A compelling discussion on the challenges faced by Black PhD students in academia. Guests William Ackah and Madina Wane, co-editors of The Black PhD Experience, offer a nuanced exploration of the lived experiences of Black scholars.
Through personal narratives the book examines systemic barriers, microaggressions, the psychological toll faced by Black students and the strategies they employ to persist.
This episode offers valuable insights for educators, researchers and policymakers seeking to understand and address the urgent need for greater equity and inclusion in higher education.
Listen to the podcast here, or on your favourite podcast platform:
Scroll down for shownotes and transcript.
William Ackah is Senior Lecturer in Black and Community Geographies at Birkbeck, University of London. Madina Wane is a research scientist working in the biomedical sector and the co-founder of non-profit organisation, Black In Immuno.
The Black PhD Experience is available on the Policy Press website. Order here for £19.99.
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Image credit: Jacqueline Darkwa
SHOWNOTES
Read the Leading Routes report.
Timestamps:
1:06 – What are your stories and how did you come to edit the book?
5:59 – Can you talk about the approach you’ve taken with the book?
9:24 – In what ways are widening participation efforts in academia performative?
14:26 – How do individual actions align with structural racism to influence the experience?
19:00 – Can you speak about the drain of the PhD experience?
25:40 – How do black scholars support each other?
35:25 – What fundamental shifts in thinking are needed in higher education to make change possible?
40:17 – Can you talk about the 5 areas for specific action?
49:22 – Can you talk about the fictional last chapter?
Transcript:
(Please note this transcript is autogenerated and may have minor inaccuracies.)
Jess Miles: Welcome to the Transforming Society podcast. My name is Jess Miles, and today I’m speaking to William Ackah and Madina Wane, two of the Co-editors of ‘The Black PhD Experience’, which is a new book out now and published by Policy Press. It confronts the realities of being black in the Academy, with 27 stories in the book that highlight the lived experience of black PhD students.
Amongst many other things the book explains how black students have to wait longer to be accepted into PhD programs, experience bias in grading, have to deal with the impact on their mental well-being, including feelings of isolation and being unsupported by supervisors. Jason Arday’s foreword to the book begins with the idea of a leaking pipeline to explain the absence of black people in academia, but the book makes clear that it’s not so much the pipeline being broken as the valves being regulated.
So welcome, William and Madina. Thank you very much for giving us your time today. It’s a fascinating book, but let’s begin by speaking about you briefly. What are your stories and how did you come to edit ‘The Black PhD Experience’? William, if you want to go first.
William Ackah: Yeah. Thank you, Jess. So I got my PhD from the University of Manchester in 2006, but, how I came to be really involved in the book stemmed from my life at Birkbeck at the University of London, where I teach in the School of Social Sciences. It was in 2012 I started a network with, Professor Robert Beckford supporting Black PhD students.
And we recognized that, we needed a space for our combined PhD students to kind of talk about their work in a safe space. And then what was just meant to initially be just for our students by word of mouth and it mushroomed across London, where a range of students and people in the community just started coming to our meetings and having a space to talk about their experiences with a black POV.
JM: How did they find you? Was it on social media?
WA: No, because this was that 2012, wasn’t so much social media then, but it’s just through the students sharing with their friends and them sharing with others. People kind of got to got to know about it. Later on 2019, 2020, it became a wider group. I started working with Leading Routes, Blacks in academia and, Doctor Gabriella Beckles-Raymond.
And then that network kind of branched into supporting students online, and that was kind of a national group. And again, listening to those students talk about their experiences as black PhD students, and the microaggressions, particularly getting funding, then kind of led us to think about, well, what can we do about this? And this was then, when I then joined with colleagues across different disciplines and other editors of the book, to then, and then bringing about the kind of the beginning of the framework having been set and our interest then converged from the different editors to kind of bring the project together.
JM: Yeah. Madina, how about you?
Madina Wane: So I completed my PhD in kind of 2020, 2021. So bang in during the Covid pandemic, and during the kind of resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. And during that period, whilst I was finishing my PhD, I ended up being kind of brought in to a lot of EDI conversations, conversations around, especially in 2020 about, you know, what my institution could be doing better with regards to supporting black students.
I’d already been involved with some EDI initiatives before, and, that’s equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives. And I was increasingly kind of making connections and being part of networks that were supporting black scientists in my case, and what I felt being part of those initiatives in 2020 was, I think there was a lot of push from institutions to kind of do things with urgency, but not necessarily with depth and I was finding that myself and, you know, kind of a small number of other black PhD students at my institution were kind of the same faces being brought into these, into these conversations.
JM: It’s a thing, right? Yeah.
