Em's PgCert Blog

You can find a interactive ppt. here and a pdf version below.

http://ewoolleypgcert.myblog.arts.ac.uk/files/2026/01/ARP-Presentation-1.pdf

Ahmed, S. (2017) Living a Feminist Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.  

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2017) Thematic analysis, The Journal of Positive Psychology, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 297-298, doi: 10.1080/17439760.2016.1262613  

Braun, V. and Clarke, V. (2017) Thematic analysis – an introduction [YouTube video], 1:01:38, posted by Victoria Clarke. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv7C53yvLqk (Accessed: 18 December 2025; 4 Jan 2026 

Boler, M. (1999) Feeling Power. Emotions and Education. Abingdon: Routledge.  

Converse, J.M. and Presser, S. (2011) The Tools at Hand, in Survey Questions. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, pp. 48–75. doi: 10.4135/9781412986045 

Cox, L. (2025), Pedagogies of Discomfort, [Recorded lecture]. Inclusive Practices. University of the Arts London. 14 May. Available at: https://moodle.arts.ac.uk/mod/folder/view.php?id=1401553 (Accessed 15 May 2025; 13 November 2025; 2 January 2026). 

Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 

Hughes, D (2014), Dwelling as an Approach to Creative Pedagogy, Art Design and Communication in Higher Education, vol. 13. no. 1, pp. 73-87. https://doi.org/10.1386/adch.13.1.73_ 

Hu, X. (2024) International Students’ Feeling of Shame in the Higher Education: An Intersectional Analysis of Their Racialised, Gendered and Classed Experiences in the UK Universities, Sociology Study, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 69 – 89, doi: 10.17265/2159‑5526/2024.01.006 

Jokela, T. and Huhmarniemi, M. (2018) Art‑based action research in the development work of arts and art education, in Coutts, G., Härkönen, E., Huhmarniemi, M. and Jokela, T. (eds.) The Lure of Lapland: A Handbook of Arctic Art and Design. Rovaniemi: University of Lapland, pp. 9–25 

Jones, L., Holmes, R., Macrae, C., & Maclure, M. (2010). Documenting classroom life: how can I write about what I am seeing? Qualitative Research, Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 479-491. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794110366814 

Lenette, C. (2023) Participatory Action Research: Ethics and Decolonization [MP4]. Available at: https://moodle.arts.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=87078 (Accessed: 18 September 2025) 

McNiff, J. (2002) Action Research for Professional Development: Concise Advice for New Action Researchers. 3rd edn. Available at: https://moodle.arts.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=87078 (Accessed: 18 September 2025) 

Nguyen’s, C.T. (2021) The Seductions of Clarity, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 89, pp. 227–255. doi:10.1017/S1358246121000035 

Odeniyi, Victoria (2022) Reimagining Conversations. Project Report. University of the Arts London. (Unpublished) 

Orr, S. and Shreeve, A. (2017) Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. 

Patten, M.L., 2017. Questionnaire Research: A Practical Guide. 4th ed. New York: Routledge.

Phillips, D.K. and Carr, K. (2014) Becoming a Teacher Through Action Research: Process, Context, and Self‑Study. 3rd ed. New York and Abingdon: Routledge.  

University of the Arts London (2019) Inclusive Group Work. Disability Service, University of the Arts London. 

The flexibility of TA requires the researcher to actively position their analysis within a critical framework and generate themes accordingly. By engaging with relevant literature before analysis, I ensured this framework was in place, enabling a more reflexive and critically grounded approach. This also helped prevent my initial intuitions about student confusion from dominating the findings, allowing me to position my voice within existing conversations. 

My TA adopts an inductive, experiential orientation with a critical realist perspective, positioning it as an effective tool for “experiential research which seeks to understand what participants think, feel, and do” (Braun and Clarke, 2017, p. 297). Its recursive nature aligns well with my subject matter, as confusion is inherently messy, creative, and complex. 

