Raisa Kabir

This is a project being worked on with other staff of colour in the Jewellery Textiles and Materials department at CSM. For my artefact intervention I want to run a workshop to introduce a new space to students, that aims to equip students with tools to create collective action, student agency and an enquiry into intersectional support, with a focus on disability, hidden disabilities, and the intersections of race and disability.

Its intention is to be a safe space, a brave space, where students of colour could be supported to learn about social models of disability, and how they might be further supported in the university. It has been noted around the politics and history of safe/r spaces, who is included, who feels angry they are excluded etc who is allowed to feel safe – safety and the feeling of safety is not universal. Certain identities feel safer to speak up more than others. Facilitating spaces is a long term skill of mine, where I have a history of organising spaces for conversation for femmes of colour, women of colour, disabled women. Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens (2013) state that it is crucial to lay ground rules for safe spaces, and that they are usually defined as a space in social justice settings where people come together to honestly discuss difficult issues, and that for many students, they conflate safety with comfort. I believe most generative discussion when dealing with groups can be when there is a little discomfort. Those of us who walk with more power in this world need to feel a little uncomfortable, if we are to question our positionality in the world. In this way, we ask for braver spaces, spaces where we understand as we enter we might feel uncomfortable and need to accept this is part of a process of change and transformation. I know gender/ableism is more likely to play a role in managing how the space is run. A set of ground rules of no tolerance to racism, sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism, and transphobia, will be introduced. And ideally this will help the disabled, younger, students of colour to feel as supported and safe as possible to know they will be listened to.

As there is a wider group of staff of colour who are all working on this together, I only want to focus on the session I want to bring to this space. We have a room booked, and are trying to set up the session weekly. My contribution to the space was to ensure, we weren’t just going to open up a space and leave potentially vulnerable students in a room together with no facilitation. Feedback from staff was mentioned, that it would create a lot of extra work for tutors who already had teaching to then steer an additional space. I suggested that by creating a lateral space, a space created with teachers and students, and centring students needs, and voices, we could introduce tools resources and knowledge exchange of the power of collective spaces, that would go on to empower poc students of intersectional experiences whilst inside the UAL CSM institution.

We know that gendered students and students of colour, are often misdiagnosed, or under diagnosed, meaning a multitude of mental health issues, chronic pain, auto immune conditions, neuro divergence, and learning/processing differences stay undetected and untreated. We understand the impact of racism can lead to mental health issues, the continued further obstacles when navigating formal education means it can put extra pressure on students and their physical and mental health. Increased stress and anxiety, can lead to depression, feelings of low self worth, and a higher likelihood of isolation, disengagement and poor attendance/attainment of grades than their peers who might not have the same lived experiences of oppression.

From my other blog posts about disability and race, I will have mentioned other ways I have integrated social justice pedagogy into my work through rearranging curriculum, but I noted that this was for post graduate students who have might have an extra level of independence that younger students out of college and further education might not have. I have also noticed gaps of student support for intersectional disabled students of colour, and wanted to focus on how I could help co-facilitate dialogic spaces on campus, that would offer support, but also connect students to each other from different parts of the department, and eventually could be school wide. I believe BA students of colour who are struggling on campus would benefit from meeting each other in a space that had various staff of colour present, I think this will help support student retention and the attainment gap, for poc and disabled students.

From speaking to poc staff members, their feedback was that it was thought important to distinguish the space as not a “dumping ground” for micro aggressions and conflicts/disputes of racism or any intersectional oppression, where things would be aired but not dealt with properly with due process and the correct channels within the university’s complaint process.

It was also noted whether it would be space for additional art curriculum, theory and dialogic practice, and if this would be separate from a poc safe space, for students to talk about their experiences and possibly even their work. Other feedback was that it shouldn’t be a separate curriculum teaching space, as this is extra work for poc teachers, and this kind of curriculum work should be integrated onto courses, not segregated.

I positioned the idea that to start with the history of collectivity of other artists of colour who had survived art school, and the tools and practices that led them there. We can note that the work students do and the theory we and they use, are intertwined and it is not always possible to separate them i.e we cannot always separate curriculum/theory/political body/personal experiences. That our intersectional experiences allows the practice of theory and employ what Paulo Friere wrote about Epistemological curiosity. That is through putting theory into practice, with our bodies, and positionality, that we can they understand how knowledge can be formed, critiqued and resitiuated.

A publication I edited and co-created in 2015, which was a resource created with three other queer and trans artists of colour, Evan Ifekoya, Rudy Loewe, and Raju Rage; called ‘How to Survive Art School, An Artists of colour tool kit’. Some of the exercises and resources in the book introduces a catalogue of British artists of colour, and resources of how to build collectives at art school and form transformative coalitions of voice and power.

I want to use the publication as a way to introduce these ideas of intersectional identities – Me, Rudy and Raju all identify as disabled. There is also another resource called ‘Keywords’, published by Tate and edited by Evan Ifekoya, this also narrates perspectives on care, collectivity and managing mental health/disability. with a conversation with Rudy Loewe. The resource I contributed to charts ideas around knowledge production, the value placed on hidden historic, embodied ancestral knowledges and a section of photo essays and prompts to create a conversation about who has ownership and authorship over knowledge production, language and dissemination. What does that look like and feel like? How might there be examples of indigenous knowledge that are undervalued say in our European institutions and academies of power.

From combining these various prompts and resources, around value, care, and intersectional identities and histories, I will be putting into practice many of the theories I’ve written about in the previous blogs, that chart my journey on this module, have been informed by my positionality and are based on practicing social justice pedagogy.

The aim would be to facilitate an open space for students of colour from varying stages in their degrees, and to open up the space and introduces its aims, and hopes to facilitate the students to eventually self organise and share knowledges to support each other. The resources would be shared to illustrate how collective tools can be used to address race and disability in the institution. This would begin with ways where we can humanise the student experience, and validate the trauma of being in such an environment, and also facilitate voices.

The beginning session I wanted to run, would be to introduce the space without students feeling under pressure to disclose or participate. But to build a foundation on which to collectively build a space where students did feel able to speak and share. I feel we need this space to counteract the way learning spaces violently and systematically fail students of colour. That it is not enough to have the one staff of colour per course. That it is not enough to have one to two students of black experience per course. Students are suffering in isolation and are being denied the tools with which they can dismantle the structures being enforced to reifying black, poc and disabled students oppression. This puts into theory bell hooks mentions in Teaching to transgress, and Paulo Friere demands it is the only way education can transform those who have been oppressed, and carry histories of oppression in their bodies. Education and radical spaces for exchange, thought, critical enquiry is the only way we can further create continued ripples of change.

Bhagat, D. and O’Neill, P. (2011) ​Inclusive practices, inclusive pedagogies: learning from widening participation research in art and design higher education.​ Croydon: CHEAD.

Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens. (2013). From Safe Spaces to Brave Places: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice. The Art of Effective Facilitation, Chapter 8.

Burke, P. J. and McManus, J. (2009) ‘Art for a few: Exclusions and misrecognitions in higher education admissions practices’, ​Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education​, 32(5), pp.699-712.

Cowden, S. and Singh, G. (2013); Acts of knowing: Critical pedagogy in, against and beyond the​   university​. London: Bloomsbury Publishing. 

England, K. (1994), ‘Getting personal: reflexivity, positionality, and feminist research’, The Professional Geographer, 46(1), pp. 80-9.

