Dr Muna Abdi is an independent scholar and consultant who is using her own experience and expertise as a British Somali academic to support organisations embed anti-racist practices.
Being a black British Somali woman in the academia is likely to put you in the odd-one-out category of university staff in the UK Higher Education system.
Dr Muna Abdi has experienced many academic spaces since the start of her career. From being one of many Black home students as an undergraduate student, to being the only black home PhD student among other black overseas students, in a Russell group institution, and moving to the great challenge of being the only British Somali early career academic in an institution with many black home students.
Muna’s experiences of academia is an interesting illustration of the intermingling of race, gender and post-colonial issues in our academic world.
Muna's consultancy can be found here: https://ma-consultancy.co.uk/
Muna is also a Podcaster. Her Podcast is called Becoming an antiracist
https://anchor.fm/becomingantiracist
Dr Muna Abdi is an independent scholar and consultant who is using her own experience and expertise as a British Somali academic to support organisations embed anti-racist practices.
Being a black British Somali woman in the academia is likely to put you in the odd-one-out category of university staff in the UK Higher Education system.
Dr Muna Abdi has experienced many academic spaces since the start of her career. From being one of many Black home students as an undergraduate student, to being the only black home PhD student among other black overseas students, in a Russell group institution, and moving to the great challenge of being the only British Somali early career academic in an institution with many black home students.
Muna’s experiences of academia is an interesting illustration of the intermingling of race, gender and post-colonial issues in our academic world.
Muna's consultancy can be found here: https://ma-consultancy.co.uk/
Muna is also a Podcaster. Her Podcast is called Becoming an antiracist
https://anchor.fm/becomingantiracist
Warning- getting a perfect transcript is really hard. This transcript may have mistakes. Be kind to us by accepting these potential errors. We hope that the transcript can be helpful to some of you! Apologies in advances for any mistakes in the transcript.
Sandrine Soubes: Let's make a start.
[music]
Sandrine: Good morning dear listener. You are today with me Sandrine Soubes on the podcast, Research Lives, and Cultures. I got the pleasure to have with me today, Dr. Muna Abdi. Welcome on the show, Muna.
Muna Abdi: Thank you, Sandrine.
Sandrine: I met Muna many, many years ago. Maybe not so many years. It depends how you look at time. Muna was a PhD researcher at the University of Sheffield. I met here through a program that I was running for PhD student, postdoc, and research fellows. It's really a pleasure to have seen Muna grow in a professional life.
I follow Muna on LinkedIn. It's been really interesting to see some of the work that she's been doing. Muna works now as an independent scholar and as an independent consultant. She set up a consultancy. How long ago now, Muna?
Muna: In 2019. That's just two years ago.
Sandrine: That's brilliant. It would be really interesting to have some insight about your early years in your professional life and in terms of just getting started in research in the first place. Can you take us through the journey of your first few years in the academia?
Muna: I think my journey into research really started at undergraduate level. Being able to do a dissertation where you have the opportunity to explore a subject for the first time in-depth when you've never had that opportunity before. Because my undergraduate degree was in education, I was really able to start to ask the questions about the system that I was immersed in with what felt like very few restrictions.
My immediate response was, I've always been curious about why particular students struggle within the education system, and students who look like me, struggle within the schooling system more so than the education system. There's a distinction between the two. I really enjoyed, in my undergraduate degree, being able to just explore subject. I fell in love with research. It was one of the reasons why I had the opportunity to apply for a scholarship, to do a master's and a PhD.
I jumped at the opportunity too because it meant I could spend more years immersing myself in research. The challenge of doing the research, the process of doing the research was always where I had the greatest amount of discomfort. The practice of research in terms of being able to explore subjects that were so close to my heart and so close to my practice was the reason why this became part of my professional identity and is still a part of my professional identity.
There is a real love for exploration, a real love for being able to bring to the surface issues that are not often brought to the surface and then being able to see how that translates into, hopefully, change but dialogue and further work that could potentially happen. Research has been in my heart since, God, too long to think about my undergraduate years.
Sandrine: It's interesting because depending on your family background, you may have people who have done PhDs or not, and understanding what it means to do a PhD or what it means to have a career in the academia. It not something that all of us have. In a way for you, what was-- I don't know the trigger or what made you feel that it was okay to embark on that journey?
