Developing my Ethical Action Plan was harder than I expected. Across four versions (linked below) I accepted that the plan will keep evolving as my reading, question and data do. The research questionDefining a clear, concise question was hardest. It moved from “Why do students lack a sense of belonging in the studio?” to “How […]
Redesigning the Classroom: An Act of Belonging This report emerges from a double realisation. As a migrant woman from a working class background, who has lived far from home for more than half her life, who speaks English as an additional language, who is married to a person of colour and who is pregnant and […]
Reflections on Racism and Repair in Architecture Education A year ago, during a formative review, a student of South Asian origin was repetitively questioned by three white peers about his drawings, indirectly implying he couldn’t draw properly. None of the other students had been criticised or questioned in this way. This incident brought up a […]
There is something contradictory about training future spatial practitioners in spaces that were never designed with them in mind. In my previous posts, I described teaching architecture in a context where studio culture is increasingly driven by digital production and compressed timelines that alienates students from their bodies and from each other. The studio, once […]
Hypervisible, Yet Silenced: Faith, Race and Epistemic Injustice Until recently I had never been exposed to the need to critically engage with the theme of faith, religion and belief in the context of the classroom and the academic curriculum. Early this year, three students arrived late to my session. I called them out in front […]
Systemic Inequality, Visibility and the Creative Potential of Lived Experience Ade Adepitan (ParalympicsGB, 2020) speaks about the experience of being Black and disabled, two marginalised identities whose intersection creates a distinct form of vulnerability and lived experience (Center for Intersectional Justice, 2022; Crenshaw, 1989) resulting in further exclusion, making him a target for both racial […]
For me, writing takes time. Writing concisely takes even longer. Throughout Unit 1, Theories, Policies and Practices, I have found myself wanting to unpack ideas in depth: exploring pedagogical approaches, questioning my own teaching practice, connecting references that I am discovering and mapping my learning across these. This reflective process is exciting, yet it challenges the requirements […]
https://www.arts.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0014/190112/Spatial-Practices_Manifesto.pdf