Fletcher, K. (2010) ‘Being inside and outside the field: An exploration of identity, positionality and reflexivity in inter-racial research’, Leisure Identities and Authenticity. LSA Publication, academia.edu

Friere, P. (1970) ​Pedagogy of the oppressed​. London: Continuum. 

Gabriel, D. and Tate, S. (eds.) (2017) ​Inside the ivory tower: narratives of women of colour surviving and thriving in British academia​. London: UCL IOE Press. 

Hatton, K. (2015) ​Towards an inclusive arts education. ​London: Trentham. 

hooks, b. (1994) ​Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom​. London: Routledge. 

hooks, b. (1994) Outlaw Culture Resisting Representations. London: Routledge.

Lorde, A. (2013) ​Sister outsider: essays and speeches.​ Berkeley: Crossing Press. 

Richards, A. and Finnigan, T. (2015) ​Embedding equality and diversity in the curriculum: An art and design practitioner’s guide​. York: Higher Education Academy. 

The writer and theorist bell hooks describes the moment we come to understand internalised racism is when we start to begin to unravel how many of our prior experiences and formations of knowledge about the world and our place in it are informed as our experience as racialised people of colour, and as people who are racialised as white. We see can begin to understand certain past actions and decisions unconsciously re-inscribes the value we place on ourselves or others depending on where they fit within white supremacist racist hierarchies. From an intersectional framework, I can know that I am South Asian, and even though I am anti racist and anti colonial, I am aware of the history of complicity of Brown culture to perpetuate Anti Blackness. I carry that with me wherever I go, I always need to keep learning, and actively resisting anyways that I might replicate whiteness and ingrained power hierarchies whilst teaching. I am aware of how every single one of us needs to be working on actively unlearning harmful things we have internalised about the world around us and our place within it. This is so very true of the learning environment. In the video ‘Witness unconsious bias’ it becomes clear, we are past explaining this away as ‘unconscious bias’, it is not enough to purely be aware of this bias. We have to be continually readdressing our approaches to students and their experiences and consciously taking responsibility of our positionality and how this impacts how we mark/treat our students. Unconscious bias is internalised racism. My journey into race awareness arrived when, as a queer person on my undergrad, I picked up Audre Lorde Sister Outsider, and it changed my life completely, to see articulated the specific pain of internalised oppression, the intersectional identity of gender, queerness and race, described in her writings, radicalised my politics from that moment on. This is where many of us, as bell hooks says, who are wounded, come to theory to articulate and form words and language around experiences we were unable to name.

Hahn Tapper (2013) ‘A pedagogy of social justice education: social identity, theory and intersectionality’, Pp. 411- 417 

From reading Tapper (2013) I reflected on how important it was to create spaces of learning that were dialogical, created critical conversation and allowed lateral space for students and teachers to learn from each other, taking into account the Social Identity of all who were present. It is to acknowledge how learning environments can be co-created between teacher and student, and any hierarchies of knowledge be abolished. Tapper explains that “an ideal educational experience exists between a teacher and students rather than emanating from a teacher to students. A teacher needs to create experiences with, and not for, students, integrating their experiences and voices into the educational experience itself”. We don’t have enough spaces to talk about race in arts education, and the underrepresentation of artists and designers of colour specifically at UAL, means students come onto courses and have their cultural and subjective experiences minimised.

Social justice education using Social Identity theory, explicitly refutes the ‘Banking theory’ of knowledge transfer, and embeds critical enquiry and theory that leads to epistemological curiosity. In this way students are actors in their own agency and empowered in their learning spaces. We give them tools to speak, rather than limit the parameters of what is to be observed. Tapper explains how this way of teaching takes into account people’s intersectional backgrounds, and names the power dynamics present in the institution of the university. This is illustrated in the pillars of Pedagogy of Social Justice education below in fig 1.

Dialogic spaces are not centred on the one of the courses I’ve witnessed, and I wonder how we might go beyond a numbers game of just including disabled, trans, poc students on the course as visible tokens of difference, but do nothing to address their intersectional identities, or imagine intersectional learning spaces.

Retention and attainment in the disciplines: Art and Design’ Finnigan and Richards 2016.

From reading this report it is clear how much staff diversity has an impact on student learning experiences, by marginalised students as well as white students. It discussed how art and design school pedagogy has been focused on the crit format, and also one to one tutorials where tutors give feedback after the student has done the work, and this causes a lot of low scores for the national student satisfaction survey, as students are not taught per se, and how this disproportionately affects working class, poc and disabled students the most. Instead student centered teaching practices and dialogic spaces would instead help the art and design learning environment to hold space for students of varying experience and knowledge, and to incorporate these in their work. The report mentions how the inclusive practice teaching module was formed, and created a space for tutors taking the module to reflect on their own practice and positionality as educators and to create small interventions in their curriculums. This could be an extended reading list or workshop or presentation. This type of process causes educators to see how these relatively minor inclusions to curriculum can change the context of much teaching being done to help dismantle and bolster social justice education practices in UAL.

Provocation – Courses are beginning to widen the students they accept onto the course as mentioned in Burke, P. J. and McManus, J. (2009) ‘Art for a few: Exclusions and misrecognitions in higher education admissions practices’,  and to look beyond the existing caches of cultural capital that students from higher socio economic and class backgrounds of students possess. Though students recruited outside of these boundaries are not sufficiently supported with the student centred teaching approach they need and require to bridge the gap in cultural capital. They are still left to ‘get on with it’, no research skills session are introduced, and everyone is given brief quick group tutorials with tutors gasping for air with no breaks or provision to go beyond telling the student what to do to complete the brief. As mentioned by Richards and Finnigan, “However, with increasing group sizes, and the increase in diversity within Art and Design studio spaces, providing feedback at an individual level for learning becomes increasingly challenging.” (2016) they reflect on how the university being privatised and taking on more students, builds this ‘spread thinly’ teaching environment. This has led to strike action and represents deeper issues at play, that involve the financial management body of the university itself, that prevents marginalised students from succeeded in such environments.

Liberation and social justice means giving more time and workshop sessions to students without the prior subject background and assumed learning skills in order to level the playing field. This is underpinned by reading Hahn Tapper (2013), where he writes how Paulo Friere in Pedagogy of the Opressed, “explains the role that identity plays in the shaping and implementation of education. One of his most important arguments is that students’ identities need to be taken into account in all educational settings. They should not be approached as if everyone in the classroom, including the teacher, is starting from the same place in terms of social status and identity.” (2013). Intersectional approaches to understanding student’ multiplicities of backgrounds could bolster the student and learning experience in not closing the gap of skills, research, planning and prior subject knowledge they might not have, but by enriching everyone’s experience by sharing all knowledges in a collective student group. This would put less stress on the model of individual tutors trying to lift students’s work on a one to one basis, but encourage processes of epistemological curiosity and enquiry that enabled students to radically support each other and understand each other in relation to each other.

Admissions see ‘potential’ now as beyond ‘what students already know’, but how are intersectional marginalised working class/poc/disabled students able to learn how to tap into their ‘potential’ if we aren’t nurturing their progress in a person centred teaching practice? Dialogic spaces would allow students to speak to each other and learn from each other. This kind of methodology I have put into practice in other courses at a different UAL college, where I have been allowed the freedom to build a student centered teaching practice into the module.

I recognise myself in these struggling students, I remember not understanding 1st year, not knowing how to decipher what was expected of me, floundering with research material that was personal to my subjectivity, but didn’t seem to translate to the subject being taught in a very rigid manner. I am speaking specifically about textiles here.