MW: Exactly. And it just felt, to me it just felt like there needed to be more work done to acknowledge that, yes, whilst there are small numbers of black students in individual departments and institutions, actually what I was seeing from these kind of other networks, like the ones that William is speaking about, is that actually, if you look at us across the across the UK, there’s a lot of us who are a) already doing a lot of this work that’s already supporting black students, but b) that like, we are kind of isolated institutionally.
And so for me, joining this project it felt like we were able to bring our stories together, and one of the coeditors on the team I’d actually kind of work with her. She did a previous, her master’s thesis was on looking at the experience of black PhD students in the institution. We’re both in the same institution. And so it was really nice to be able to bring in someone who, yeah, had kind of done some of this work already and then kind of bring it to a larger scale through, you know, working with these different networks and bringing a wider group together.
JM: Yeah. So I mean, just to talk about the book a bit, I was taken as I read the book how, it’s made up of like these 27 first person accounts, and they really deepen our understanding of the experience, I think, and take us beyond like the percentages and targets that like so often presented, or the black people in the EDI groups and in the photos and that kind of thing.
So, can you talk a little bit about the approach you’ve taken with the book?
MW: Because we were coming together with already wanting to build a sense of community, and we felt that a lot of kind of initiatives and in the UK were geared around, I guess, not necessarily centering the voices of black scholars and black students really, really wanted to make sure that our contributors had that chance to kind of share their own story, in their own words.
There’s so much of academia that’s quite extractive and kind of, you know, sees black people as research subjects rather than kind of valuing our own contributions. And so I think part of the interest in wanting to use this first person narrative was to make sure that, you know, each contributor was kind of seen as an expert of their own experience in their own right, and not just, you know, a kind of data point that someone can use and analyze for their own purposes.
And it also just helped us to build, again, a kind of community within this project. So we were really intentional about not just, you know, collecting these stories to have a book, but actually building a collective around that that could provide some level of support throughout the process. And, you know, as these, students and scholars were kind of going through their own, academic journey.
JM: Yeah.
WA: Yeah. And can I just add as well. So we were really excited with the range of contributors. So in terms of age, subjects being studied, some doctoral students in their early 20s, right into their 50s and 60s, from the hard sciences, to the social sciences and humanities. And various intersectionalities, race, gender, disability and so on. So it really gives, a broad picture of what the black PhD experience was like.
And we had many meetings both during the Covid periods, online, so that people could get to share their experiences in a safe space like Madina said, and then then work at a format that could really bring those stories to the fore. And like you said, you know, try to move beyond that kind of the data and the statistics to really get the lived experience of what it’s like to be a student at a UK university.
JM: Yeah, and they’re so lovely, because each story really does stand alone. And you do really get a sense of like the positive and negative that the people have been through and yeah, it’s quite it’s quite unusual. as academic books go, I think, and I really valued that reading it. To go on a bit to like the subject, what we’re talking about.
Think higher education in Britain, as you say in the book’s introduction, kind of believes itself to be liberal, tolerant, fair, and there’s this idea that anyone can succeed based on merit, and the book just turns this on its head. And so in what ways are widening participation efforts in academia a bit performative and actually failing to consider the needs of those entering these white spaces?
MW: I think for me, one of the most striking aspects of the stories was because we gave contributors kind of free rein to talk about what they want to talk about and, you know, kind of present their own narrative and their own perspective of their story. We found that a lot of contributors would talk about the kind of early stage of their educational journeys.
And right from, you know, kind of early school experiences up until the point where they’re applying or doing their PhD. And to me, it really reflects this idea that I think a lot of academic, you know, higher education initiatives tend to engage, there are some that engage early on in education, but I think they don’t necessarily consider the fullness of what it means to be a black person in the UK.
And so you have so many, you know, we know that systemic racism exists at so many different levels in our society. And so to only try and tackle and address individual elements of it and expect that, okay, now you’re going to have, you know, a lot more students who are able to access this or when they are able to access our institutions they’ll you know, going to feel like they belong here and you know, they’re going to have the right support.
I don’t think current initiatives really bring together all of these different facets, whether it’s, you know, economic issues or whether it’s the fact that, you know, someone might have had negative experiences in terms of the kind of teacher experiences they’ve had early on that might influence, you know, how they see themselves. I think a lot of that isn’t necessarily addressed by these kind of one off initiatives.
And so you do end up having students who only kind of only able to access certain types of support that might not be particularly helpful for the entirety of their experience.
JM: So it focuses on the experience within the bubble of academia, perhaps, and doesn’t quite take into account enough what’s led people to there and what kinds of people they are. And that kind of thing.
