Anon.

Dear Anon.

Can you please change your name so we know who you are and you can get credit, otherwise you'll fail the class.

The Academics tackling everyday sexism in University Life

 'The Academics tackling everyday sexism in University Life'


Just an interesting article written by a female lecturer in Oxford University, Selina Todd. She comments on how her and some other female senior teaching staff went to a Historical Society conference and noticed the distinct lack of women studied, the belittling of the Women's work, and the attitudes toward the women there.
She comments on how their questions were often ignored, they were spoken over, and faced many a 'Mansplaining'. 

Selina comments on how after the conference she found herself in another, but with a much more tasteful motive. 'Women in the Humanities' is a 4 year old research programme, created by Oxford's own academics, to push for the study of women within their own institution, and if possible others as well. 


''Our universities are highly sexist institutions. Women are outnumbered and relegated to junior posts. More than 60% of academics are men, and about 80% of professors. Official statistics show that more women are on temporary contracts than men.''

Women in Humanities Info

On their website they draw out a plan of what they wish to achieve: 


''Women in the Humanities has five main aims:

•To create knowledge that develops new perspectives on gender equality. Oxford has the largest concentration of humanities researchers in the world, many of whom focus on women. Their collaboration can produce novel and workable solutions to advancing gender equality.

•To train and mentor the next generation of pioneering women scholars, policymakers and professionals by supporting research into women’s lives and representations.

•To promote women’s voices and influence within the Humanities.

•To support the University in its promotion of gender equality, recognised by the Vice-Chancellor as a strategic aim for Oxford.

•To collaborate with a variety of institutions and individuals to promote common aims and public engagement in Oxford and beyond.''

All very agreeable points. So overall I would like to find out more on these 'direct action' groups whose main objective is to tackle Sexism/Racism/General Inequality within Universities. I think they'd be great to use in illustration of how to combat the inequality within the Educational Institution.

Proposal

Proposal

• To do a Social Experiment regarding Race and Gender roles in Goldsmiths University
• Take a sheet with nine headshots of people within Goldsmiths on it and nine different job roles. Three lecturers, three students and three other staff. 
• Ask students within Goldsmiths to answer a sort of questionnaire on which specific job role links with the specific headshot e.g Photo B job role is job A.
• We are doing this to see how people initially or maybe unintentionally perceive a type of race or gender with a specific job role.  For example, if a student takes the photo of an African Women and joins it up with the role of a cleaner, or if they take a white Western male and link that up with a lecturer. Our aim here is to demonstrate whether there a subconscious prejudice within students at Goldsmiths who have grown up in a Western patriarchal society. 
• Once the student has answered the questionnaire, we will ask three questions, for example, do you think that there are more male lecturers within Goldsmiths with higher job roles such as heads of department? Or, do you believe there is less of a chance for a female or person with an ethnic background to be hired as a head of department over a white male?
• This will all be done as a video interview.
• Once we take all the evidence and collate it. We can then make our verdict on whether race and gender effects the types of job roles you can get within University and moreover, if there is a sub-conscious prejudice within students at Goldsmiths regarding race, gender and specific job roles that has maybe been engrained in us from a young age living in a Western society which has dominated the world for centuries.
• Then we will make a hard hitting poster showing the results. We will use statistical evidence which we have collated by doing the social experiment and use that as evidence of race and gender prejudice on the poster and stick them around campus.
• Just a thought? once we have put up these posters around campus, maybe we can write an email on the bottom of the poster and see if people want to email us feedback about the evidence shown on the poster and thus see how Goldsmiths students feel about the results. As well, we can ask if they can anonymously email us any personal experiences of prejudice or maybe if they have been a victim of sexism at Goldsmiths etc.

Plan of Action ?

1.

- We aim to interview around 50 people across campus
- Present them with pictures of 9 different people. 
      - 3 will be Students, 3 will be Lecturers/Teaching staff and the last 3 will be those who hold non-teaching positions within the Uni. All of different races, genders and ages.
- We will ask the person we're interviewing which job/position they think each individual holds. 

- After we document their response we will then continue to ask some quick follow up questions to widen our research and also to feature on our final video. 
   
-These include questions like: 
       ''Do you think there are more males in higher academic roles?''
       ''Do you think white lecturers are prefered over those of other races?''
       ''Have you ever experienced any prejudice yourself, from either students or teaching              staff?''
      ''Have you ever faced any sexism or discrimination for something you cannot help? (i.e         Gender, Race, Sexuality etc.''


2.

The second part of the task would be to film people being interviewed by us, and to make it into a short video for our final presentation. 
We would firstly film them trying to match up a picture of one of the 9 people with one of the 3 types of positions within the uni. 
After we've asked them to do this we will then ask them a few follow up questions which will mostly feature within our final video. (as mentioned in point 1.)