Whereas on the Performance Design and Practice course where I taught in 2020- 21, I did witness dialogic spaces in action. There was group discussion where broader ideas of social justice were included and built into the fabric of the pedagogy and curriculum areas. Where a performance practice is specifically about the body, thinking about how we negotiate our bodies from different perspectives is a crucial aspect of teaching this subject. In a design degree however, cultural studies (or anything critical for that matter) is separated from the course based skills practice, and design skills are taught in such a way that students have to fit themselves inside a marking structure and European design/thinking process. This is what is valued. I personally find this hard to witness (and teach).

On other courses, such as at post graduate level at a different UAL institution, I was given opportunity to use dialogical methods to critique standard design pedagogy. To do this I led a module that incorporated looking at artists and designers from the global world, textile artists that looked at race, queerness, disability and gender, borders, nationality and imperialism. Artists such as Faith Ringold, Diedrick Brackens, Maria Nepomuceno, Mona Hatoum, Gees Bend, and Jeffrey Gibson. The students were told to “Research an artist from the list below – what do they tell us about the world we live in today, and how so through textiles”

This work allowed us to start with cultural ideas and processes that explored thinking process that began with material culture, fibre history, global perspectives, bodies, and tools that were textile knowledges not formed from Western design processes. Students were asked to incorporate a contextual history of a material, such as the colonial history of cotton, indigo, jute, etc into their work, and use their weaving as a research tool using embodied processes of weaving – back strap looms – to create a political narrative essay.

In this way students wrote essays that were deeply personal, and questioned their own historical implications to racism, slavery and empire. It was wonderful to see the end of the project come to fruition and witness how students had examined their own positionality as designers and makers to critique power relations in a global society and world, and crucially put these ideas of theory into practice – as Paulo Friere states. We need to practice theory, and theory needs to be embodied, we cannot have one without the other, or try to separate them, they must be intergrated. This kind of alternative pedagogy works, and we can see direct results. But as these are post graduate students, they are better equipped to research themselves and are working to get the most out of their degrees.

For the the first year students I work with – something extra is needed, and a plan for my artefact will explore this.

^{Decolonizing textile tools brief – written for Sept 2021}

Decolonising textile tools workshop

This series of workshops with artist Raisa Kabir, will begin as an introduction to textile making, designing and using tools that are de-centered from Western euro-centric technology and thinking frameworks. We will equip you with the tools to begin to understand how to research an area of textile history, such as colour, pigment, material, technique or artist, from a global, ecological and sustainable viewpoint, and translate these into weavings, and explore the languages of design.

_{^{Too often designers are seen as removed from the centre of production, by starting with back strap weaving – a type of weaving found in many places across the world, such as Mexico, Peru, China, India – will be re-situating our perspective on textile making tools and machinery that places us as tools ourselves, where we will be learning how to be researchers, through our bodies, and material exploration. There will be small research tasks each week, where you will share and learn from each other what you have found, about a global textile artist, a material, a technique, a colour.}}

_{^{We will start the project, with looking at a variety of textile and weaving making processes that are off loom, low tech and branch from ancient weaving technology found across different regions. We will assess how cultural imperialism affects craft and textile identities related to place, land, culture and language, and how there are several strands of global textile thinking, where an embodied practice can innovate and make us think post industrially about textile design.}}

_{^{The project will allow you build a research folio, that you can then translate into a woven sample, using back strap looms, and begin to experiment with colour, texture, fibre, and using your body as a tool for action, reflection and research. We are decolonizing the way we imagine textile production, and to think about global labour processes and our role as textile designers, makers and producers in this time, when resources and materials are dwindling and how we can incorporate reducing our impact on the future}}

_{^{Key words: diaspora, migration, production, labour, industrialisation, indigenous, intangible heritage, technique, process, global weaving techniques, tacit knowledge “}}

I will end on a quote from Tapper (2013) where we can sense and understand how these incremental shifts can create ripples in education, but more importantly allow students to reflect on themselves and keep on questions ideas around power, and to continue this practice once leaving the institution. This kind of affect can’t be measured, but we can only imagine how these students will go on to teach others and share thoughts on questioning ideas of race, positionality, and contextual history. We cannot dream or imagine a future without understanding who we are now, and what we are the products of.

“Students who learn to internalize the responsibility they have to change the world around them and feel empowered to do so are repeatedly reminded that social change is ultimately a lifelong process. They are taught not to grandiosely expect the organization’s programs to hold the secret to life. Rather, they are taught that each program’s goal is to start this deeply reflective process but not to finish it.”

Burke, P. J. and McManus, J. (2009) ‘Art for a few: Exclusions and misrecognitions in higher education admissions practices’, ​Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education​, 32(5), pp.699-712. 

 Sabri, Duna (201 7) Students’ Experience of Identity and Attainment at UAL, Final year 4 report of a longitudinal study for the University of the Arts London. Project Report. University of the Arts London, London

Friere, P. (1970) ​Pedagogy of the oppressed​. London: Continuum. 

Finnigan, T. and Richards, A. (2016) .‘Retention and attainment in the disciplines: Art and Design’

hooks, b. (1994) ​Teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom​. London: Routledge. 

Richards, A. and Finnigan, T. (2015) ​Embedding equality and diversity in the curriculum: An art and design practitioner’s guide​. York: Higher Education Academy. 

Tapper, T. (2013) ‘A pedagogy of social justice education: social identity, theory and intersectionality’,  

I wrote my dissertation on Queer South Asian Muslim women and intersectional dress in 2013. It means I have previous reading about the validity and multiplicities of experience of being Queer and Muslim. I am Muslim, even though I grew up with a mother who was always questioning what it meant to be Muslim, and to have Muslim heritage/ancestry. She believed being Muslim was incompatible with being a feminist and supporting women. She ran away from religion to the UK so she could have an independent income and be independent financially from any man, including her first and second husband (who she only married the second time, because I was born).

It meant I grew up learning about all religions, she didn’t want to force me to be Muslim, but to come to my faith, to Allah, in my own journey. It was more imperative to learn to be spiritual, to understand the world as something within us and bigger than us, how faith could take many forms, and it was about liberation and freedom. But it also meant there were gaps in my grasp on Islam. I didn’t learn Arabic like my other Muslim peers. Me and my siblings felt a loss of a cultural connection to Islam as well as a rooted sense of faith.

It wasn’t until I attended the Inclusive Mosque initiative, which was set up in 2012 that I felt I was allowed to engage with my Faith. I first went to a meeting in 2013, and met other Queer Muslims, from all backgrounds, races and genders. It was a liberatory moment, where I had been given access to a world which I had felt would reject me certainly. And this wasn’t the case. I later introduced my mother to the inclusive mosque initiative, to give her a space to practice her faith in a feminist environment that was safe for queer trans people, and women. After years of saying to her yes there was a space to be queer and muslim, and feminist! A space that didn’t gender us, when so much of that customary gendering was cultural sexism, rather than spiritual mandate. It also was a space that meant you didn’t have to be part of a specific diasporic community to attend, which can deter people from entering spaces of faith linked to a specific cultural connection – which are important for that community but not everyone is afforded to be a part of a community.

“The Inclusive Mosque Initiative is an intersectional feminist mosque dedicated to creating inclusive, safer places for marginalised Muslims and their families, especially non-traditional families. We are committed to reviving a rights-based Islam that challenges all forms of oppression. We call ourselves a mosque to demonstrate that a mosque is made up of a community, not bound by a building.” IMI website.