MW: Exactly. And just what comes next? You know, when you think about the kind of whole pipeline of, you know, what? What are black students going to go on to next? Like, I think that’s another big gap that’s not really addressed because we have a section at the end, towards the end of the book about, scholars who have finished their PhD process, and several of them do talk about the challenge about progressing into, you know, whether it’s, you know, kind of academic, academic career or kind of other aspects of getting a job in the UK market.
WA: Yeah. And, and I would say that as well. I think one of the things we tried to do in the book is to say that we’re not divorced from our communities. So in the same way that our community has been impacted by structural racism, the way that, we the way that our grandparents, our forebears, entered Britain, what they were forced to endure, the work they did in the kind of racist environment black students are not divorced from that.
And so to on the other end of the scale, universities are not divorced from that, you know, they are part of an institutionalized, structured racist system so when they say, well, let’s widen participation and encourage more black people to enter into this system. But it’s like they’re not willing to change the system. They’re not willing to acknowledge that the system has these racist impacts.
And you say, well, come in and and you’ll be fine. As almost if to say, well, if there’s any issues, it’s the students that have deficit, not the system. I think what the book exposes is to kind of say well actually, the black students are very talented, have great ability. It’s the system that has these inbuilt problems that need to be acknowledged and need to be addressed.
JM: Yeah. And that actually shows, I mean I’m think, it’s so many industries as well. It’s not just academia, I think about publishing and it’s the same in publishing like exactly the same in publishing. So I think there’s resonance of your book like for people outside of academia as well, and the whole structure of the book does give this holistic feel like it does go all the way through, like the looking for funding and then the experience of actually doing the PhD.
And then like you say, what happens afterwards? It just really paints the whole picture. I wanted to also ask just quickly, like there’s quite a bit in the book about people’s positive and negative experiences they’ve had with supervisors and things. So how do individual actions align with this structural racism to influence the experience of black scholars?
MW: Yeah, I think it’s, kind of building on William’s point about, you know, the system in academia itself is kind of the problem. And one thing that you can kind of pull out is within academia, there are these kind of incentives or I guess, social norms for how people are expected to behave and, and who is kind of rewarded and what type of behaviors are rewarded within academia.
And so I think what ends up happening is, you know, as a black student, as a black scholar, you’re going to be faced with a system that kind of is quite hostile. And it’s feels, especially when you look at the different stories, it feels like somewhat luck of the draw if you’re going to end up, you know, encountering people who might be supportive.
And so can individually support you, even if that doesn’t address, you know, the totality of black students, you know, in a particular institution. But on the flip side, again, through kind of luck, chance or luck of the draw, you might end up encountering someone who actually is perpetuating these kind of harms. And the problem is, there isn’t really good systems of like redress to know what to do when those harms do happen, or for the institutions to actually be able to tackle them.
And similarly, the kind of more supportive behaviors aren’t often kind of institutionally rewarded. And so they tend to be an exception to the rule rather than the norm. So I think it’s really a lot of it, I think is down to fundamentally, what is this- what does this system of academia value? And often it’s not that kind of broad, supportive, kind of inclusive system that we know black students need, and actually everyone does need to grow.
JM: Yeah. I think just to give an example, there was one story in the book, was it Sigourney’s story, and she talked about having an interview, and just one person on the panel was basically racist, weren’t they? And then that it’s kind of that like that, you saying about the luck and the chance, and who you happen to meet along the way.
It just that that is how it works, isn’t it? Did you have anything to add to that, William?
WA: Yeah, that, when you read Sigourney’s story and almost like the, that one of the interviewers just looked at her and was just like immediately dismissive. Asking her questions that were not answerable and even when she eventually came through and answered some of these unanswerable question. He was still confident she doesn’t fit. And if you think about it, a sense of institutions almost having a kind of a colonial hangover that, that academics, they’re the ones with the knowledge and the students have to come in and acquiesced in order to prove themselves. Yeah, yeah. But actually as black students, we try to challenge that cause we actually we do bring skills, we do bring knowledge, we do bring experience, and we want to be co-creators of knowledge. And when you trying to upend some of these kind of colonial processes and legacies, like you have a lot of people who’ve grown up in that system so they’re steeped in it so they feel we can’t, if you ask questions when you say look we’re going for a different approach is that then challenging my academic integrity and my my knowledge as opposed to opening up for it to be a much more facilitated and co-creative process. That’s one of the real stigmas and real issues that emerge out of the book. We’ve got talented black scholars who are kind of feeling out of place because the system doesn’t have enough stretch or give, or it’s not willing to kind of facilitate any new ideas in the way, new knowledge, new people, and actually that’s such a contradiction, because that’s the very basis of universities, creates new knowledge, new ways of thinking and new ways of doing things.
