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 few important questions for me: Why did they feel entitled to target him? Did my critique of the student’s work help legitimise their behaviour? How do I as a tutor, from a white background, act on such instances, beyond reporting? Am I right to assume that their behaviour, was at least in part, rooted in implicit racial bias?
Reading this through Bradbury’s (2020) CRT framework, the crit format itself operated as what appeared to be a neutral space: questioning “how and why” something was drawn in a particular way is a normal part of architectural pedagogy. The format of technical, objective critique allowed his peers to enact a form of policing: enforcing the unstated norm that ‘correct drawing looks a certain way,’ whilst concealing any bias.
This year, that same student joined my course in Stage 2. He identified as neurodivergent and halfway through the module he stopped coming to studio due to family and health circumstances. Here, I realised that he was confronted by structural barriers the university poses to his intersecting identities: race, class, and neurodivergence (Garrett, 2024). He was navigating this with two white women as his tutors: neither of us sharing his reality, our privilege instead manifesting as “the absence of having to live with the consequences of racism” (Channel 4, 2020).
Sitting with this, a few things feel necessary to address.
Despite UAL’s anti-racist action plan focusing heavily on representation (UAL, 2021), in my own experience, course and stage leaders in BA Architecture remain predominantly white male. How can we empower our students to pursue their future careers, if they cannot see themselves represented in us? We cannot be educated from one source. Garrett (2024) highlights the importance of mentorship from racialised minority academics who share students’ lived experience, not just their demographic identity. Embedding diversity in the way we teach also means bringing in different precedents from across the globe, different methodologies and, most importantly, different experiences, perspectives and realities.
Yet as Lokko observes, institutions are often curious about non-Western architectural traditions in the abstract while they are reluctant to let them genuinely take shape: ‘everyone’s keen to see or understand what “African” architecture might look like, but not so keen to allow the space for the answers to develop’ (Lokko, 2019). Representation, in this sense, is not simply about who is in the room, but whether the space itself allows different ways of knowing to be developed on their own terms.
I believe language matters too. It shapes identity and reality. Terms like BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Groups), repeatedly used in the UAL 2021 anti-racism action plan, club vastly diverse groups of people into one category. In Excitable Speech (Butler, 1997), Butler argues that language is not a passive tool to describe reality, but a dynamic force that constructs it. We must revise and question our language so that it can hold complexity while being precise, resisting categories that flatten identity into administrative convenience. A label like BAME could never have captured the layered intersection of race, class, and neurodivergence that shaped my student’s experience of the course.
We also need to listen to the lived experiences of students and staff to gather qualitative data. Active listening helps people feel heard and ensures a range of perspectives are understood, creating environments where difference is welcome and where people feel free to express themselves and their aspirations.
Art and design schools have a long history as sites of exclusion (Drabble and Gridneff, 2025). Decolonising the curriculum is therefore a long-overdue response to exclusions that have been built into these institutions since their founding, centuries ago. This work will require my and our constant questioning, learning and revision of ourselves, our practices and the system itself.
References
Butler, J. (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.
Channel 4 (2020) Heartbreaking Moment When Kids Learn About White Privilege | The School That Tried to End Racism. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I3wJ7pJUjg (Accessed: 5 July 2026).
Drabble, N. and Gridneff, R. (2025) ‘Inclusivity and exclusivity’, in Architectures of Art and Design Education: An Exploration of UK and International Design Schools. London: RIBA Publishing, pp. 177–184.
Garrett, R. (2024). Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, pp.1–15.
Lokko, L. (2019) Interview with D. Mileo. Decolonising architecture with Lesley Lokko. Assemble Papers, 4 September. Available at: https://assemblepapers.com.au/2019/09/04/lesley-lokko-decolonising-architecture/ (Accessed: 10 July 2026).
University of the Arts London (UAL) (2021) UAL Anti-racism Action Plan Summary. London: UAL.
One reply on “Inclusive Practices Blog Task 3: Race”
Hi Gaia,
I found this really thoughtful, particularly your reflection on how the apparently neutral format of the crit can allow bias to hide inside accepted academic practice. Your point that questioning may be normal within architectural education, while still becoming a way of policing whose work is seen as credible, really stayed with me.
I was also struck by your distinction between representation and whether different ways of knowing are genuinely given space to develop. That connects strongly to my own reflections on paid student opportunities; simply inviting a wider range of students into an existing system does not necessarily make the system equitable.
Your discussion of language was important too. Categories can be useful institutionally, but they can also flatten very different experiences and conceal the intersections that actually shape participation.
This left me wondering how the crit itself might be redesigned; not only how tutors intervene when bias appears, but how the structure could make collective responsibility, care and accountability more explicit from the outset.
A.