We want it to have tones of a Social Experiment.



3.

After we've gained all the info we need, we will analyse the results and put the answers of the 'who's job is who's?' questionnaire into a poster.

- We hope to make a poster of the results we've collected and use them to make a judgement on how people around campus think.

- For example::: 
      -If the results found that over 50% of people interviewed said they thought the 40 yr old bloke was a lecturer instead of a student, or the Hispanic lady was a cleaner instead of a Head of Department then we would illustrate that on the poster. Not necessarily pointing fingers, or perhaps we should(?).

-We could then go around asking people what they thought of the posters and if what they say surprised them? Another thing to pop into the video if there's room? and if time is on our side of course.


4. 

Action 4 would be to write our presentation and put the video together.

Overview of the WHY

Why have we decided to do our project on how Race and Gender within Educational Institutions? 

- Its an example of, once AGAIN, the inequality (that old chestnut) of anyone who's not a Middle Class white bloke. 

- I think it's important to shed more light on something that makes many people think 'Oh no not this again'. Why do they think that? Who are those people? Why do you think this is a boring/unimportant topic?

-Its an example of everyday Public Sphere racism/sexism but on a smaller more intimate scale. Because of these qualities it'll be easier to conduct research.

-To develop more on the second point; Educating people that this is happening is the first step in combating it. The more people in your arsenal the stronger your message. 

-We want to also look into roles such as 'Women's Officers' and Societies such as the 'Islamic Society' and 'Black Students Societies'. We want to know if they are making a difference (aimed more at the women's officers).

-To reform the ''What's the point?'' Thinkers. The people who believe in what we're doing is respectable and needed, but at the same time have never done anything about Educational Inequality themselves because they hold the ''Whats the point?'' Attitude. These people are led to believe that they can't make a difference, and we want to tell them THEY CAN.

Gandhi statue banished

Someone in the class, raised awareness of the below article which we could find use to us in this project. The article quotes Ghanaian professors stating that ' Gandhi was racist and that the university should put African heroes and heroines 'first and foremost'. Controversial to say the least. 

Feel free to read. 

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/06/ghana-academics-petition-removal-mahatma-gandhi-statue-african-heroes

#RhodesMustFall

So I remember last year sometime (?). Students of the University of Oxford began a campaign to remove a statue of Cecil Rhodes of one of their buildings. 
This guy was a leading figure in the establishment of the apartheid in South Africa, and is responsible for thousands of African deaths. 
SO understandably modern day students at Oxford and, even in South African University where they also have a statue of him, want rid of his glorified memorial. 
The Oxford students in particular received an unlikely backlash from their own Chancellor, Chris Pattern. Who, while speaking on Radio 4 said:

 “If people at a university are not prepared to demonstrate the sort of generosity of spirit which Nelson Mandela showed towards Rhodes and towards history, if they are not prepared to embrace all those values which are contained in the most important book for any undergraduate – Karl Popper’s Open Society – if they are not prepared to embrace those issues then maybe they should think about being educated elsewhere.” 

(Thank you Guardian  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/19/rhodes-fall-oxford-university-inclusivity-black-students) 

I think I may dig a bit deeper on this guy because he seems like a proper douche. 
According to the Guardian; the Campaign to remove Rhodes' statue was lead by Black and Ethnic Minority students, who claimed that the praise of Rhodes in their institution undermined their presence there. Which is fair enough.

Here are some links from the Guardian if you guys wanna take a look: 

- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/19/rhodes-fall-oxford-university-inclusivity-black-students 
-https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/feb/02/students-cecil-rhodes-statue-campaign-oxford-oriel-college

And then from the BBC

-http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-32131829

You've made a start!

Good to see you're up and running now and there are already some good and very detailed and thoughtful posts here! Sajjad, dwilgold and Anonymous (for Pete's sake, please change your Username to your actual name or I won't be able to log your activity and you'll get ZERO for your contributions) get a move on and start supporting your group and helping to build and shape your project.  There are some good ideas flying around here already so now you need to:

1. Figure out what your rationale is - i.e. why is it important to focus on this issue of bias/ equality in race and gender in Goldsmiths.  What is at stake here?  For who? Are you looking at staff/ students/ everyone in Goldsmiths? Remember you'll need to upload a group rationale to the blog.  You need to jointly articulate it and buy into the idea as a group. 
2. What are you actually going to do?  What are you going to make happen here? You need a project idea and a plan so that you can start to think about how to make a public intervention/ event/ happening etc. I think you should look at some more creative ideas to help you formulate this. Reports and statistics are great for getting a snapshot of a current situation, but films ads and artworks are also very interesting ways of generating a sense of what is at stake in a project and for dreaming up ideas about how to dramatise the issues. You've got a fairly narrow scope for your project - this is good because it means you stay focussed. But you need to think about how you can make a difference too.