JM: And it’s just really, actually, urgently needed, isn’t it, as well. And yeah, another theme in the book that really jumped out of me was almost like the exhaustion of the experience and the resilience that black people, need to have as part of it. And it’s like to go down to the individual stories, because it’s really great to have these examples.
April-Louise had this analogy of like swimming amongst whiteness, and Esther spoke about just never being able to be their whole selves. So I’d love you to speak a little bit about that kind of the drain of the experience.
MW: You know, one thing that, we might touch on later as well, but one thing that we didn’t we weren’t able to capture with the book was actually the students who hadn’t completed a PhD and the students who didn’t apply for one in the first place. And I think to me, that’s kind of it reflects what you’re kind of saying.
We do hear a lot of the stories, obviously, in the book they’re people who have started, you know, are currently doing or have completed a PhD. And within that group, yeah. You do hear how much kind of work they’ve had to do again, consistently, often since kind of early childhood to get access to educational opportunities push back when, you know, teachers have kind of not believed in them or tried to deter them from, from progressing further.
But I think to me, you know, we know that between the undergraduate stage in UK universities to postgraduates, particularly for doctoral studies, there is a huge reduction in the percentage of black students. And so I think to be able to understand, you know, not just those who have had the right support and, you know, the kind of opportunities to be able to progress, but who actually hasn’t been able to because the toll has been so great, you know, for whatever reason.
So it’s not a kind of direct answer to, you know, the, the challenges that are portrayed by the book. But I do think it’s important to point out that, you know, I think there’s a lot missing about what toll this kind of persistence, resilience, has on black students.
JM: Is that what the chapter, The Missing Ones is about? Which is just a blank chapter, isn’t it?
MW: Yeah. So that chapter actually originally we had, an additional contributor, who had submitted an essay, unfortunately, you know, when it came time to actually, you know, finalizing the manuscript, we weren’t able to get in contact with them. And we we haven’t been able to find out what’s happened to them. And so, you know, that was obviously quite, you know, it’s quite disheartening to see that, especially, you know, we have no information about what happened to them, but also we felt it was important to be able to reflect the fact that this student and so many others actually aren’t their kind of histories and their struggles actually haven’t been told, because there’s almost this, yeah, invisible, invisiblizing of the process. And it’s really hard to capture people who have kind of not fallen through the cracks. But, you know, who’ve kind of had those valves regulated to kind of force them out of that pipeline.
JM: Yeah. Yeah. It was it’s really provocative having that chapter in there. And it does make you stop and think as you go through. So yeah.
WA: Yeah, yeah. That yeah. There’s that, that sense. Yeah that there are silent victims of the institution life. That comes from being a part of this process in the sense that, the people who wrote have been resilient enough to tell their stories and to come through, but it does come across. And so some people and that’s how we wanted to kind of recognize who were not able to articulate that.
We want to include their stories that were not written. That is a story that we want people to reflect on. And then just coming back to your earlier point about that resilience. Amira Samatar, in her chapter ‘Through, Around or Over the Gate? Navigating Academia from a Black Muslim Woman’s Perspective’, and she put it in poetic form. I just wanted to read a bit of this poem and it’s called masks.
And she writes:
You did the dance
faked the smile
hid the tears
made someone comfortable enough to ask you a question
And remembered to be grateful for the opportunity
Well done.
You can clock off for the day, I mean night now.
Take a sip of water and leave.
Just don’t swallow all of your hope when the first bit of air hits your throat.
You’ll need that little piece if you want to come back tomorrow.
I think that really speaks. You know that sometimes you got to put on a mask. You’ve got to perform in a certain way. Sometimes you challenge the system, sometimes you go to just struggle on. The goal is to try and make it through. And I think the book really outlines even when students are successful and they get through still takes this toll I think. De-Shaine in the final chapter talks about the tax that we pay.
Equality kind of, get through, you know, one’s mental health and trying to deal with these kind of microagressions, but it’s almost like you do need a mask or an armor if you’re going to get through the, through the system. So it speaks both to the tenacity of the students that have that and to come through.
But then we have to ask the question, well, actually, why do you need that? Should you need that? I mean, you think you should you should you shouldn’t need that. And that speaks to the need for institutional change.
JM: Yeah. I’m going to go and talk about resistance in a minute. That’s my next question. But yeah, it shouldn’t be, resistance shouldn’t be needed should it. And it’s very I suppose reading the book it’s kind of easy to go, oh, great. And then people got their PhDs and it’s like they’ve won and oh that’s really good. But it’s in spite of everything, isn’t it?
