hope and possibility at times when it is easy to feel the opposite. I wanted this thesis to exemplify this through the projects, and to highlight specific approaches used and considerations made for others to know how they can build and support counter-storytelling communities, sites and spaces.  

I make an original contribution by bringing Counter-Storytelling together with Wenger’s Communities of Practice theory. Through doing this, I have developed knowledge of how racialised communities form around shared counter-storytelling goals, imaginations and artifacts. Counter-Storytelling is also said to create and occupy ‘site[s] of radical possibility’ and ‘space[s] of resistance’ (hooks cited in Solorzano and Yosso, 2002, p.36-37). I make an additional original contribution by examining this aspect of the projects in relation to Participatory Culture theories applied to the zine and user-generated sites of YouTube and Wikipedia. With this I have developed knowledge of what counter-storytelling communities and spaces look like and how they operate in the context a metropolitan art school.  

While this offers valuable insights to educators and educational developers in arts HE, the arts-based methods for counter-storytelling, community-building and space-making in each project offer value to other subject disciplines. Since leaving UAL I have taught University of Kent staff on the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education (PGCHE), working mainly with academics from STEM and Social Science subjects, not the arts, and there is an appetite among such academics for creative approaches to understand and address complex matters of educational equity. One academic I’ve worked with is Dr Mwangi Wanjiru, a Barrister, Lecturer in Law and author of ‘Black Iconography and Colonial (re)production at the ICC: (In)dependence Cha Cha Cha?’ (2022). In his book, Wanjiru takes a multi-disciplinary approach to interrogating the treatment of Black men in international law, drawing inspiration from art, poetry, music and architecture: 

‘...to show the effects of the contact between the black body and a Eurocentric law more vividly and how this helps in the performance of power relations in legal contexts’ (p.5-6). 

The British Educational Research Association value such ‘transdisciplinary knowledge creation’ and ‘ideas, methods, techniques, and processes from the arts to help understand and improve education’ (BERA, 2024). Dr Adam Hart is a convenor of BERA’s Art-Based Education Research Special Interest Group and is co-editing a 2025 Bloomsbury book on this. Hart approached me to write about the UAL projects I led for a ‘creative advocacy’ section of the book, in collaboration with others to bring in transdisciplinary examples. I start the chapter with a discussion of the methods used to facilitate counter-storytelling in the UAL projects. After which zine 1 contributor E Okobi writes about her use of the Theatre of the Oppressed (Boal, 2019) with communities at UAL and beyond. Mwangi Wanjiru then ends the chapter writing about his use of arts-based methods in critical legal research and education. 

Although some time has passed since I led the three UAL projects, there is still much interest in them and the invitation to write the Bloomsbury book chapter is one of many invitations I have received to write or speak about them. In February 2024, I spoke about the projects for a webinar on ‘Racial Inequality and the Representation of Marginalised Communities in Creative Education’ (University of the Creative Arts. I also use the zine and YouTube videos as examples of practice on the PGCHE modules I teach and staff development sessions I run, to offer University of Kent academics ideas of how to elicit and use counter-stories to inform curriculum development. The depth of critical reflection I have undertaken for this thesis has helped me to better understand and theoretically frame the UAL projects in a way that constructively informs current and future educational development and boosts my confidence as an educator and educational developer committed to racial justice.