Becoming an anti-racist scholar and change maker
With Dr Muna Abdi
Being a black British Somali woman in the academia is likely to put you in the odd-one-out category of university staff in the UK Higher Education system. Dr Muna Abdi has experienced many academic spaces since the start of her career. From being one of many Black home students as an undergraduate student, to being the only black home PhD student among other black overseas students in a Russell group institution, and moving to the great challenge of being the only British Somali early career academic in an institution with many black home students.
Muna’s experiences of academia is an interesting illustration of the intermingling of race, gender and post-colonial issues in our academic world.
About Muna
Dr Muna Abdi is an independent scholar and consultant who is using her own experience and expertise as a British Somali academic to support organisations embed anti-racist practices.
Muna's consultancy can be found here: https://ma-consultancy.co.uk/
Muna is also a Podcaster. Her Podcast is called Becoming an antiracist:
https://anchor.fm/becomingantiracist
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking
What could be the unexplored assumptions you may have about your academic colleagues from ethnic minorities?
How could you contribute through your own actions and interactions to challenge and minimise the power dynamics anchored in post-colonial practices and racism?
What would it mean to you to decolonise your frames of reference in your academic life?
Some reflections and questions to ponder based on my discussion with Muna
Carrying the weight of representation
What intrigues and fascinates me in the discussion with Muna, is this idea of the weight carried by those who embark in an academic career when few people from their community are present in the research space. The awareness of being the only one around has a significant impact on how individuals may feel able to be their full self in the research space.
For Muna, being able to embark on a research career was not something she was taking for granted. She really wanted to make the most of the opportunities. She experienced both a sense of responsibility towards her own family who had supported her and towards her British Somali community. Her commitment to her family was about using her professional competencies towards creating a better life for them. Her commitment to her community is complex, but one of the core elements is the ethical dimension of ensuring that knowledge gained goes back to her community to serve a valuable purpose, not just as an intellectual exercise.
Her research goals had been intimately linked to the experience of her Somali community when she started during her undergraduate research to look at the experience of black boys and men in the education system. Later on, she explored the experience of fatherhood in Somali men, but also how masculinity develops as Somali boys experience the British school system. This work was not just about an intellectual pursuit. It was about actively contributing to her own community through her research perspective.
Doing the research is challenging enough, so when your own work is part of creating a narrative about your own community and its experiences, and how your work may be of value to this community, there is a significant added weight. This represents a form of emotional labour that other research colleagues may have never experienced themselves.
o Have you ever asked a colleague from an ethnic minority, what it has been like for them to navigate their academic career?
o Can you remember that your academic colleagues from ethnic minorities can not be the sole role models for students from these communities? What about your own contribution to being an advocate and champion of academic colleagues and students from ethnic minorities?
Experiencing being a black home student
Institutional racism in the academic world is declined in a great many ways. One of the things that felt important in what Muna described, was that as a black home PhD student, her own experience was put in the same bag as that of the black overseas students. The specificity of her experience as a black woman home PhD student was likely to be hidden since she was probably to be the only one such student around.
A critical decision that Muna made was choosing carefully her supervisors. Whilst they did not understand the racial dimension in her work, they were open to dialogue. They had enough compassion and humility to step back and acknowledge her own experience. They gave her the space to explore and enabled her to make her own research decisions.
Our post-colonial practices are so embedded in our ways of working that we may not even realise what they are. Muna described that for some overseas PhD students, post-colonial practices could be when research/ knowledge/ data may be interpreted by students through western theoretical or Eurocentric frameworks. As overseas students are likely to be supervised by white academics, the approach to research analysis will come from the expertise of the supervisors. Most people may say, well what’s the problem with this? Muna explained that on occasion, a student may be told that they are lacking research skills when their approach significantly differs from what the supervisor may consider good research practices. If an overseas student is attempting to make sense of data coming from their own local context, what kind of approach for the analysis may be considered a decolonised one? Are PhD supervisors starting to think about this? Yes, it is hard stuff.
Muna describes that her knowledge was seeing by some as experience and not scholarship, as she was researching her community and issues of race. The way our knowledge is perceived by others impact our ability to navigate the research environment. It would be so easy to doubt ourselves when our research starting point is so different from others because of our origin and community.
o How will students/ research & academic colleagues from ethnic minorities know that you are truly open to listening to their thoughts even when they may differ greatly from yours?
o How prepared are you to challenge your own views about what is appropriate in shaping research analysis from a decolonised stance?
o What would it mean anyway to open ourselves to a less colonised way of making sense of the world and of producing knowledge?
Creating the right environment for researchers from ethnic minorities to thrive
As a black woman in academia, Muna felt the challenge of pushing for what she needed. She felt that she had to hold back many of her thoughts because of the worry of being perceived as aggressive. In a recent workshop I ran with early career women in research, many other women from ethnic minorities shared this experience of preventing themselves from being assertive. The worry of being perceived as aggressive from expressing themselves was shared by several black women participants. They felt that whatever approach they may try to have a voice, they may be accused of being aggressive. Listening to these participants and to Muna feels hard. How do we create a research space where the research voices of black women and colleagues from minorities are heard openly, putting aside pre-conceptions/ assumptions about what we expect people to be like when they are assertive.
Muna describes that as a black woman in academia, your experience of micro-aggression is not believed. Your experience is dismissed and denied. You may be told that you are over-reading things. The impact is that you may find yourself in a constant high state of alert, constantly risk assessing whether you can or not say something, express your views, disagree with someone else.
Muna’s luck was that her supervisors were prepared to fully engage with her through their own vulnerability of not understanding the racial dimension. Acknowledging openly their own weaknesses meant this helped her engage with them. It gave her the confidence to interact more fully with them. It built the relationship and the respect they could have for each other.
A way forward in challenging ourselves is to pay attention to the power dynamics in research environments, particularly power dynamics linked to race and gender. It is to accept as a starting point that research is both a personal and a political activity. When power dynamics are at play, we need to learn to confront them and name them. Muna emphasises that power is often not acknowledged.
Challenging institutions in their anti-racist stance means getting them to start the necessary introspective work. Muna says that it is about bringing back the human. It has a lot to do with humility. Yes indeed, not a term we hear often in academic circles.
Whilst many research institutions and universities may have projects on the go that aims to address racism and how ethnic minorities may be better supported in institutions. The work needed to foster anti-racist approaches as research professionals starts within ourselves:
o Doing the work internally: this means reflecting on our actions and ways of thinking when it comes to working with students and colleagues from ethnic minorities
o Decolonising our frames of references: this concerns paying attention to what you consider valuable knowledge or what is your approach to making decisions. Reframing your decision-making process through understanding the assumptions you may hold when making decisions.
o Positioning ourselves in spaces of engagement and dialogue with colleagues and students, instead of relying on the faster solution of relying on our assumptions.
o Acknowledging fully the experience of others and not dismissing how they feel about certain situations, even if we do not see or understand it initially, and even if we think ourselves full of good intentions.
o Being prepared to be vulnerable so that others can be.
o Not making assumptions about others who are different from us
o Listening to understand and build relationships
o Informing yourself about the issues that students bring to your attention.
“naming what the issues are within the university, making sure that commitments are made to change these different dynamics and then holding individuals to account and holding and creating systems that ensure that there is accountability at all stages would completely transform the research process”