It’s not because of anything, in the system. So going to resistance and it’s I know something that you said in the intro that you’ve both been involved in groups and stuff. So how do black scholars support each other to persist in these systems that are structurally anti black? It feels like the void in support is being filled by support groups like the ones you’ve spoken about.
So what kinds of things does that involve?
MW: So there’s a whole host of different groups and a lot of them have kind of flourished and kind of grown, I think, at least from my perspective, since I’ve been in, since I kind of did my academic studies over the last few years, I think they’re quite adaptable. Because a lot of these groups are not institutionally based, and a lot of them are I guess, what you’d call more grassroots.
And they’re really set up by people who need that, the groups themselves to support them. So one of our co editors De-Shaine Murray, he set up a group for African-Caribbean students in response to the 2019 Leading Roots report, which showed the kind of huge lack of funding going to black PhD students in the UK.
JM: We should put a link to that in the show notes, actually. I’ll do that.
MW: Yeah, it’s a really powerful report. And I think one of the key statistics, which, you know, we’ve talked we’ve spoken how statistics don’t give everything. But I think in this case it was a really powerful, almost call to action that there were only 30 black Caribbean students being funded out of almost 20,000. And, you know, De-Shaine Murray is a Caribbean student himself.
And I think that initiated trying to just find this 30 because, you know, already you’re saying, you know, there’s so few of us, but that that there is a community. and so I think a lot of groups are just people who are feeling isolated, feeling like there’s something missing and want to be able to build a community around themselves.
That’s certainly why I’ve kind of developed some of the networks I’ve developed. and, you know, there’s a whole range of different things that these groups do, whether it’s just having like a space for people to share their frustrations, questions, you know, they might not necessarily want to ask a supervisor or they might not have a good relationship with some of their supervisors or colleagues about being able to kind of share and celebrate, much like the book is trying to do.
JM: Yeah.
MW: But yeah, I think they’re just very flexible. They don’t have a ton of kind of infrastructure support. So I think there’s still the risk of a lot of these groups kind of come and go. And that’s not necessarily because they stopped being important or needed, but because these are people, again, who’re kind of volunteering their time and setting stuff up when there isn’t like a a really.
Yeah, kind of strong and sustainable system to support them.
JM: They’re quite often, they seem to be quite often subject focused. So there’s like black in immuno and things like that, which I thought was quite cool.
MW: Yeah. Some of them are a lot of these groups kind of came out in 2020, the kind of black in X kind of groups, as they’re called. But there are obviously a lot of other groups that have kind of predate that. and I think for me, one of the really interesting things was to learn more about the kind of black supplementary school system in the UK and how that was set up.
I, I want to say in maybe the 60s as a response to the failings of the British educational system, specifically with regards to kind of school aged children, you know, a lot of these groups, you know, in higher education, I see them as a kind of a legacy of, you know, all kind of a continuation of that sort of legacy.
So I think it’s important to say that this kind of resistance has existed, you know, for a long time and, you know, even, you know, pre-dating kind of, you know, going back to kind of colonial times.
JM: Yeah. William.
WA: Yeah, I think, one of the great things for me is kind of in being one of the editors of the book was to then see the range of networks and, and in a sense then when we all came together to discuss the group finding out that, ah, there are all these networks taking place in spite, offering support to the students in different ways for sometimes even for us, you can like believe you’re in this working alone, supporting this group of of, over here and again, because one of the things about the network that I’m a part of is that because it was a safe space for all the things that we did.
We had to keep private. So, you know, in some ways we we only used to do a set amount of promotion because people have, they need a safe space, maybe talk sensitively about what’s going on in your institution, what’s going on with their supervisors. They want to kind of test out ideas if they’re trying to develop a theoretical framework, some of that perspective, who feel like inside their institutional space they’re being marginalized or not accepted, we gave them the space to test it and friendly feedback.
So yeah. Yeah, I think this would really work. This won’t work. They talk to their peers and they’re supportive. And then what we found is that people could then use that space to be empowered and then be affirmed. And then go on to do some better work and then go back into then institution to then achieve. So those networks really do provide kind of an important source like Madina outlined.
Most of us that were doing those things, we were doing them outside.
JM: Yeah, yeah. Extra.
WA: Yeah yeah yeah yeah. and a lot of students were doing it themselves. So, imagine in the book outlines that you’ve got people they’re doing their PhD and they’re running a support network supporting other students. But it’s really taking on a lot, a lot of labor.