Data was collected from 15 respondents, all of whom answered “yes” to the initial question, and 12 provided an example. I conducted three cycles of coding. In the second cycle, I generated “fear” as a theme but later recognised that this overlooked emotions as “socially and relationally constructed” (Hu, 2024, p. 71). In the final cycle, my themes framed student confusion within social and relational contexts: technical problems, working independently, and lack of support or communication from staff. Notably, none identified tasks or briefings as sources of confusion, which I did not anticipate. Overall, students appear confident working during taught sessions but less confident when working independently outside of them. 

Helping students work independently and offering focused feedback are achievable within the group tutorial. For technical problems, I will direct students to relevant workshops or technicians. 

The data largely frames confusion as a negative experiential state: “I don’t know if whatever I’m doing is ‘right’ or not,” and “I was afraid not to do what was instructed.” Reframing confusion as a normal and productive part of independent practice is therefore essential. Within the 20-minute tutorial, this must be achieved verbally, leading me to propose the following initial changes: 

First, I have designed an “It’s sticky” prompt card for use in tutorials. “Sticky” is a simple, playful synonym for confusion. Inspired by Orr and Shreeve’s (2017, p.31) view that “vague forms of communication are very important. They remind us that our thinking… is not yet finished,” the card offers a shared term to help students articulate their experiences. The reasons listed on the back are drawn directly from my TA. This activity addresses student needs identified in the data and supports cognitive ease (Nguyen, 2021), helping students recognise and explore what feels challenging. 

Second, I will replace my opening question “How did you find this week?” with “What’s feeling sticky?” Alongside the prompt card, this allows students to identify their confusion quickly and easily. It positions the tutorial as a space for focused support, emphasises verbal communication for problem-solving, and enables me to offer more targeted feedback within the limited time available. 

Finally, I will ensure feedback is focused and action-oriented, hinging on practical steps and artist references, responding directly to student feedback that “proposing concrete ways to develop the work would be great”​.

My interest in Pedagogies of Discomfort (Boler, 1999; Cox, 2025; Hu, 2024) catalysed my ARP. Reflecting on group tutorials, and how confusion might be reframed as productive within them, I was reminded by Hu that “it is imperative to view emotions not as individual possessions but rather as socially and relationally constructed phenomena” (p. 71), and by Cox that educators must “actively and intentionally engage with emotion in teaching spaces.” In my ARP, I frame confusion as a difficult emotion that it is important to help students engage with productively, without fear or shame. This focus has led me to engage with The Seductions of Clarity (Nguyen, 2021), Dwelling as an Approach to Creative Pedagogy (Hughes, 2014), and Art and Design Pedagogy in Higher Education: Knowledge, Values and Ambiguity in the Creative Curriculum (Orr and Shreeve, 2017). These works have helped me explore the role confusion plays in learning and creative practice, and the challenges of navigating it within HE. 

Nguyen (2021) frames confusion, with clarity as its inverse, as experiential states. They argue that clarity is “the feeling associated with understanding things” (p. 1), and that if clarity is a form of cognitive epiphany that is “incredibly pleasurable” (p. 17), then it “can be dangerously seductive” (p. 1). By contrast, although “a sense of confusion is a signal that we need to think more” (p. 2), it is often experienced as feeling stuck or lost. This raises an interesting problem: if confusion is an emotion we tend to shy away from, how can I help students reframe it as useful? Where Nguyen asks, “how [can] we use our feeling of understanding” (p. 10), I am interested in how we might use our feeling of confusion. I am in good company; foregrounding confusion is what Sara Ahmed (2017) calls “sweaty concepts” and what Donna Haraway (2016) terms “staying with the trouble.” The question then becomes how this can be achieved within the group tutorial format. As Orr and Shreeve (2017) argue, “uncertainty lies at the core of art and design teaching and learning” (p. 56) and fosters “productive confusion” (Bailey, 2014, cited p. 58); it is “not an absence of clarity… [but] the presence of ambiguity” (p. 58). Moving into data collection and analysis, a key concern will be how I can bring this positive and active framing of confusion into my teaching. 

