The Black British Postgraduate Experience

In this seminar final year DPhils Rachel Robinson and Danielle Watkis will share key findings from their research with racially minoritised students in Initial Teacher Education (Roberts) and Black British doctoral students in elite spaces (Watkis). In doing so they explore the implications for universities and academics. Hosted by the Race, Coloniality and Education research group. Full abstracts and bios below.

Title: The Spaces Between: Black-British Doctoral Life and Elite Imaginaries

Abstract: Elite universities are often imagined as spaces of intellectual openness and excellence, yet for Black doctoral students, these institutions can also represent spaces shaped by longstanding racialised and exclusionary traditions, producing more complex spatial, relational, affective, and knowledge-based realities of doctoral study.
Drawing on findings collected through narrative virtual walking interviews with 16 Black British doctoral students across the University of Oxford’s MPLS, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Medical Sciences divisions, I explore how doctoral students navigate the spaces of the elite. Through themes of temporal (dis)engagement, supervision, counterspace and collective intellectual community, the paper foregrounds the spatial and relational dimensions of doctoral study, examining how Black doctoral students create alternative forms of recognition, support, and intellectual life within and beyond the university.

Bio: Danielle Watkis is a DPhil candidate in Education at the University of Oxford whose research examines the spatial dimensions of doctoral study for Black British doctoral students, advancing theoretical understandings of space, agency, and knowledge within institutional structures. Holding a BSc in Psychology and an MRes in Research Methods in Psychology, her work sits at the intersection of race, psychology, and education, with a particular focus on how institutions move beyond access to address participation and experience. Central to her approach is translating voices into governance and systems, connecting lived experience and complex research in policy across the education sector.

Title: The black and diasporic experience of teacher education: A black feminist narration of the body in learning space
Rooted in black feminist theory, informed and supported by its tenets of care, lived experience, narrative, pragmatic action, and unflinching in acknowledging the emotion in existing in a racialised body; this work is about a desire to pragmatically act to improve and alter what currently exists. Race and how this constructed and contested term influences the experiences of those from diasporic communities as they return to the educational space as novice teachers embarking on university based secondary PGCE courses and progress through to Early Career employment. Positioned beside decades of research evidence documenting macro and microaggressions experienced by black and brown teachers from the moment they re-enter the school environment and how this influences not only their sense of self, but the unlikelihood of their sustained retention within the profession; experiential methods including walking, drawing and photo elicitation interviews, situate individual participants within their school context and offers a visceral reflection of their experience. Black feminist theory constructs an intersectional lens with which to view the spaces in which our novices are learning and offers them a voice via narrative to enable them to counter accepted realities that ignore the significance of their racialised selves in recognising the challenge of being a racialised body in a space that can be openly hostile to your form. Care is placed centrally within this framework, with it being essential to our collective survival, which places relationships formed within the space, notably with school-based mentor teachers – the people tasked with guiding our beginning teachers in the learning space, as well as peer groups, as essential in supporting the journey of becoming a teacher.

Bio: Rachel Robinson is a DPhil candidate and doctoral teaching and research fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research spans the themes within anti-racist education with her doctoral research focusing on the experiences of racialised beginning teachers through a black feminist lens. She currently teaches on the Science PGCE at Oxford and leads the Teaching Physics in Schools programme for Oxford undergraduate physics students. She is currently a research assistant on the Global Action for Racial Justice in Education (GARJE) research and advocacy project that explores anti-racist education initiatives across the world. Prior to her current work, she completed her PGCE in physics in 2014 and later a Master’s in Teacher Education at the University of Oxford whilst a secondary science teacher, mentor, and head of Physics.

This event is hosted by the Race, Coloniality and Education group.