Muna: To be honest, I haven't had guidance on the system and the processes because I was the second in my family after my sister to go to university and the first in my family to do a master's and then first to do a PhD. I didn't really have any guidance on what was going to be ahead of me, it was really a blank canvas for me to just try and explore. I did have a sense of the importance of education.
There's a reason why I talk about education and schooling as being two separate things because schooling is the systems and structures that we navigate our way through, whereas education is the journey of seeking knowledge. I grew up in a culture, I grew up in a family unit where the importance of education and seeking knowledge was always a fundamental part of being in that space.
When I was at the university and I was able to be immersed in so much knowledge despite the challenges of the processes and the systems around us, it really felt like a responsibility to be able to make the most of that opportunity because many members of my family haven't had the opportunity to be immersed in a place where knowledge is being made and knowledge is being shared. I never took it for granted but it carried with a sense of responsibility more than anything else.
Sandrine: That's to have burden because it's almost like you have a sense that you have to succeed. Is that what you're saying? Why is that really?
Muna: I don't know if it's succeed but I think it definitely, it carries within a burden from the family perspective but also from the wider community perspective for different reasons. For my family, my parents came to the country as refugees as part of the civil war. They sacrifice everything in order for us to be able to have access to these opportunities so their sense of responsibility was make sure that the time that is spent within these spaces is worthwhile and that it is time that is ultimately going to support you and your family to have a better life. That was always in my consciousness, it is in my mind.
From a community perspective, it was about the lack of representation and the responsibility that if there are not that many people in the spaces that you're in that look like you, you are, to a certain degree, representing a community in that space and carrying the weight of that representation, but also, the responsibility that the knowledge that you gained is never yours on your own to hold. It has to go back into that community as well because you have the opportunity to access a space that others don't have the opportunity to access. If there's knowledge within that space that could benefit those communities, you have a responsibility to take that out as well.
This is why community-based research and knowledge making has always been at the heart of my work because that is the responsibility that I always carry with me in this space.
Sandrine: How did you go about choosing actually what to work on because you do undergraduate dissertation and then master? Maybe you mentioned the same topic from your master's to your PhD but the point at which you decide what you're going to study, there is a time where it's-- At least in social sciences, there is more scope to shape the topic. In the sciences, it's quite different.
What was your approach to actually decide where to study in the first instance and who to study with because again, the environment that we choose to become the researchers that we want to become makes a massive difference in the way that we are able to navigate the research environment? What was your own approach to decide who, where, on what to go about your first years in research?
Muna: I think, for me, my research has always been emerging and it always starts off from what is the experience within the community that I work within because I was a researcher and a community advocate before I was an academic. That's always my starting point. When I did my undergraduate degree, I initially explored racism within the education system because that was something that was really important to me. I saw the effects of that within the community that I was working with.
Within my undergraduate degree, I really honed in on a particular lens that was emerging in my community work and that was the gender lens, particularly around the dynamics of race and gender and how it played out in the experiences of Black men and Black boys within my particular community. Things around policing, crime, education, mental health, so on and so forth. It was a really dominant theme that wasn't really being spoken about. That really fed into the research direction that I went into.
Then when I did my PhD, that naturally gravitated towards one of the outcomes of my master's research was that I looked at gender and I specifically looked at the experience of fatherhood within the Somali community and the most dominant theme within that was the experience of fatherhood had a lasting effect on young men's experiences of their own masculinity within particular context. That is something that I chose to explore in my PhD was, how is the experience of masculinity affecting the way in which young Somali boys experienced the school system, in particular, the wider social world that they are part of as well?
When it came to selecting where I did my research, I will be honest and say, initially, I didn't put that much thought into it because, for me, I wanted to stay local and a university for me was a university. I, first of all, chose to do my undergraduate degree at Sheffield Hallam, purely because it had the most diverse student demographic. By diverse, I mean, it had a diverse home student demographic within that university rather than an international student demographic.
For me, as somebody who is entering university for the first time, I needed to have people around me with similar lived experiences. That wasn't reflected in the teaching that I received, but I had the comfort of being around my peers who shared the same experiences as me.