JM: Coordinating any kind of group is a huge amount of work isn’t it. And kind of supporting people and keeping people invested. What you said there also made me remember that so much of a PhD is about like presenting your work to groups of people, isn’t it? And discussing your work at conferences and things. So that must have been a really valuable thing again, and it really shouldn’t be needed.
But to provide that space for people to kind of test ideas and then go in with confidence, more confidence is, yeah, PhD isn’t just about sitting writing quietly by yourself, is it?
WA: Yeah, precisely. Yeah. And and often times I think, again, that part of certain strands of academia is that whether you go to conferences or present in seminars, they can be very hypercritical spaces.
JM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So kind of because they’re supposed to be. But then if you’ve got that extra layer of being a black person in there. Yeah, yeah.
MW: I think that also, just to build a little bit on what William’s talking about in the sense of, you know, spaces being kind of, yeah, hyper critical and and needing kind of safe spaces for that. It also does make me question. I’m always asking myself like, why does academia do things that feel like they’re quite harmful to people and that sense that you know, what’s seen as rigorous scholarship, I think, is something we really have to question.
And to me, it’s one of the like kind of key issues that does mean that academia kind of gatekeeps and tries to kind of push out certain modes of thought and certain ways of doing scholarship. And because, you know, being, you know, connected to community and asking questions and doing research that is important to your community, especially as black people, is something that comes up again and again in the book.
And, you know, much other kind of research on this. It just means that a lot of the things that, you know, we’re interested in doing and exploring is not necessarily supported by what’s considered kind of academic research. And so you’re automatically kind of pushed out of that box. But also it then means that if you look at things like funding, it also means that actually certain certain types of research, are not well funded are not going to get certain types of grants.
And we mentioned at some point in the book the fact that there was a major master’s course for kind of African history that was, canceled, I think last year, that was run by Professor Hakim Adi, and it was one of the few courses that could actually center kind of black and African history in the UK at postgraduate level.
So again, it just shows that, you know, on a kind of structural level, a lot of the work that black academics are interested in and approaches are not being valued. And so you are going to get you’re going to need, you know, other kind of mechanisms to compensate.
JM: I’m so into this is just a general line of thinking, because it’s so important like academia is just so restrictive, isn’t it? From like the science, how things have to be scientific and proven in a particular way and then written down in a particular way. And yeah, and I think this possibly also applies to like people with like neurodiversity and things like that.
Just anything different just does get squeezed out, which kind of, takes me to my next question, which is this thing about I wanted to ask about this thing about interest convergence and critical race theory. So that would say that change only really happens when there’s a vested interest, like basically when there’s something in it for white people to, to benefit from the change.
So what fundamental shifts in thinking do you think need to happen in higher education to get towards that and make change possible? Maybe I’m being a bit too negative. Is that really the only way change is going to happen is if there’s benefit to white people too?
WA: I think, there’s a mixture, yeah. So, change doesn’t happen without black struggle and and and and black push for change. Just like what’s happened in the wake of, George Floyd’s, the push for Black Lives Matter in, in different spaces, including the university then has led to certain shifts. We’ve already mentioned the leading roots report and after that report came out and the activism behind it, that was when the Office for Students and Research England then set aside a special fund to encourage participation for black and underrepresented groups at PhD level.
And without the push, that change wouldn’t have emerged. Not until I would say in terms of the kind of interest convergence that that maybe one small, small way is actually useful. Institutions need to they need to kind of see the production of black scholars as an asset, just as they get esteem for things like REF and TEF these are the kinds of things that they value.
How the numbers of black PhD students, the number of black scholars, those things almost need to be put that level as target. Your marker of esteem. Now, if you’re if you’re good at that, you’re highly ranked institution. If you’re badly ranked that speaks to you not being a very good institution. And if funding was attached to that…
JM: You’d see things happening quite quickly, wouldn’t you then.
WA: We’d certainly see change at then end, if you are given more funding because of your progress in reaching those targets. And if you were punished or given less funding, for not meeting those targets. Yeah, we’d start having much more on the agenda and would actually take seriously as opposed to a lot of the time. My statements were pure activism.
JM: Yeah. Madina.
MW: Yeah, that’s a really interesting point. I think I’m still quite like, cynical. Of I guess how change happens in academic spaces, you know, I think, you know, there is, for example, like a race equality charter that’s kind of come out in, I can’t remember when, but, it’s around and universities can kind of sign up to it voluntarily and kind of measure how well they’re doing on race equality, I guess for me, if institutions as they are now were to start looking at these kind of markers, even if they took them more seriously in the sense of there was more of, kind of benefit attached to them. I guess my worry is that they could still end up doing quite performative actions.