The Inclusive Mosque Initiative (IMI) was founded in 2012, in London, UK. It is a grassroots activist organisation which works toward promotes the understanding of an intersectional feminist Islam.”^[1] In practice this means that IMI spaces and events are organised to be as inclusive as possible; unlike many existing mosques and religious organisations, IMI is not divided along linguistic, sectarian, political or ethnic lines. The organisation makes every effort towards providing disabled access to and within its venues, including British Sign Language (BSL) within its services,^[2] and giving translations of Arabic words when used

A quote from IMI’s wikipedia page

From the Religion, Belief and Faith identities UAL website by UAL which is a Community of Practice page that “brings together academic and support staff to share practice and ideas about how we address religion, belief, and faith identities through teaching, learning and research at UAL. The group will consider the intersection between faith identity and other social identities (e.g. gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class).”

I came across Angela Drisdale Gordon’s pen portraits and thought this was a really useful entry point to addressing faith and inclusion practices in teaching. It is an ice breaker excercise that allows students to learn and answer questions about each other that do not bring up conflict or tension. I went on to read her interview with Shades of Noir and read about her journey of being a Black academic of 32 years at UAL. Her practice of listening to every each and one of her students and tracking their progress, and how it was fundamental to her that she practiced learning through conversation. This is so important. Students need to learn from each other and speak to each other. And as teachers we learn from them if we listen to them also. I really appreciated it, when she said when students come to her with a technique she wasn’t familiar with, she said would make the effort to research it and learn about it herself.

I remember writing my dissertation in 2013, on Queer South Asian and Muslim dress/fashion cultures, and the tutors had nothing to say to me regarding my work, I had to do it all alone. It wasn’t until I found a friend in the shape of PhD student Lipi Begum, who was queer and Bangladeshi like me, that she looked over it and gave me proper advice.

Later Lipi Begum and Rohit Das Gupta, would commission me to present this work at a conference at LCF with Professor Reina Lewis, and the photo essays would be published in a book Styling South Asian Youth cultures. They originally wanted me to write something, but the essay kept coming back with edits that took out my politics, or was too grammatically incorrect – I felt like I wasn’t good enough at writing and in the end my ideas were condensed into an interview, that summarised all my ideas.

On the Religion, Belief and Faith identities UAL website I also watched the conference of Reina Lewis speaking on faith and fashion at UAL.

Professor Reina Lewis. Dress, Politics, and Belonging post-Brexit, 30 November 2016

“What does it mean to be a visible minority in a post-Brexit Britain given the rise in racism, anti-semitism and anti-Muslim prejudice increasingly evident in the West?” Lewis in the conference talks about the intimacies of dress cultural knowledge in faith communities. How we read each other in a secret knowing, which is only shared by those who had grown up with those cultural dress codes and signals are able to decipher them. She attributes this skills akin to queer people’s notion of ‘gaydar’ where we learn to read people, read their queerness, their dress and cultural ethnic markers. It is a language that you learn when part of the Jewish faith, or Islamic cultural upbringing, we notice these codes linked to identity and gender.

‘Religion in Britain: Challenges for Higher Education.’ Stimulus paper (Modood & Calhoun, 2015) I read three headings and responded to two things I learnt about Religion, faith and education settings

1. Multiculturalism “not just anti-discrimination, sameness of treatment and toleration of ‘difference’, but respect for difference; not equal rights despite differences but equality as the accommodation of difference in the public space, which therefore comes to be shared rather than dominated by the majority. Instead of creating a sharp distinction between the public sphere of rights and civic relations and a private sphere (of male–female relations, sexual orientations or religious beliefs), we acknowledge that the public sphere reflects various norms and interests of, for example, masculinity, heterosexuality, Anglophones, Christians, and that equality therefore requires the abandonment of the pretence of ‘difference-blindness’ and allowing others, the marginalised minorities, to also be visible and explicitly accommodated in the public sphere.”

Here Modood explains that dominate public spaces are can be categorised as hegemonic white cultural and heterosexual spaces, where queer and visibly muslim people, or people occupying any state of difference is seen as ‘out of place’ Puwar (2002) These hegemonic spaces include workplaces and educational settings as well. Some work I mentioned earlier that I had done, with Queer South Asian Muslim participants – In/visible space – looked at how we can complicate ideas around faith, and the public/private spaces of worship, and private white queer spaces, that can become racialised. A way to visualise intersectional public and private geographies. Who is comfortable to be visibly muslim in a white queer space? Who is comfortably visibly queer in a Disaporic culturally muslim space such as a Mosque? My photographic work asked those questions about the body, difference, and feeling out of place, and subverting ideas around what could be public queer muslim space, as well as private spaces created into be inclusive of gender, faith and sexuality.

I think I could use these works, that look at fashion and subcultures of queer Muslim and South Asian dress identity to give a workshop on faith and inclusion and intersectional identities, to fashion students at CSM? I know a colleague there who is a future academics tutor who has asked me to do some work with her department. It could be an exercise in looking at cross cultural dress, identity, and expression of faith and ethnicity, and codes of difference. What is it about cultural space and the experience of moving through white spaces that makes it harder for people of multiple marginalised experiences to moves through these space.?

2. Religion and dissent in universities 

Calhoun in this section of the paper covers several areas where religion comes into cross hairs at University and educational settings, from the PREVENT requirement of the university to report students they think might be extremist or too radical. To issues of gender segregation and the presumed incompatibility of sexuality and religion. The practice of gender segregation is not only the practice of Muslims Calhoun notes, and helpfully he affirms what I mentioned earlier in this post, that this practice is not a religious requirement but one that comes from cultural customs instead. “Gender and sexuality are challenging issues for universities that struggle to combine respect for religion with clarity that a lack of respect or denigration based on gender or sexuality cannot be countenanced. ” Here Calhoun mentions that Universities trying to balances religious tolerance and still be open to LGBTQ discussions and support on campus, misrepresents the students who are both religious and of LGBTQ experience. Universities need to take a further inclusive approach, and not just assume Religious societies on campus are homophobic, and assume that all LGTBQ societies would reject Muslim students and other students of faith, purely on the basis that they believed their existence to be against their religion. There is space between these questions and debates that allow for plural identities to co exist AND support each other. As I mentioned with the Inclusive Mosque Initiative. Feminist and Intersectional approaches to gender, sexuality and faith exist, and we should be encouraging this open dialogue and scholarship with students in educational settings.

The Reith lectures by Kwame Anthony Appiah – Mistaken Identities – Creed

Listening to Kwame Anthony Appiah, he talks about how our families shape so much of who we are. I mention my family background as I don’t know any other way to really think about the way I do things, possibly because of the way they do things. But also gender, nationality, race, class, they inform everything we do, as professionals and educators.

How does identity work? “Religious identities so often connect us with the oldest stories” Appiah states that religion is not simply about belief, but is so much more about praxis, action and the action of community. Is it possible to belong to a religion without believing in God. I see myself and my family as culturally Muslim, even thought the older we get we practice Islam in different way than when I was younger. Faith doesn’t have to be a performance, the ritual the ceremony, without the true engagement. So much of religion is to believe what is in the scripture, and to “practice” what it says. But when we have illiteracies of communities told to practice religion in a language they will never begin to read – it is more about control of one person/group/political voice over other communities. My mother asked me how I could be Muslim and be Queer? She saw in the culturally Bangladeshi practice of Islam as a deep conservatism, where questioning the book was not possible. But as we see in the IMI project, how coming together to the action of practicing our faith with other Queer muslims, we can question and read and take from the scripture of what is in our hearts. Appiah states that so much in the scripture is utterly irrelevant and communities ignore out of date lessons, so in the future we should be able to accommodate queerness and gender difference as being a part of our faith communities. Because being connected to faith is so much more than piousness, it is about being connected to others we love and share in a collectivity – to feel part of something bigger than yourself. I feel connected to my ancestors, my grandma and aunts, who are no longer with us. I cannot believe that Allah doesn’t love us, as Allah is the universe. Doctrine of control means these spiritual interpretations are not accepted. But so much of religion and Scripture is interpreted through heterosexual and dominant cultural groups. It gives us allowances that as queer communities of faith, we are also legitimate in interpreting scripture with a feminist and intersectional gaze too, and our interpretation to take what is needed and what isn’t, is also divine.