And obviously the people who aren't yet contributing need to start pulling their weight!

Promoting Gender Equality

It was interesting walking around University College London School of Pharmacy and seeing quite a few of these posters scattered around the university. Does Goldsmiths University have something like this, and if not what does this say about Goldsmiths itself?

Possible Questionnaire

Perception of Race and Gender in Educational Institutions Questionnaire

Please indicate your level of agreement or disagreement with each of these statements. Place an "X" mark in the box of your answer.

Q1: What is your gender?

            ____________________________________________________

Q2: Specify your role within the institution i.e. Student / Lecturer

            ____________________________________________________

	Strongly Agree	Agree	Neutral	Disagree	Strongly Disagree
There are more male lecturers compared to female lecturers within the institution
There is a lack of BME (Black & Minority Ethnic) lecturers within the institution
There are more men who currently occupy senior positions within the institution
More needs to be done to encourage women and BME into occupations within higher education and universities
Gender equality has already been achieved within institutions like universities
The issue of gender inequality within institutions like universities is a big problem
The University actively promotes gender equality

This is just a provisional questionnaire; if anyone has any other ideas of what other questions we can ask, or a different direction we should go in, feel free to comment. 

SU's Welfare and Diversity Campaign

The SU is launching a campaign, "Liberate my Degree",  to stop the curriculum being so "pale, male and stale", link here. This shows it's not just us who are aware of the issues facing Goldsmiths, perhaps the Welfare and Diversity officer could be of use in our project.

Helen

Random idea for the project

We could collect pictures of different people of different races, sexes etc who hold different roles within the university. We should then stage it as a game show.  We could show the pictures to people, and give them 3 options as to what they do, eg cleaner, lecturer, student or whatever, and then score them on how many people they got right. We could them ask them a few follow-up questions eg, what about the person in this picture make you think they did this role?  To gain what thoughts went through people's minds when they said their answer. We could then correlate the results and turn it into a miniature report, which we could submit to the principal or the dean or whoever of the university. The game show element might make people more eager to participate rather than just "can you help us with our project", and the follow-up questions would help us understand the problem better overall and could help us come up with some suggestions of how to improve the university.

Does anyone in the group have any special skills which we could use in the project in general?
I'm good with data analysis and would be able to turn the data we gather into statistics etc if we decide to go down a similar route or whatever. Look forward to hearing from you all, have a wonderful reading week.

Race and Gender Inequality in Higher and Further Educational Institutions in Britain.

How Do We Perceive Race and Gender in an Educational Institution

• Are male lecturers seen as more important than female lecturers at University?
• Do male lecturers have more power in Educational Institutions? (are there more Male heads of departments at Goldsmiths?)
• Is there gender or race prejudice in a University like Goldsmiths, who pride themselves as a forward thinking, Liberal educational Institution?
• Is there any examples of this at University? E.G. SOAS Justice for Cleaners- Campaigning against injustice or inequality within a powerful Educational Institution.
• https://soasunion.org/liberation/campaigns/justiceforcleaners/
• Sexual Harassment in University. In our Western Liberal Society, do we still live in a patriarchal society where men feel they have more power or rights over women?
• Sara Ahmed Director of the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London resigned in protest over alleged sexual harassment claims by students against staff.
• http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/london-university-goldsmiths-professor-quits-sexual-harassment-female-students-staff-a7072131.html
• The problems of race inequality, not just in Higher Education but in Further Educational Institutions e.g. Primary and Secondary Schools.
• The U.K.'s Prevent Scheme (counter-radicalisation policy.) Is it badly flawed?
• https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/19/uks-prevent-counter-radicalisation-policy-badly-flawed
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-28939555
• In a radio 4 programme I listened to about Prevent. One British Muslim mother, was worried about the decision her young daughter made about wanting to start wearing the Hijab because she believed her daughter would be perceived differently by her race and gender to other children in her class. The prevent scheme has stigmatised Islam as a negative religion. It has alluded all Muslims to being a potential threat. As a result, this has taken away for many children like the one above the liberal values of individuality and freedom of speech and choice which the West has advocated for, for centuries. 
• BBC Radio 4 Westminster Hour 29/01/2017 Prevent discussion start at 35:30 and the example of women and daughter is at 39:20.
• http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08byns2
• How do we tackle race and gender inequality in Educational Institutions? 
• As a group, what can we do to highlight this?