And some of this is comes from personal experience. As to, you know, being like the only black PhD student in, you know, a department or, you know, very small number in an institution and kind of being almost sometimes it feels kind of, you know, using my achievements as a kind of, you know, PR status thing. So I think there’s like, there’s something about almost maybe there needs to be like, some kind of external accountability for, like how well institutions are doing, like in the wake of 2020, where a lot of institutions did start, you know, putting out some initiatives and releasing statements and so on.
I am really curious as to like, you know, when you look back now in 2024 and even, you know, say like ten years after, like, will anyone actually be checking to see what these institutions have done? And, and in a kind of really meaningful
JM: A lot was said around that time, wasn’t it.
MW: Yeah. So it’s probably quite hard to.
JM: No, but I mean, like all sorts of working groups were set up saying all sorts of things. And you do wonder, a few years on, how many in how many places is that kind of still being pushed forward? That’s like about mindset shift and like big changes that need to happen. But at the end of the book, you outline five areas for specific action that, while it does only scratch the surface, it does give some clear ways forward. Could you talk us through what these five points are and also maybe say what you’d like PhD supervisors to take away from the book?
WA: So I think, the first one was, transparency. Yeah, that that certainly the need for the PhD process to be a lot clearer and much better explained. Again, a number of the chapters in the book and students kind of going around, applying to different places, getting rejected and not knowing why or going for interviews. So you need a much more transparent,
JM: So things like feedback and more guidance and more information.
WA: Yes. And just openness actually. How do you apply? What are the criteria? Very different in very different institutions. Different departments. It’s quite an opaque process compared to if you like undergraduate studies and UCAS where it’s uniform. PhD’s, they can be very individual. Your supervisor.
JM: Yeah.
WA: You know, like what you were thinking about doing will it be this, will it do that? But if you don’t have those connections. Then you’d never know. That’s why it’s certainly a key area. You also outlined the need for support. We’ve spoken about the mental stresses and strain that structural racism does to to black students and number of students in the book talk about the stress it places on their mental health, the need for support is also a key area of concern for us.
Then also processes for dealing with racism and bullying. Students experience challenges with their supervisors. Again, most of the processes are internal and and the PhD process obviously there’s a some strong power dynamics at play where your supervisor is in a lot of power and you as a student in a very, you know, weakened situation, having challenges and things are not having any.
JM: Processes need to take that power dynamic into account don’t they?
WA: Yeah. And then we’ve spoken about, the black support groups playing a really important role in supporting students so that most of these, run by students themselves in their own spare time. We put forward the idea that those need to be funded and supported, taken into account. As part of the actual PhD work, PhD workloads and not seen as something separate and isolated.
JM: Is there any funding at the moment for black support groups?
MW: Yeah. Not not concretely. There is some ongoing work being done by the Wellcome Trust who specifically have a program where they’re looking into how they can support these black support networks and kind of grassroot groups. This is very, very early stage. I think they kind of first announced it maybe last year. I think it is encouraging to see one of the UK’s biggest research funders to, you know, have highlighted this and be kind of making conscious effort to do so.
But yeah, I think it’s, you know, it’s going to need a lot of, a lot of work to actually build something which sustainably provides those resources and that support. So ultimately it’s still very early days.
WA: Then obviously the PhD process, the role of the supervisor is, crucial to actually then update the training for PhD supervisors, understanding their roles, understanding the power dynamics, the need for race equality across what it is they’re doing and the need to kind of treat students with, dignity. Kind of outlined in some respects while involved, the kind of co-creation, of knowledge, not just in the sense of where you have bad supervisory practices is tantamount to kind of use and abuse.
Where you’ve just got a body doing work for you. No, you’re developing future scholars, future practitioners. And that’s, the training definitely needs to be updated and systemitized across the board. And then the final one was about both demystifying the PhD and what it involves. But then also the fact that now because access is being broadened and that more black students are entering into doing PhD studies that there then needs to be clear progression pathways post again, part of the problem with widening access is you create all these expectation, come and do this.
Your life is going to be better and your career will be better. And then actually then you get left you that pathways out of the PhD into the same level academic jobs.
MW: I guess maybe just to provide some context about how we put some of these kind of conclusions and recommendations together. We are very conscious that there has been a lot of work in the sector already that have highlighted, you know, really tangible areas for change. So we didn’t want to repeat what that work has already done, partially because, you know, it’s already out there.
And we wanted to highlight the stories in the book, but also because we wanted to kind of intentionally point to the fact that institutions are not necessarily taking those recommendations and advice on board. But we did want to include some kind of concrete points that people could use to help people kind of take away, you know, some, I guess, action points from the book.