Puwar, N. (Ed.). (2004). Space invaders: Race, gender and bodies out of place. New York: Berg.

Religion in Britain: Challenges for Higher Education June 2015

Stimulus paper Tariq Modood Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy University of Bristol Craig Calhoun Director and School Professor of Social Science London School of Economics and Political Science

Kwame Anthony Appiah Reith lecture on Creed – BBC Oct 2016

I am a Queer Disabled South Asian Muslim artist working in higher education and funded community art projects nationally and internationally.

There are many many times, too many to count, where institutions have failed to support me as a Disabled Artist, but failed to meet basic needs for any Artist. As a result I wrote the Disabled Artist/Artworker contract manifesto in 2021 for an event at the ICA London, to make visible the demands of a safe working environment for any artist/artworker/educator whose labour is extracted by institutions. I’m sharing this as a note on positionality, as also as a prompt for my artefact, to ask how students might think about what constitute safe working conditions. How can we build non hierarchal dialogic spaces with students that will help equip them with dealing with institutions now at university/art school and beyond in their careers.

My Positionality as a disabled lecturer. I have Rheumatoid Arthritis, Fibromyalgia, hyper-mobility, depression and complex PTSD. I often feel invalid, or unable to function in society because of the ways disability shapes my everyday life. I feel incompatible with the outside world. I battle internalised ableism daily.

My first experience of coming to study UAL as a disabled student on crutches was a very traumatic time. And as such this unit has been extremely triggering to think about my positionality and memories of being so disabled in London and at UAL. It has been difficult remembering how students treated me and spoke to me as if I was lesser-than somehow, because I was visibly disabled, I was South Asian and from Manchester. Which was at odds with what I had to say. I was a mature student and it had taken a lot to get here. To speak my voice.

I remember struggling with pain and my mobility yet when talking to UAL disability services back 2010 they stated they had no provision for me as a physically disabled student, they only supported learning disabilities. I had to fight with them to get the taxi support to get me into uni after complaining. I missed an entire year of university and worked entirely from home that year because of the racism, the classism, the ableism. I missed out on so much simply because the world I lived in disabled me because of my mobility needs.

Ironically I have now come to realise that I am probably quite dyslexic. I struggle with reading, writing, deadlines and comprehending time. This has impacted me most of my academic career and at school. I was severely disabled with Rheumatoid arthritis most of my time in secondary school and did not actually attend many lessons. This has meant I have shame and fear of writing despite being told I was an A+ capable student. I feel I am not good enough or academic enough, because I was never able to achieve those grades. Instead I studied art and textiles at foundation and circumvented needing A levels/G.C.S.Es to get into university. I as a disabled person, never thought I would get into university. I never thought I would have aspirations to teach and support other students in this way.

Many disabled people feel like this, like we aren’t good enough, that we don’t deserve careers. That we lost time out at school/university (if we did go at all) and thus feel we are not as equipped in basic skills as others, even though we have much lived experience and tacit knowledge. But anyone who had a difficult early years experience, will feel like this also, invalidated by the institiution, and we can see how our experiences of disability, race, faith and gender/sexuality combine and inform each other. Many queer and trans people are more likely to suffer from mental health conditions as a result of society invalidating the queer and trans experience, and many Black/PoC Trans and queer people are disabled. We see this also in the Diaspora, where children of colour do not see their experiences, values and references reflected in curriculums or popular culture, and grew up with continued racist micro aggressions that pathologized their ethnicity or racial background. To feel erased is to feel like you are nothing.

This never stops, it is continual into Further Education and Higher Education. I can see now how the Art school reinforces these beliefs, rather than create a supportive, exploratory and creative environment that encourages diverse thought. My positionality and experiences inform how I want to support other disabled and intersectional marginalised students. I want to keep on learning, and understand how my class background and South Asian racial background can be complicit in replicating institutional/racist/classist/ableist thinking.

We are all capable of this, and we have to unlearn the way university drums into us the way we need to teach, that often purposely excludes and disseminates knowledge in a particular way. Paulo Friere talks about the banking method theory, and how this purposely reinforces power relations between students and teachers, where students are fed facts and have to keep reverence to the professors, instead of a more mutual reciprocal approach to transforming pedagogy. I see how harmful it is to have these ways of thinking seep into my practice, just because I have been placed within an institution. I want to resist this. I have started my work on my decolonizing textile education (which was my original artefact back in 2021) and received £3000 in funding from an UAL EDI fund. We are going to use this to bolster our approaches to textile education methods that prioritise student agency, student knowledge and embodied making processes that allow for collective thought and sharing student diasporic knowledge and indigenous tools from their diverse textile heritages. In this way we begin to breakdown the assumption that students coming to Chelsea to study textiles, should only value the Western European knowledge that it puts forward. I feel this project didn’t engage fully with social justice so I am no longer going to document it as my artefact.

My positionality as someone who was educated in the UK. I come from a middle class background, my parents both came to the UK in the 1960s and had university degrees from Bangladesh before they met later in Manchester. They both independantly studied further in UK institutions. When my mother’s first husband died and she was widowed with three children, she went back to night school to study a Masters in sociology. My mum became a social worker and worked in domestic violence support centres for immigrant Bangladeshi women in Oldham, supporting them with interpretation and access to safe housing. She also worked at Manchester City council as the first woman of colour to work there in the 1970’s at the first Race Relations department in Manchester. We were a double income family – unusual for the 70’s/80’s. My dad had a HND in computer science from Salford and worked for an energy company in the 1980’s. He was never promoted in the 25 years he worked there because they deemed his speaking English to not be good enough. My parents are both feminist, socialist, liberal and anti racist. My positionality of having South Asian educated parents that supported me, my queerness, and my disability is a unique one.

Throughout my teens as having rheumatoid arthritis – which comes from trauma of being bullied for being gay at school – my parents were there. I fully understand the way intersectional oppression operates, I am living proof of it. And because of my positionality I have been able to somehow navigate the educational system, despite not having been the best at formal education.

A Disabled artist/Art worker contract

This is my Disabled artists art worker contract

I am tired and frustrated at having to explain,  each and every time I work with a new client/employer/contractor/gallery/museum/university,

There is a brick wall to be negotiated. It is further labour having to discuss, relay and communicate, my access needs and fundamental working environment  as a Disabled artist. For these requirements to be disclosed, recognised, upheld and respected.

“All artists are teachers, all labour is art labour, all art labour is labour.

Including time to rest. Resting is a labour I pour into myself to be able to function.

No such day as a sick day when you are a freelance art worker/artist/lecturer.”

Sick days are unenumerated 

Sick days are unpaid – it doesn’t pay to be sick,

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Pay us for the work we do, for you, that makes us sick.

Pay us for days we are sick, from the work we do, for you

That makes us sick

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Pay us for having days off, which are not holidays. 

