Anti‐racist learning and teaching in British geography

Abstract

This special section illustrates how learning and teaching in UK higher education reinforces, but can potentially also help to counteract, racism. This introduction provides some context for this intervention and provides an outline of key themes that emerge from the collection of papers. We use these themes to sketch out three guiding principles for the incorporation of explicitly anti‐racist praxis in our learning and teaching within British Geography: (1) Recognise each other's humanity, (2) Say the unsayable, and (3) Experiment with (y)our history. We call for explicitly anti‐racist praxis while conscious of the “disciplinary fragility” that moves to address racism might elicit. It is argued that an anti‐racist approach to learning and teaching in British Geography has the potential to equip staff and students with the tools to help make our discipline, and wider society, more equitable and just.

Defiant scholarship: Dismantling coloniality in contemporary African geographies

“…Critical scholars and intellectuals in Africa have long faced persecution, malignment, exclusion, threats and sexual harassment (Tamale & Oloka‐Onyango, 1997), targeted assassination and, more recently, toxic ‘collaborations’ with Northern‐based scholars (Musila, 2019: 287). We begin this discussion of African geographies ‘without illusion’ of the ‘the black pits that hide [capitalist and colonial] rhetoric’ (Mignolo, 2011: 46; see also Fanon, 1961) and refuse colonial ‘moves to innocence’ (Tuck & Yang, 2012; see also Esson & Last, 2020). We are aware, simultaneously, that ‘[e]ven our best intentions can, unwittingly, be obedient to a logic of coloniality’ (italics original, Dominguez, 2021: 3; see also Adebisi, 2020).…”

“…In the pursuit of anti‐racist African geographies today, we argue for the need to work from the traditions of defiant scholarship while also drawing upon the work within anti‐racist geographies (e.g. Esson & Last, 2020; Johnson, 2020). Anti‐racist geographies is a ‘praxis‐driven scholarship attentive to and critical of the changing and particular functions of racialization (including whiteness and white supremacy) in informing space, place, geographies, economies and societies—as well as the structural inequalities within and between them (Puttick & Murrey, 2021).…”

Stop the pain: Black and minority ethnic scholars on diversity policy obfuscation in universities

“…As I have argued previously, racism is about devaluing people based on their perceived race. When you have institutions that do not always value all people, students face lower degree outcomes, racism, feelings of isolation and barriers to their career progressions even when Black and minority ethnic students do get their foot in the door to university (Esson and Last, 2020). In my own recent research, I have drawn attention to the experiences of Black and ethnic minority postgraduate students and the totalising nature of Whiteness on the university campus.…”

Looking ahead to the future of GeogEd: Creating spaces of exchange between communities of practice

“…Esson argues that, in HE, while "geography classrooms [are presented] as emancipatory spaces and mechanisms for enacting positive social transformation" (2018, p. 3), the acute and urgent experience of many students and colleagues is of geography's colonial legacy and present, of hostility to those from working class or financially disadvantaged backgrounds, of the contemporary discipline's overwhelming whiteness and institutionalised racist/colonial narratives, and the racialisation of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) students and colleagues, and the belittling of their work and working practices (Desai, 2017;Esson, 2018;Esson & Last, 2019;Johnson, 2019;Tolia-Kelly, 2017). The necessity of anti-racist pedagogies at universities (Esson & Last, 2020) and schools (Morgan & Lambert, 2001Puttick & Murrey, 2020;Tomlinson, 2019) is clear.…”