I guess to me, a lot of these recommendations are kind of underpinned by the idea that you need like a wider kind of change in the culture, like the research culture in academia, to really enable some of these practices to change. And I think that’s really challenging because these are very kind of established, ingrained practices. But I do think they could be it could be really transformative.
So again, thinking about, you know, how we understand there’s a lot of talk about like excellence, right. We have the Research Excellence framework, for example. And yeah, thinking about how knowledge is made and who’s considered to be a scholar. And you know, how how even things like research has communicated, you know, very used to kind of having these quite technical academic texts and again, coming back down to community and understanding, how can you actually bring wider communities into the process of, academic research and what does that look like?
I think changing a lot of that fundamental research culture will go a long way to enabling the points that William was talking about, about support, about demystifying the process, because, again, you know, if you don’t demystify the it’s one thing to demystify the process for students who already kind of started their route into academia. They’re doing an undergraduate course.
You know, a lot of, students who go on to doctoral studies, you know, I think generally have an easier time if they come from Russell Group universities. And so, you know, demystifying actually extends beyond just, you know, students who’re probably already better placed to go on to PhDs, but also to go into like more broadly, the education system in the UK and in the context of black scholars, you know, black communities in the UK, that that’s one of the focuses for, you know, our own project.
We want to make sure that this work speaks to people’s families and friends. Again, recognizing that a lot of black scholars who do PhDs haven’t necessarily come from a kind of lineage of, you know, family who have also done PhDs or been through that process. So, again, thinking about it in a much broader scale.
JM: Yeah, yeah. The last note, it’s kind of a question, I suppose, but the storytelling is absolutely fundamental to the book, so much so that you end up, you finish the book with a fictional narrative. It’s called Our Ancestors Wildest Dreams. And we’ve talked a bit just then about that more transformative change. But could you just say a little bit about this piece at the end of the book?
Almost like what it meant to you to have that included?
MW: So because the book is already trying to move away from, I guess, the confines of what’s considered kind of traditional academic research or academic texts, we felt that it was important to be able to include something that, yeah, was a bit more imaginative, I guess, rather than just analytical. And also just drawing on, you know, a lot of, I guess, work and practice around this idea of kind of black futures, black Afrofuturism and being able to imagine, you know, a more, yeah, transformed and liberatory future for black people and kind of applying it to, in our context to the kind of academic and research context.
So a lot of the book obviously highlights the real persistent challenges and struggles that black scholars go through. And so giving space for something that does feel more hopeful and but also kind of tangible and potentially feasible, I think was quite to me is quite powerful. because you’re not again, it feels like you’re not just relying on, you know, okay here are these recommendations for these institutions and hope they take them away.
We’re actually showing people what we want to see and what that looks like. So I hope, I hope it gives people something kind of new to ponder. And, you know, I hope it gives the contributors and, you know, their families in the book something, a piece of hope that they can kind of take away, despite the kind of heaviness of some of the stories.
JM: I really enjoyed that last bit of the book because it, it’s quite beautifully written, but also it is so tangible and so feasible. That story at the end of the book, it shouldn’t be like in our wildest dreams, should it? It should be like so obvious. Did you have anything to add, William?
WA: Just that. Yeah, I love that ending. And I think it it speaks to the kind of academia that, like you say, the bit where the, the locus of power is shifting, the fact that the student is doing their work in the UK, but they’re learning from scholars in Africa and in different parts of the world. And that that those scholars in those, the global South spaces, their knowledge is being valued and they will have the power to generate knowledge that kind of moving away from this kind of extractive, actually kind of sharing knowledge and sharing information across global boundaries and being and doing interdisciplinary work that both helps the community and helps the world, and it helps the broader world I think that’s the kind of academia that we want to see. And I think that speaks to the sense from the book being it’s about the PhD experience and actually it’s it’s bigger than it is about how do we create better communities, how do how can education be transformative and that we realize our potential really create space for equity and inclusion in a real, genuine way that we don’t just create better institutions, we create better society.
JM: Thank you so much, Madina and William. It’s, it’s a pleasure reading the book, and it’s been really, really interesting to talk to you today and yeah really grateful for giving us the time.
MW: Yeah. Nice to be here, thanks for having us.
WA: Thank you. Thanks for having me.
JM: So, the book is called ‘The Black PhD Experience: Stories of Strength, Courage and Wisdom in UK Academia’. It’s edited by William Ackah, Jacqueline Darkwa, Wayne Mitchell, De-Shaine Murray and Madina Wane, and it’s published by Policy Press. You can find out more on our website which is policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk. And you can also get 25% off the book and all our books if you sign up to our mailing list while you’re there. Thank you for listening. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you again, guys. Thanks. Thank you.