Pay us for rest days. Resting properly takes time. Pay us for the time it takes for us to fully rest

If not, Pay us for the extra time, for the time it takes for us to get sick, if we cannot rest.

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Pay us for having food as a part of the budget

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Always build in a fully accessible taxi allowance

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Assume we need assistance, an assistant on hand or two to help, build it in into the budget

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

We need the conditions of work to reflect how sick we might get from carrying out this work

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Don’t assume your timeline is the same time line, don’t assume time is universal

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

I want us to be paid for the days I can’t move

Can’t cook

Can’t eat

Can’t work

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Pay us for the extra labour responding to all your emails whilst we are sick, from you demanding our art labour for you.

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

We deserve to be paid for our sick days as standard, for that to be built into the project, budget, timeline, adjustments. We will get sick. We know our bodies.

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Pay for us to have the time to cope

Pay for the extra hours it takes for us to emotionally recover from having our labour extracted from

ARTS FESTIVALS

ARTS MUSEUMS

ART GALLERIES

ART SCHOOLS

ART RESIDENCIES 

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Let us have full ownership of our work, ideas, pedagogy and methods,

Trust we know what we are doing

You cannot control us.

We do not wish to be institutionalised.

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

You cannot profit from your proximity to us,

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

We refuse to break our  boundaries of safety to complete any kind of work

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

We are allowed to refuse.  To pause. To break. To step away without fear of retribution. And Without shame.

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Building in time for emotional access needs is not unprofessional.

Working without a disabled artist’s safety plan is dangerous. 

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Listen to our needs, They are not malleable.

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Assume and build in assistance into all and every budgets, we are not super human, and non disabled artists aren’t either.

We are Mothers and carers also, build in time and availability for childcare and caring responsibilities.

For a  Disabled Artist/Art Worker contract

Pay us properly for our expertise and knowledge.

We are not grateful to help you with information extraction. 

All labour is art labour

All art labour is labour

Raisa Kabir 2021

Who has monoplogies on knowledge? A thought I had when watching Christine Sun Kim’s film (2010) on her approach to visualising sound as a deaf artist. Why did hearing communities assume they had the monopoly on sound, when they took such a singular approach to only ‘hearing’ sound. Sun Kim talks about feeling sound, seeing sound, and creates a multitude of sculptures that paint and mark make and cause objects to jump with the vibrations of sound waves. Sound is physical. Sound is somatic. Sun Kim makes it clear how she has brought attention to ways hearing communities ignore the multiplicities and materiality of sound waves. She captures this material sound activity and demonstrates the joy of sound possibilities experienced by deaf people through the other 5 senses. The assumption by those who can hear sound, imagine that those who are deaf, do not interact with sound is false.

Thinking about my own practice as an educator, I am leading a workshop on 3D making out of found objects, and since seeing this film, I’ve wanted to show this video to my students. I have included work about the artist Judith Scott in the project brief as well, who is an American sculptor and was an artist who had Down syndrome and was Deaf. Which isn’t necessarily a disability, but people of this experience have historically been institutionalised and ostracised, and regarded as people who cannot participate in language and society if they are Deaf or have Downs syndrome. It is these violent assumptions that abled people and hearing people make.

Judith Scott was born in 1943 and was institutionalised for over 40 years and kept away from her family. It was only in the 1980’s when these institutions closed and she was brought to Oakland by her sister, that she gained access to an art environment at Creative Growth Art centre in Oakland California in 1987. She began to sculpt by wrapping and binding several objects together with yarn where these ritual processes became her intuitive material language, her way of communicating. In previous years she had been denied access to language, and presumed to not have significant thoughts or talent.

It is this monopoly on language, words, art expression, that denies Disabled or Deaf or people with diverse learning experiences, to have agency and access to art making and expression.

I have used Judith Scott in my teaching to get students to question ideas around knowledge production and dissemination in the practice of language and communication. Whose voices are listened to when they are not verbal?

How are artists like Christine Sun Kim and Judith Scott communicating in ways that are not rooted in ableist and racist ideas of knowledge. Thus showing the intertwined ways epistemological violence is practiced by enforcing European western values on knowledge production systems that are predicated on ableist forms such as practices of writing/hearing/verbal communication.

UAL uses the social model of disability. Defined as

• Dyslexia or another Specific Learning Difference
• A sensory impairment
• A physical impairment
• A long-term health or mental health condition
• Autism
• Another long-term condition which has an impact on your day-to-day life

UAL say they are committed to inclusion and to accommodate disabled students. Yet as many theorists have noted, the institution itself is predicated on ableist barriers, and intentional barriers to accessing the institution that reify racism ableism and sexism. There are many processes of teaching that I’ve noticed occur in departments I’ve taught on at UAL, where it is clear the way communication with students about course curriculum, knowledge and assessment is designed for students outside theses institutional parameters of knowledge to fail.

For an example where students have used their mental health as a starting point for their research. The students are not told how to visually research, and are not told how this summer project will inform their intense making projects. They are marked down for being conceptual, because the material/colour and aesthetic information is not considered broad enough to comply with the European design practices and theory – which consistently undermine and devalue students who are disabled, are using neurodivergent thought processes, or are coming from non cultural capital class backgrounds. The university assumes a certain kind of research knowledge base, and a reliance on a visual one. It becomes clear how students feel excluded for their own approaches to research that might look and feel different.

It is in these ways we see the university as an institution that works its staff so hard, they can’t do more than follow the assessment formulations that severely marks students down for their limited research. How can we steer students to develop appropriate research skills, without devaluing their ideas on disability, ethnicity? What kinds of academic support are needed. How can we use social justice methodologies and pedagogy to support students who are navigating educational systems that were not designed for them to succeed?

In Penny Jane Burke & Jackie McManus (2011) Art for a few: exclusions and misrecognitions in higher education admissions practices, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, they talk about the way students selected for Art and Design courses are expected already to have clear communicated potential. “These are tied in with ontological perspectives that value certain dispositions and attitudes more highly than others, and this is inextricably connected to classed and racialized inequalities and subjectivities” Burke, McManus. (2011) describe here from their findings, the attributes they use to distinguish candidates as potential students on their courses, were subject to particular subjectivities on assumed shared knowledge and and equity in access to cultural capital, where people from racialised and non middle class backgrounds are more likely to fail to be perceived as having these aptitudes. I see this research reflected and involved in the practice of research as well, and how students of colour with intersectional disabilities and experience of class, form a complicated barrier that leads to students not thriving in these environments. Students who are people of colour, and are neurodivergent are less likely to have been diagnosed, often mask their symptoms and struggle in isolation. These debates feed into a lot of how disability services and representations of disability justice movements are very white, as mentioned in the resource of Disabilitytoowhite. This means students of multiple experience are less likely to seek support and perhaps have conditions or symptoms viewed through racialised lenses by tutors/teaching staff. Who might perceive the students as under achievers, an unconscious racist bias of believing students of colour are not putting enough work or are as talented as their white counterparts. Or having more sympathy for disabled white/affulent white students rather than trying to see what obstacles students of colour are experiencing or masking, and the impact of mitigating these disabilities or closing the gap/gulf of cultural capital, disabled students of colour have further barriers and perceptions of their work assessed by tutors in this way.

