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Is Diversity Academic in UK Universities?

“Why isn’t my professor black?” and “Why is my curriculum white?”: Imagining UK universities differently.
 
Date: Sat 17th Oct
Time: 2.15pm-3.15pm
Format: Panel
Location: Cinema, Warwick Arts Centre
Price: Free
 
There are 18,510 professors in British universities – only 85 of them are black (and only 17 of these are women). At the same time, a significant “attainment gap” persists between the proportion of white undergraduates achieving good degrees (around 75%) and the proportions of all other ethnic groups doing so (around 57%). The situation is very different in the USA, where departments of Black Studies have existed since the 1960s. If we are to imagine a different future for diverse and equitable Higher Education, can the establishment of British Black Studies lead the way?
 

Panellists
Kehinde Andrews
Dr Kehinde Andrews is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University. His research interests are radical approaches to overcoming racial inequality and his first book Resisting Racism: Race, Inequality and the Black Supplementary School Movement. Kehinde is director of the Centre for Critical Social Research; founder of the Organisation of Black Unity; and co-chair of the Black Studies Association.
 Kehinde

Gurminder Bhambra
Dr Gurminder K Bhambra is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. For the academic year 2014-15, she was Visiting Fellow in the Department of Sociology, Princeton University and Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her research interests are primarily in the area of historical sociology and contemporary social theory and she is also interested in the intersection of the social sciences with recent work in postcolonial and decolonial studies.

She is author of Connected Sociologies (Bloomsbury, 2014) and Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Palgrave, 2007) which won the 2008 Philip Abrams Memorial Prize for best first book in sociology. She has co-edited three collections, Silencing Human Rights (Palgrave, 2009); 1968 in Retrospect (Palgrave, 2009); and African Athena (OUP, 2011). She also set up the Global Social Theory website to support students and academics interested in social theory in global perspective. She tweets in a personal capacity @gkbhambra

 Gurminder

Adam Elliot
Adam Elliott-Cooper was University College London’s research assistant in “Race”, and is currently a doctoral researcher in the School of Geography and the Environment, at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on black resistance to police violence in post-2011 London. Adam also sits on the editorial board of City. He has worked as a researcher/writer at the Institute of Race Relations, Race on the Agenda, the Runnymede Trust, the Greater London Authority, Goldsmith’s University and Britain's National Portrait Gallery.

A Cooper
Lisa Palmer
Dr Lisa Palmer is Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University. Her research interest include Black Studies in Britain, the cultural politics of Lover's Rock music, racism and decolonial studies.
 Lisa
Robbie Shilliam
Dr Robbie Shilliam is Reader in International Relations at Queen Mary University of London. He is author of The Black Pacific: Anti-colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015) and co-editor of Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (Routledge, 2014). He is co-convener of the British International Studies Association's Colonial/Postcolonial/Decolonial working group, and co-editor of the book series Kilombo: International Relations and the Colonial Question (Rowman & Littlefield International).
 RS