My master's and my PhD, I applied for scholarship. Unfortunately, that scholarship was tied to Russell Group universities, in particular, and so it shifted me away from Sheffield Hallam to The University of Sheffield. For me that initially caused quite a little bit of hesitancy because I wasn't sure what I was coming into the space with that, but I was sure that the student demographic wouldn't have the same lived experience as me and it didn't. I was part of a PhD cohort where I was the only Black student and that was a home student.
There were international students on the course, but because I was the only student of color that was a home student, the treatment that I received for the first year of my PhD was very much dissimilar to an international student. Because I was a scholarship student, I received some of the benefits of the home students. I fell into this liminal in-between space, but I had to find a way of negotiating. I think the thing that I had the most control over in the PhD was being able to define my research and who was going to be my supervisor.
That was the most important decision for me because, as you can imagine, I heard quite a lot of horror stories about PhDs that just don't work because the supervisory experience or relationship is just doesn't work well together. I tried really hard to research different academics who were working in the department. I knew none of the academics that that worked within that space knew my research area in detail, but I was trying to find somebody that would at least understand the research methodology that I wanted to use.
I was really fortunate to find two outstanding academics who were, again, two White academics who didn't understand the racial aspects of the work that I was doing but who were open enough to be able to have that dialogue, compassionate enough to be able to hold the space and allow me to explore my approach in multiple different ways and had the humility to be able to step back when they needed to and allow me to make some of the decisions alongside the research journey as well. I think I strike a very lucky balance in the people that I was fortunate to have. My PhD journey could have gone very differently had those individuals not been there.
Sandrine: You used the word humility and it's certainly not a word that we use a lot in the research space. It's really fascinating the thing that you said about, the way we cater for the type of support or the type of programs that we have for international students were, in a way, you were lumped as the diversity person with the international students.
I've worked as a researcher, developer for many, many years, and I know that before I left the university, actually, I had a conversation with a chemist PhD student from Nigeria. When I was discussing with him, suddenly I started to realize, hang on a minute, we have a lot of overseas students from lots of different countries where government invest a huge amount of money to get this research or training. Really, what we are doing, we are training them at our image. We are training them following the researcher development framework that was set by this national organization called Vitae.
All of this is based on what we think researchers ought to be like in a Western context. The students completely opened my eyes and I felt really embarrassed because I felt, I've never actually taken the time to listen to the overseas students from the Global South. It's like, what is their experience in their context and what is it that we are doing or not doing to train them for when they return back home.
Also, in a way, I've never considered your situation or people like yourself who are from Black and ethnic minorities and may be lumped together with overseas students. Tell me a little bit about this experience of being like that. Almost not considered as a specific group whose experience is very different.
Muna: Absolutely. It's one of the reasons why my research, particularly when you're looking at the Somali experiences, looks at both a post-colonial lens and looks at a critical race lens because the critical race lens, allows me to name what it means to be Black and British doing this work and the dynamics that you have to interact with when you're looking at it through a purely racial lens. Then the post-colonial lens really unpacks the legacies of knowledge-making and what we see as justified knowledge, what we see as the canons of knowledge that we hold in one particular position and we don't value other knowledges in other ways.
What I really noticed was that the international students were making sense of Eurocentric knowledge to shape research, even if that research was taking place in a context that was in the Global South. If they were doing it in their countries of origin, they were still using the Eurocentric framework of interviewing surveying ethics, et cetera, and a claim back. There was always a tension. In every colleague that I spoke to, there was that tension, but because their supervisors didn't have the racial literacy, didn't have that decolonial lens, they were just seeing that as incompetence.
They were seeing that as you're lacking research skill because you're not able to engage with these theories or these models or these studies in the way that you want to, rather than acknowledging that these individuals are engaging with knowledge that doesn't fit with the research that they're trying to engage with or they are trying to frame this knowledge through a way of thinking that isn't a Eurocentric way of thinking. There was that complete disconnect. From the perspective of somebody who is racialized as Black living in the UK context and, particularly, you being a woman, the biggest struggle was managing the dynamic in the relationship.
Again, those dynamics are different because international students experienced a lot of these tensions as well. One of the things that I found for the first time in my academic life, in all honesty, was that my knowledge was being seen as experience. It wasn't being seen scholarship. Because I was researching race, most of the academics that I was talking to, whether it was in a conference or whether it was in an informal setting, would talk about the emotionality of my research as lived experience and not see it for the rigor in terms of the scholarship of it.