In contrast, Hughes (2014) argues that “not-knowing is not a logical and intelligent series of events” (p. 3). I found their emphasis on logical intelligence, and derision of emotion, patriarchal and colonial. They instead advocate for the “creative potential of staying still, or… dwelling” (p. 5). Repetition is a valuable tool, but I am interested in how it might be leveraged within confusion rather than in opposition to it. 

This reading has helped me consider how I can “actively and intentionally engage with emotion” (Cox, 2025) in group tutorials, while understanding confusion as a “socially and relationally constructed” (Hu, 2024, p. 71). I explore this further through my thematic analysis. 

http://ewoolleypgcert.myblog.arts.ac.uk/files/2026/01/Questionnaire-and-Information-Sheet.pdf

Note: This document was printed on A4 paper and single-sided to allow students space to draw on the blank pages, should they need or wish to do so.

Reading (Converse and Presser, 2011; Patten, 2017), alongside tutorial feedback, helped me to clarify my thinking and determine my data collection method: a questionnaire comprising two questions. 

Converse and Presser’s (2011) focus on practical questionnaire design significantly informed my approach. Their discussion of how researchers’ intended meanings often differ from respondents’ interpretations (drawing on Belson, 1981) highlighted the risk of ambiguity in survey questions. To mitigate this and improve accessibility, I used straightforward language and clearly defined parameters throughout the questionnaire. For example, the opening question asks students to consider whether they have experienced confusion within the past month, explicitly situating this reflection in relation to creative and academic activities such as classes, tutorials, studio work, and independent practice. Although I initially intended to begin with a drawing task, insights from the readings and feedback from tutorials indicated that this approach could be overwhelming, leading me to revise the structure accordingly. 

The reading also highlighted the value of varied question formats to reduce respondent fatigue, and the use of visual aids such as bold text, arrows, and boxes. I incorporated both into my questionnaire design. Peer feedback from Anna Reading prompted me to consider paper size and colour. When we discussed printing the questionnaire at A3 and on coloured paper, Anna noted this could compromise anonymity. As a result, the final questionnaire was printed at A4 on plain paper. 

Further ethical considerations around anonymity and participant wellbeing were also addressed through reading and tutorial discussions. Converse and Presser (2011, p. 14) ask, “In the academic setting, who can say that a questionnaire is distressing respondents, leaving them feeling worse about themselves or their lives than the interviewer found them? If that happened . . . is it anyone’s responsibility to find out?” This raised three key concerns for me: how to support students without compromising anonymity, how to avoid reinforcing negative associations between their course and confusion, and how to ensure that participation or non-participation did not affect our tutor-student relationship. To address these, I built 20 minutes into the teaching session for optional follow-up, did not mention UAL or the course in my questions, instead asking students to think about their “creative or academic work,” and communicated both verbally and in the information sheet that participation was voluntary and would have no bearing on my relationship with them. 

Finally, when drafting my questionnaire, this quote was particularly helpful: “Human experience is much too unruly in its diversity to be fully contained by the precoded responses of closed questions . . . Open-ended questions are far better for capturing these details and idiosyncrasies.” (Converse and Presser, 2011, p. 14) While my first question was closed to help students situate themselves, the second question was open, with the option to write and/or draw, to enable responses that might better capture students’ plural experiences of confusion.  