Intersectional disability – gender and disability mean girls are less likely to receive diagnosis of neurodivergence, meaning the affect it has on everyday life and studies is not supported as it should be. Women of colour and femmes of colour are less likely to be believed by their doctors about chronic pain symptoms, and again are misdiagnosed or undiagnosed for their disabilities o conditions. Khairani Barokka states in her piece, “Deaf-Accessibility for Spoonies: Lessons From Touring Eve and Mary Are Having Coffee While Chronically Ill”(201 7) about the intersectionality of race and disability, where for years her levels of pain were misbelieved and dismissed by professionals, where she found herself working in 2014 under unsafe conditions because of how her disability was perceived, she says she was suffering health and chronic pain wise from “working under other people’s assumptions that my pain was negligible, lack of proper healthcare, and setting unduly high expectations for the arts work I’d become immersed in” She went on to create a show on In/visible disabilities and the continued gaslighting brown disabled people face when trying to articulate how much pain they are actually in. Here we see race gender and disability collide. The root of inherited intergenerational trauma also means disability in the form of chronic illness, race and gender intertwine, as structural oppression is the disabling factor – using the social model of disability we can see how it is society and the models and structures we come to live inside that make it disabling to navigate. Khairani also reflects on making her show accessible as possible, but fails to include herself, and ask for a PA or assistant.

In 2017 I had the joy of working with Khairani Barokka, we were working on the same event together, on bodies of colour and disability. We both spoke Bangla. Queer disabled brown poetic connections are rare. I shared an endurance performance on intergenerational trauma, and in 2018 we were on a disabled poetry event together. We have similar experiences of navigating pain and negotiating western medical systems with our brown disabled bodies. I am reflecting on how I might incorporate these embodied methodologies into my teaching with students, possibly by putting our disabled bodies forthright and centre as disruptions and ruptures. How it is a deliberate and vulnerable act to make invisible disabilities visible. This is something I practice in my art performances, but I would like to see how I could use this context of lived experience to share with students and employ this thinking in my teaching. Khairani talks of the empathy gap, and how to bridge connections of experience of pain with each other. I feel I would want to explore this with my teaching practice, as I have done in a the performance ‘you and 1 are more alike…’ 2017 that sought to visualise and complicate experiences of shared ancestral pain and trauma.

Khairani thinks about how to use exercises in teaching performance in higher eduction to highlight the bodily differences of trying to perform whilst disabled she says she would, “propose an intersectional, disability-aware exercise for production classes. I would ask them how, if they lived with chronic pain, they could continue to perform and produce whilst placing an undisputed premium on holistic self-care in complex circumstances, whilst maintaining an artistic practice.” To put something like this in practice would be to ask students to consider outside of themselves and comprehend how much they rely on their bodies, and what would it mean to not be in control of how it functions. What does it mean to rely on others?

From reading the extensive ‘Disabled People: The Voice of Many publication by Shades of Noir’. There were so many resonant articles and resources articulated with care nuance and expertise, that I felt reflected my own experience as well. It is a collection and anthology of reflection and practice that explores the full intersectional experience of disability, race and gender and its impact in continuing and higher educational settings.

The article I’ve chosen to reflect on their inclusive approach to the Arts sector and/or Higher education is Rebekah Ubuntu’s ‘An inquiry into Disability and intersectional identities’. It is a self interview format, and discusses the intersection of class disability, race and queer identity. Rebekah says their experience of disability is informed by their experiences of race, gender, class and being in foster care. That we cannot extricate ones intersectional experience of disability without taking into account how all parts of ones identity is shaped and informed by the other.

Rebekah speaks of how their diagnosis of Autism was delayed for many years because any characteristics of stress and trauma were seen as the product of surviving the foster care system. It was only when Rebekah was able to take agency over their own health that they were able to obtain a diagnosis. This personal account echoes other evidence of gender impacting rates of support and diagnosis of autism. Children of intersectional experience are often gas lit about their own experiences of trauma. Rebekah mentions even though their school has disability screening, this was never presented as an option for them or the same equal support given to other white disabled peers.

Here we see time and time again disabled people of colour struggle to be recognised as disabled by medical professionals, often depriving them of medical care, medication and holistic support they require. Both Khairani and Rebekah are artists. Rebekah because of their diagnosis is able to build disability assistance into funding applications. Learning to advocate for oneself as a disabled artist, ask for food ask for support, ask for the institution you are working for to care for you is so hard. And I empathise deeply when you are forced to work in any setting unsafely and without the disability support in place. Rebekah says their survival as a Black, queer disabled working class person is dependent on access to their safe space “cocoon” to have this space they can retreat to.

I imagine there are many disabled students of colour on campus at UAL, who are struggling deeply with issues of juggling their disability, diagnosis, high work loads, micro aggressions, and being in an institutionally white/racist environment – a place where their complex experiences of race and disability are unrecognised or deeply misunderstood. I would like to think about the idea of how to create a safer space for black and brown students, to examine/share tools that help foster and create collectivity between other students of colour, that take into account disability and trauma, that will equip them to weather the storms of their degrees.

For my work in textiles, it is imperative in my pedagogic journey to develop a series of decolonial textiles lectures and tool kits that disrupts the way textile education is formulated. I use my presence and research as a textile artist and researcher to interrupt institutional spaces, and my roles teaching within UAL that is no different.

I have developed a lecture that was open to Chelsea textiles students, to reflect on their work they had done with me using backstrap looms, and the provenance of indigenous technology we were using that is found in Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, and China, Indonesia, Bhutan,North Eastern India, Thailand, and many South Asian and South East Asian remote places where this weaving is still found.

Some slides from the lecture that show how the lecture supported the weaving workshop, and continued these conversations around global knowledge and colonial contexts of materials and technology and archives.

Building a social justice framework into education a crucial and key to understanding where the attainment gap between White students and BAME, home and international students originates. Referencing the Sabri (2017) report gives a clear indication of the gaps and discrepancies between the attainments of different student groups. These factors might relate to familial support, or difficulties adjusting to the structural design of institutions that create extra hurdles for students of differing backgrounds. In my teaching, I try to use global references that decentre the Eurocentricity of curriculum and knowledge only found in Western art and design education, and underpinning this with historical context. This includes, discussing more than just the race of our students, or addressing anti blackness. It means designing curriculum that point to the structural inequalities that have been built into our education system – and this includes history, and global history – that underpins the racism, capitalism and anti-blackness that is found in all aspects and operations in our world today. We cannot separate UK history from Racism and Slavery, and colonial wars, occupations and imperialism. How different nations have had their own empires and where these migrations and histories relating to art, textile and cloth, and pattern design might coexist and interrupt each other.

Visible space is a series of photographic essays that provide documentation of the visibility of young South Asian LBTQ identified persons in Britain today. It explores the use of cross-cultural dress to assert South Asian queer and ethnic identities, in relation to occupying public and private space. Because of the largely Eurocentric depiction and representation of LGBTQ identity, South Asian persons are often rendered invisible or their queerness misread and erased. 

In an attempt to reverse the gaze of invisibility, this project sought to ask South Asian queer women and trans/genderqueer persons how they saw themselves, and how they wished to be represented. Either by subverting and occupying public spaces, or documenting and re-creating private spaces where they felt completely safe and visible to be South Asian and LBTQ simultaneously. Through these visual essays we can witness how dress, is a powerful tool in constructing gender, sexuality ethnicity and faith, and how on the queer South Asian body, different meanings are projected on to racialised bodies depending on the space that they occupy. 

Some of the people I worked with for this project, we discussed our personal relationship to Islam, and faith, and being of South Asian descent and queer. I feel these works, and showing them to students would open up some amazing intersectional conversations about the multiplicities of faith, and talking about dress and faith – like Reina Lewis. I have written and worked on essays regarding feminism and muslim dress and gender, and these photo essays expand on that to focus on queer muslim dress and spaces.