There was always that way of trying to over justify yourself in those spaces. There was, in all honesty, some imposter syndrome that kicked in because you start to doubt your level of scholarship. You start to doubt the quality of your work when people are only looking at this as lived experience because it's a subject that's so close to your heart. Then you also have the dilemma of the narrative around Black women and when you are trying to assert yourself and trying to push for what you need as part of your research, you are seen as being aggressive.
Until I built that trust with both of my supervisors, I held back a lot of my thoughts and a lot of the decisions I wanted to make for fear that I would be seen as too aggressive in that space. Having that thinking behind me that if they see me as aggressive, they're not going to support my work. I need to navigate my way through the research. That puts a strain on you in terms of your mental health, it puts a strain on you in terms of your confidence because you're ultimately in a space that's silencing you. If you are confined to a way of working and you're not able to say, I need to do this, I need to do that.
Then the third thing that many of the Black female scholars that I work with have articulated as well that I've also experienced is that as a Black woman in academia, you're not believed, your experience is not believed. When you are encountering challenges, whether that is some micro-aggression that takes place or a dismissal in a space and you try and talk about that with somebody, there is that immediate dismissal or that denial of your experience that you encounter, where somebody will say, "I think you're just overreacting," or, "They didn't mean it in that way," et cetera.
Because there's such a power imbalance between students and academic staff, and even as a PhD doctoral candidate, you're positioned as a student, you are very aware of what that power dynamic is and who the university is designed to protect. Very often, the university is designed to protect its academics and not the doctoral candidate. You carry that all with you and, in every space that you go to, you're constantly risk assessing what you can and can't do with your identity and the awareness of your identity in mind.
Sandrine: Were you able to overcome that in term of the relationship that you built with your supervisors and, in a way, what's enabled for you to reach the point where you find your voice in the relationship? Voice to basically say the way you wanted to undertake your work?
Muna: It comes with risk, but I definitely built that trust with my supervisors. I think what helped me in building that trust was their willingness to be vulnerable with me and to name what they were seeing as their weaknesses in the process or the things that they found challenging in that process. I think as soon as I saw that willingness to be vulnerable, it allowed me to be vulnerable with them and be open with them about what I was experiencing. That is really the moment that our relationship started to strengthen.
I also recognize that there were things that I just couldn't talk to my supervisors with because our lived experiences were just too different. For me, an external network of support was really helpful. I had mentors that were located in all over the world that were doing similar pieces of research and much further ahead than me, who were my points of contact to talk to about different areas of the research, and for pastoral support as well, just to have that conversation with. Having those multiple spaces for support really was what made me stay within the PhD because there were times in which I didn't think I'd complete.
Sandrine: Many of us have experienced that, that's for sure. [chuckles] This idea of mentors, I can't remember, there is a scholar in the US who's done a lot of work on the position of women in the academia. I can't remember, she has a term about having a circle of advisors, I think, she used. It's funny because you've put on LinkedIn recently a really, really interesting post about this idea of role model and how challenging it is to be considered a role model.
In a way, I'd be interested in you talking about that because, in building this network of advisor or whatever you want to call it, who we are reaching out can really shape, again, our sense of identity, the past, and the opportunities that we take. What was your approach in making your decision who to ask to be maybe your informal mentor or who to ask to have conversation with? What was really for you the-- I don't know what the term, but the path of deciding, "I need this person in my life as a mentor or as a conversation partner."
Muna: I think most of those relationships were very organic and they were looking at the qualities in a person or the skills that that person had that I needed, but also seeing that there was a potential to actually build a relationship with that person as well. With my two supervisors, both of them had very different approaches to working, both of them had very different personalities. I managed, over time, to be able to build two very different relationships with them in that space because I got to know them and they got to know me.
With the people that I had as part of my network of advisors, it was really about, first of all, something that drew me to them, whether it was me engaging with their work and feeling as though their work resonated with mine, attending a conference and building up a conversation with them and seeing that there are connections in the way that we work or having informal conversations with them and those informal conversations slowly building up into more of an advisory role.