Appendix:

1. A brief voice note capturing my initial reflections after reading The Tools at Hand (Converse and Presser, 2011). If listening, please do so from 2 mins 40 secs: http://ewoolleypgcert.myblog.arts.ac.uk/files/2026/01/Reflections-on-The-Tools-at-Hand-Converse-and-Presser-2011.m4a
2. Initial draft questionnaire: http://ewoolleypgcert.myblog.arts.ac.uk/files/2026/01/Outline-for-a-questionnaire-1.pdf. My questions were initially wide-ranging, exploring confusion as a bodily and emotional experience, how students from different language backgrounds use the word, synonyms they might employ, and the strategies or support they draw on to navigate confusion. Tutorial feedback prompted me to realise that I had collapsed my project ambitions to review my group tutorial delivery into the data collection method. Several questions were presumptive or asked students to identify potential solutions, rather than locating responsibility for change within my own practice. The discussion also highlighted the role of language. If the phrase “I’m confused” functions as a proxy for multiple or layered experiences, this, rather than the word “confused” alone, becomes the more meaningful focus for exploration.

http://ewoolleypgcert.myblog.arts.ac.uk/files/2026/01/Ethical-Action-Plan-2025-26_Emily-Woolley_First-Draft.pdf

“How can I work with first-year BA Illustration and Visual Media (BAIVM) students in group tutorials to develop a shared way of talking that helps them meaningfully engage with confusion?” 

This question went through several iterations and was developed through critical friendship, group tutorials, and by following the steps for formulating a research question in Becoming a Teacher Through Action Research (Phillips and Carr, 2013, pp. 54–60). I found the “Spheres of Influence” framework particularly useful as a way of conceptualising questions that align both with my ARP ambitions and the unit’s encouragement to critically analyse how social justice issues impact students’ experiences. As noted in Action Research for Professional Development: Concise Advice for New Action Researchers (McNiff, 2002), “The question ‘how do I improve my work?’ contains a social intent.” 

As discussed in my EAP, I am interested in how confusion can be productively leveraged within Year 1 BAIVM group tutorials. I meet weekly with a group of 25 first-year students. There are no individual tutorials scheduled in the first year, and the course maintains strict parity between staff in group tutorial delivery; for example, we cannot supply written feedback and must rely on verbal communication. Responding to varied student experiences within such a rigid framework can be challenging, and predictable social dynamics often emerge, where students confident navigating the linguistic and cultural frameworks of higher education are more vocal and therefore more supported. This is a social justice issue as much as it is a communication issue as ”the bureaucratization of language will typically serve to amplify power differentials by giving more credibility to those who accept [them]” (Nguyen, 2021, p. 29). 

My intentions for the ARP are therefore twofold: to help students develop a more positive and productive relationship with confusion, allowing them to deploy it as a tool for understanding, and to develop a shared language that enables them to speak to their experiences of confusion, recognising that “having an understanding also involves having the capacity to communicate that understanding” (Stevens, 2013, cited in Nguyen, 2021, p. 18). 

In line with this intent, and in writing my question, I created two spheres of influence (below). Placing “self” at the centre helped me reflect on my relationship with confusion as a staff member, student, and practitioner. I understand confusion as an important emotion that invites complexity and is an essential part of practice. My aim is to review my teaching in order to help first-year students develop a similarly productive relationship with confusion. Coupled with my interest in interrogating the constraints of the BAIVM Year 1 group tutorial format (discussed in more detail in my EAP), this led to a research question that frames confusion positively and places an emphasis on verbal communication. 

Introduction and Context:

I explore the intersection of Object Based Learning (OBL) and Pedagogies of Discomfort to propose an intervention that uses emotive, tactile engagement to foster critical reflection and transformative learning.  

This proposal is grounded in my teaching across BA and MA Sculpture at Camberwell, and BA and MA Illustration and Visual Media (IVM) at London College of Communication, and my work as a material-led sculptor. A central concern across both practices is how material can be used as a critical and affective tool to challenge hegemonic narratives. My desire to explore this intersection stems from my interdisciplinary teaching experiences, where I’ve observed how framing material as a narrative device is highly transferable.  

I draw on key theoretical frameworks: intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991); the entanglements of racism and imagined futures (Garrett, 2024); and the role of shame in higher education (Hu, 2024). These underpin my engagement with both Pedagogies of Discomfort (Cox, 2025) and OBL (Willcocks 2025; Willcocks and Mahon 2023), offering a foundation from which to explore the emotional, material, and political dimensions of the proposed intervention.  