Maryam is a queer Muslim activist, and was concerned with using prayer as a form of feminist protest. The practice of women in Islam having to completely cover their hair for prayer, and the sometimes binary separation of gender for public prayer i.e women can sometimes only pray in a women’s designated space rather than mixed. She often mixes ethnic clothing such as kurtas and jeans with leather jackets in order to Queer South Asian dress. Being a feminist Muslim is a huge part of her identity, so for this shoot we went to the first mosque that was ever built in the UK – The Shah Jahan Mosque, built in 1889 by Dr Gottleib Wilhelm Leitner in Surrey – on Orientalist Road.

– and prepared to show a visibly queer woman praying in the public space that would be usually reserved for men. She prayed without the gendering Hijab, though still covering the back of her head with a beanie hat, as many men do not even cover their heads to pray – yet Muslim’s are required to protect their head when they pray. This use of racialised and religious space attempts to look at the structured patriarchy which polices gender and space in Islam and presents a feminist, subverted idea of gender conformity in Islam.

Ungendering prayer. This was a space in which we could replicate A’s formative memories of prayer and worship in the mosque with their  father, when they was younger and able to wear looser non-gender specific clothing.  The act of public prayer in a religious space today, felt restricted to them, because of the segregation of sexes in Islam and mandatory gendering in Islamic dress and Hijab. They didn’t feel they could enter a mosque itself. We created a safe private queerspace instead; free of gender policing, the constraints of dress, and the implied expected heterosexuality. Documenting a space where they were able to visualise, experience and immerse themselves with prayer whilst being a visibly queer Muslim in safety. We used male Islamic clothing and this was a very healing and impactful moment, enabling them to create this space, document it and the conversations that took place.

_{Yasmin grew up around Brick Lane, as part of the Bangladeshi community in East London, she chose the area as a place where she can be herself, almost anonymous amongst the vibrant graffiti art she loves rather than the Whitechapel end of Brick Lane, where she feels she would be noticed by family or feel conscious and hyper visible as a Muslim woman in racialised public space. In a sense the white hetero-public space, which used to be racialised but is now heavily whitened and gentrified, she feels that she is able to be invisible amongst the crowds as a Bisexual woman who wears Hijab and this feels like relief. She feels out of place in mainstream queer spaces, where racism and Islamophobia mean that as a Hijabi queer woman she is visible as Muslim, yet invisiblised as Bisexual.} 

“South Asian femme presenting persons, if wearing ethnic or religious dress or markers on their body, are stripped of any queer authenticity. Thus South Asian queer bodies are placed at an intersection where their racial hypervisiblity outmodes their invisibility as identifying as queer, in particular if they wear any form of ethnic dress. Making this a project that aims to highlight and create Visible space for South Asian queer women and trans/genderqueer persons, and maps out the ways in which queer, gendered and ethnic performativity is established through coded dress.” Raisa Kabir

www.in-visiblespace.co.uk

‘Performing the archive – embodied geographies workshop’

“A workshop with artist Raisa Kabir, bringing in collective tools to re -imagine what archives can be, and work with the archive of the body.  Unpicking ideas around collections, voices, places, and un/archiving as a  de-colonial practice. How can our bodies function as road maps or actioning decoded histories? Use this workshop to challenge held ideas around recording information, and how information  or narratives can be translated and embodied through your work”

This is the outline of a workshop I held for some PDP students. I wanted to explore themes of archiving, using objects and then translating some of that through our bodies. I have always thought using archives was useful, to question types of histories, and also the power of what is archived, who does the choosing, and what other types of archives exist?

(Outline lesson timings)

2pm – 2.30 (30 mins intro – What is an archive?)  10mins questions roll over

2.40 – 2.45 (5min break)

2.50 – 3.00 (10 mins introduce activity)

3.00 – 3.25 (25 mins activity task in groups)

3.25 – 3.50 ( 25 min discussion)

3.50 – 3.55 ( 5min break)

4.00 – 4.30 (Feedback/reflection)

What is an archive? What are collections?

What do they look like? Why are archives important?

Why do you want to use archives?

We start by introducing each other and I introduce myself, and then I tend to ask my group lots of questions what they might think a traditional archive is. I used my textile opening tool also, that I used in my micro teach, to again start up conversations around objects, narratives and underrepresented archives that might be housed in different languages and materials – like an Edwardian corset, or a petticoat, or woven textiles from South America or Sweden.

I asked the students if they had seen (Watermelon woman) Cheryl Dunye – 1996) A film where Cherly invents the a lost fictional actress in 1930’ cinema to research and create a film about discovering as rearchiving this fictional black actress as a radical attempt at showing where there are howling gaps in the archival records. Her film fills in the history to trace black women actresses and reclaim their stories. Knowing that they did exist, but sometimes we have to invent and insert ourselves where so often people of colour has been purposely erased. It is such an examples of queer black women inserting themselves into the canon this way and subverting and highlighting what is missing.

On the other hand in the National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago – the colonial archives, that detail the names and data the indentured are recorded, their debt owed and which village they came from, which ship they came on and information about their bodies/abilities, but nothing of people’s stories – this is what is missing – and this is where crafted object, I believe can used archive theory to embody history this way.

 UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register (Registry of Slaves of the British Caribbean 1817-1834

Prompts used:

• How do we perform with the archive? Whose stories? 
• How can we approach with ethics and care?
• What is a body?
• What is the body of work?
• The body of the archive?
• Colonial practices, divorce the archive from the body.
• Graves in Egypt  shipped around the world
• What kind of object speaks?
• Do we know how to listen?

Using books by Edward Said, Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Kumari Jaywardena, and Jasbir Puar. We looked at the way the histories of colonised or othered peoples in feminism and decolonial scholarship have been framed by others and framed themselves. I asked the group to pick up a book each and scan the pages for excerpts or even a sentence that stood out, and for them to add it to the map, and maybe we will be able to join up the questions – which I used as prompts to get the group to think about objects, bodies, and the role of archives, and how we value knowledge.

I gave each student a group and an opportunity to speak about the information they had found, and writing notes on the map, created a collective resource. Using great source material we noted that the books were dense, and were needed, but much of the knowledge in them were about our lived experiences of being poc, othered, women, and queer/trans bodies. It happened that this was a sign up workshop that a a fair few students had come to my lectures prior, so had signed up to come, meaning many students were poc and were eager to engage in some of these themes. Some were MA students and had a good grasp of the theories we were discussing, but ultimately it was the non hierarchal format, where a workshop discussion was being led and steered by me, but I did not position myself as a fountain of top down knowledge. It was geared to create a much needed space for the students to discuss these topics, of women of colour, uncredited feminism of colour scholarship, and by creating this space in the university institution it threw into focus the severe lack of other kinds of spaces like this for the students to freely share and hold space for each other.

It brought me back to one of the PGcert sessions that I think had a lot of influence on me, and reiterated the methods I use to teach and inspire. Lateral spaces, and always recognising that students have so much knowledge to share and prior experience. I always feel a bit let down when proffessors haven’t recoogised the material and experiences we’ve had or prior knowledge to sessions. And this is what I aim to encourage and foster. I am trying to make sure I can keep holding space for students and to keep going to give students several options to further/expand their ideas, as this is where eureka moments happen, students feeling safe to share, empowered by the content, then confident to form their own analysis and bring varying ideas together.