Key Theory and Pedagogical Intersect:   

Garrett’s (2024) paper, Racism Shapes Careers: Career Trajectories and Imagined Futures of Racialised Minority PhDs in UK Higher Education, has helped me meaningfully situate—and therefore better articulate—the “spatial context” of the institution as it relates to whiteness (p. 2). They define whiteness not as a personal bias, but as “an invisible structural feature of the institution”— “an ecology of hostile structures and practices that shape what we consider to be daily norms” (p. 5). Xu’s (2024) paper, International Students’ Feeling of Shame in Higher Education, extends Garrett’s work by highlighting “the nuanced interplay between power structures, institutional spatial configurations, and emotional experiences” and their impact on marginalised student groups (p. 81). In doing so, Xu contributes to a broader discourse on how higher education continues to reproduce the knowledge, cultural, and emotional capital of the West—and, by extension, whiteness (Ahmed, 2007; Fanon, 1952). Building on Garrett’s framing, Xu stresses that “it is imperative to view emotions not as individual possessions but rather as socially and relationally constructed phenomena” (p. 71). This understanding of emotion as structural and relational has informed my thinking around affect in the classroom. My proposed intervention, which centres on tactile and material engagement, seeks to respond to what Xu identifies as a “pressing need to critically examine how social and embodied forms of emotion, particularly shame, are utilised as mechanisms of exclusion and control within the higher education field” (p. 71).  

It is through this lens that I bring together OBL and Pedagogies of Discomfort. OBL is a pedagogic practice that foregrounds reciprocal engagement with objects as a way of understanding the world. As Judy Willcocks (2025) shares, “I see the world as a very rich and complex landscape which is constantly morphing and changing, and in which people’s understanding of reality is co-constructed not just by their interactions with other people but by their interactions with stuff.” Similarly, Sara Ahmed (2019) reminds us that “to inhabit a world is to be inhabited by use,” (p. 26) pointing to the ways material encounters are shaped by—and shape—our social and emotional orientations to the world.  

I encountered Pedagogies of Discomfort through Leah Cox’s talk (2025) Utilising Pedagogy as a Decolonisation Tool in Teaching and Learning Practice, where she argued that “the idea of avoiding discomfort, avoiding emotion, is one of those things that maintains the status quo.” Instead, Cox proposes that educators must “actively and intentionally engage with emotion in teaching spaces.” This resonates strongly with the work of Garrett (2024) and Xu (2024), particularly in their attention to how institutional norms uphold racialised and exclusionary dynamics through emotional regulation and spatial configuration. If, as they argue, the dominant structure of higher education causes emotional harm by privileging comfort for some at the expense of others, then our pedagogical practices—and how we teach—must also shift.  

By bringing OBL into conversation with Pedagogies of Discomfort, I propose an intervention that uses tactile, material engagement as a means of confronting and working through discomfort. Willocks (2025), an “arch collaborator” within the delivery of OBL at UAL, has generously put together a task sheet for educators to use when delivering OBL sessions. My intervention is small but considered – the adaption of this task sheet to include questions that foreground the learner’s emotional response. Please see below.   

Case study, mitigating potential problems and reflections:  

I have not yet had the opportunity to use my task sheet. However, in May I ran an OBL workshop with Y1 BAIVM students using Willcocks’ task sheet. I would like to share some reflections on that experience here. 

The workshop was developed in response to Ursula K. Le Guin’s (1986) The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, which invites us to reimagine the first human-made object not as a spear, but as a container—challenging dominant, patriarchal narratives of history rooted in conquest and aggression. What was particularly striking was how students responded through an intersectional lens, expanding the feminist reframing into an anti-imperial one. They questioned how the notion of humans as inherently dominant might be disrupted through this shift in perspective. This reminded me of an OBL session I read about on the relationship between colonialism, botany, and botanical drawing (Mahon and Willcocks, 2023). In it, students analysed 18th-century botanical illustrations—beautifully rendered flowers isolated against neutral backgrounds—that served as artefacts of a “comprehensive system of extraction” (p. 191) under colonialism. Both sessions illustrate how OBL can facilitate critical engagement with the complex, entangled histories embodied by objects. However, I was left reflecting on whether students had been provided with an adequate emotional space to process and contend with the violent histories and structures we were addressing. This is one of the reasons I am keen to interject an emotional facet.   

Feedback from Linda, along with ongoing conversations with Can from my blogging group, have emphasised the importance of preparing for situations where a session might trigger emotions in a student that become too challenging for them to manage—whether within the classroom or beyond. Below I propose some strategies for creating a supportive environment where students feel safe to express and process their emotions:  

• Ensuring multiple staff members are present so that students can be accompanied if they need to step out.   

• Establishing clear protocols for emotional support during sessions. This could be done by providing some initial protocols and then asking the student to coauthor some more so that everyone feels they have actively participated in the construction of the learning environment and its aims.  

• Signposting to external resources, such as counselling services or peer support networks.  

• Offering space for reflection and time to debrief. For example, building 20 – 30 minutes of ‘free time’ into the end of the session so that students can stay in the classroom, talk with each other and/or staff to process the learning experience.  

• Foregrounding group work.  

In the session I ran with BA Illustration and Visual Media, students worked in small groups. This structure helped diffuse emotional intensity through discussion, preventing emotional build-up and enabling students to identify shared experiences. Leah Cox (2025) has observed that while emotion is often valued by students, the primary source of discomfort tends to stem from peer dynamics rather than staff-student relationships or the subject matter itself. Designing for supported group work feels crucial in addressing one of the central tensions within pedagogies of discomfort. Group work also aligns with OBL’s capacity to challenge traditional modes of learning, where authority resides in a singular expert voice. Instead, it invites students to co-create meaning in the classroom; ensuring diverse experiences, knowledges, and contexts are central to the learning process. Collective pedagogic approaches are also encouraged by Garrett (2024), who argues that “colonial practices such as individualism and valuing ‘objective knowledge’ . . . alienate community and cultural academic knowledges” (p. 11). Working in groups helps shift away from these dynamics by relieving pressure on individuals, allowing students to process and contribute in ways and at a pace that feel safe and authentic to them. This supports a plurality of engagement and honours the complexity of cultural experience. As Xu (2024) reminds us, “emotional responses are intricately intertwined with gendered expectations and intersect with nationality, underscoring the gendered and raced dimensions of silence and silencing” (Rodriguez, 2011, p. 112, cited in Hu, 2024, p. 79). Group work can play a vital role in addressing this, as it takes the onus off the individual and allows students to choose how they engage. In this context, silence is reframed—not as a sign of disengagement or suppression, but as an act of agency, allowing space for students to participate on their own terms. In writing this, I am mindful of my own positionality as a white, cisgender female educator. Facilitating effective emotive group work will require me to actively practice humility—listening to, learning from, and with both students and colleagues.  

Conclusion:  

I have proposed an intervention that brings OBL into dialogue with pedagogies of discomfort, aiming to create space for emotional engagement in the classroom through encounters with objects. Although I have not yet implemented the intervention in full, I have drawn on my teaching practice to anticipate potential challenges and explore strategies for addressing them. I have also considered how this proposal might contribute to ongoing conversations and practices around anti-racist, anti-imperial, and equitable pedagogy. Looking ahead to the next academic year, I plan to collaborate with year and course leaders on the BAIVM programme to pilot an OBL workshop that incorporates this intervention. I will use the revised task sheet and apply the strategies for creating a supportive learning environment outlined earlier in this report.  

Reference list:

Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of Whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149-168. 

Ahmed, S. (2019). What’s the Use?: On the Uses of Use. Durham and London: Duke University Press.  

Boler, M. (1999) Feeling Power. Emotions and Education. Abingdon: Routledge. 

Cox, L. (2025), Pedagogies of Discomfort, [Recorded lecture]. Inclusive Practices. University of the Arts London. 14 May. Available at: https://moodle.arts.ac.uk/mod/folder/view.php?id=1401553 (Accessed 15 May 2025). 

Crenshaw, K. (1991). ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color.’ Stanford Law Review, 43(6), pp. 1241-1299.

Racism shapes careers: career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK hi

Fanon, Franz. 1952. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press.

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.

Hu, X. (2024) ‘International Students’ Feeling of Shame in the Higher Education: An Intersectional Analysis of Their Racialised, Gendered and Classed Experiences in the UK Universities’, Sociology Study, Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 69 – 89

Le Guin, U.K., (1986). The carrier bag theory of fiction. In: U.K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, pp.165–170.

Mahon, K. and Willcocks, J. (2023) The potential of online object-based learning activities to support the teaching of intersectional environmentalism in art and design higher education in Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education, Vol 22 / Issue 2, (October 2023), pp. 187 – 207 

Orgill, G. and Willcocks, J. (2024), How to . . . use objects to support learning and teaching, [Recorded Lecture]. TPP. University of the Arts London. January. Available at: https://ual.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Sessions/List.aspx#folderID=%2261e304ce-5498-4672-a72b-b10600e460e4%22 (Accessed: 17 March 2024). 

Below is a list of quotes cited in the recording with time stamps:

0 minutes and 27 seconds: White privilege is “the absence of having to live with the consequences of racism” (Channel 4, 2020, 0:36)

1 minute and 3 seconds: “Whiteness is an invisible structural feature of the institution” (Garrett, 2024, pp.3)

1 minute and 12 seconds: “to understand this, whiteness must be seen as more than an ‘optical privilege’ in the workplace but as an ecology of hostile structures and practices that shape what we consider to be daily norms”. (Garrett, 2024, pp.3)

3 minutes and 31 seconds: “colonial histories of UK institutional landscapes shape the identities we consider to be ‘normal’ and form social and cultural practices in the image of whiteness” (Jones and Okun 2001 cited in Garret 2024, pp.3)

5 minutes and 28 seconds: “numbers are not neutral and should be interrogated for their role in promoting deficit analyses that serve white racial interest” (Bradbury, A., 2020, pp. 244)

7 minutes and 30 seconds: “higher educational spaces need to address the racist cultural expectations based on whiteness they placed on racialised minority academics to be ‘model minorities'”. (Garrett, 2024, pp.9)

8 minutes and 14 seconds: “how can I become something I can’t see?” (Sadiq, A., 2023, 2:00)

11 minutes and 39 seconds: “As Fanon articulates, race itself is an imagination of colonial minds to maintain Western authority. Geographies of the globe are formed through banal projected imaginations, constructing the West as the enlightened superior to the inferior East and South”. (Garrett, 2024, pp.5)

11 minutes and 58 seconds: “If imaginations have the potential to transform our political, social and cultural understandings of the globe and communities within it, they also have the ability to transform career trajectories within academia”. (Garrett, 2024, pp.5)

12 minutes and 13 seconds: “Imaginations are potent and are affected by whiteness and racism in institutions as tenuous structures of race attempt to dictate what imaginations do or do not manifest”. (Garrett, 2024, pp.5)

Reference list:

Bradbury, A., 2020. A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: The case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England. Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(2), pp.241-260.

Channel 4. (2020) The School That Tried to End Racism. [Online}. Youtube. 30 June. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1I3wJ7pJUjg (Accessed: 10 July 2025).

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.

Le Guin, U.K., (1986). The carrier bag theory of fiction. In: U.K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places. New York: Grove Press, pp.165–170.

Orr, J. (2022) Revealed: The charity turning UK universities woke. The Telegraph [Online]. Youtube. 5 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRM6vOPTjuU (Accessed: 10 July 2025).

Sadiq, A. (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right. TEDx [Online}. Youtube. 2 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw  (Accessed: 10 July 2025).