I never outwardly sought out a mentor or sought out advisors. I think I was very fortunate to be able to find myself in spaces and with networks of people where I was able to have conversations. The reason why I don't use a role model as a framework is because it wasn't about those individuals in their entirety being models of academia that I wanted to live up to or emulate. It was me seeing qualities in particular individuals and me thinking, "This is something that I need to strengthen as part of my own learning and part of my own development, and that individual would be a good person to connect to, to strengthen that."
Often, those relationships were reciprocal relationships, where it wasn't just me saying, "Oh, that person could help me with that and this person could help me with that," but it was, "Is there a potential for this to become a future collaboration? Is there a potential for me to support their work and them to support mine?" I'm always really conscious of not taking somebody's time. I try and make relationships as reciprocal as possible. There have been times where I'm so grateful for this, particular academics have reached out to me and have said, "Anything that you need, just reach out. If you want me to read a chapter, I'm more than happy to do it, et cetera."
The only times I've ever taken them up on that offer is if I can offer something in return. It's just the nature of how I work. I would say to an academic, "Thank you so much for reading this chapter for me. I really do appreciate it. If you're working on a research project and you need some advice in any of these areas of expertise, please let me know what I can do." I think that, for me, builds a more natural relationship, rather than a transactional relationship.
Sandrine: If you reflect on your expense of being in the research environment, what do you think really needs to change? Obviously, at the moment, since the Black Lives Matter movement, there's been lots and lots of conversation about the position and how we support people from diverse groups to thrive in the research environment. Through the work that you're doing yourself, in communities, as a consultant, what do you think is the-- People have lots of good intentions.
There are tons of very fancy policy documents right, left and center, but the reality on the ground, of changing practices, it's really hard. I guess somebody like you may sometime get extremely frustrated seeing these practices, being so slow, and change just not happening. If we're just focusing on the world of research, what does it look like to really have an antiracist, post-colonial kind of shakeup of the research environment, what needs to happen? I know it's a massive question, but what's your take on this?
Muna: I think there are multiple power dynamics at play within research that are just not spoken about, let alone addressed. We can talk about knowledge. We can talk about practices. We can talk about relationships, and so on and so forth. Even looking at ethics and how we actually engage in research, all of those different strands of the research ecosystem needs to be dismantled and explored.
One of the fundamental things for me is that the approach to research within universities is very transactional. It is very much around an exchange of information, an exchange of you have somebody who is a knowledge bearer, the supervisor, who is guiding the student and the student is almost in an apprenticeship role of being expected to mirror the skills of the supervisor, and then go into a role that is almost already carved out for them while they're doing that apprenticeship space. The humanity aspect of the work isn't given as much thoughts, the relationship aspect of the work, the introspective and the emotional aspect of research isn't given nearly enough thought.
Research is a deeply personal activity. It's also a very political activity. It's not a neutral space. I think the university tries very hard to make it an objective neutral activity when it's really not. What that then means is, when you see those power dynamics, when you see the discomfort, when you see the messiness, there's a lot of work that is done to try and clean things up. There's a lot of things that are done to try and compartmentalize and simplify issues that are deeply complex.
The first thing that I would say that needs to change is that we need to be able to unpack and name what the issues are at all levels and have a really honest conversation about what those issues are. There needs to be accountability. At the moment, the worrying thing is that there's very little accountability within the research community.
Ethics is a really problematic thing, and I could do an entire podcast with you about the issues around university ethics, but it is a system that is almost like a corporate contract, and it's the only way that I can refer to it. University ethics programs, or ethics systems, are almost a way of the university protecting itself. It's not about the research in its truest sense.
What then that means is it sets a precedent for what this work is. My worry is that universities hold such a position within society and within communities that they readily go into particular communities to do research with very little scrutiny and that power isn't acknowledged, it isn't acknowledged by the university, but it's also not acknowledged by the communities who almost see this as a given. If a researcher comes into a university and says, "We want to do some research with you," it doesn't matter what their information sheets or their ethics form says you're coming from on the university.
The chance is somebody's going to say yes to doing that research, despite how problematic it might be. Because of the power imbalance, that introspective work needs to happen at the university, because if it doesn't happen at the university and the owners is on communities to name this problem, you've completely got a disconnect where the knowledge is held by those who just don't have the power to change the system.
Naming what the issues are within the university, making sure that commitments are made to change these different dynamics, and then holding individuals to account and holding creating systems that ensure that there is accountability at all stage would completely transform the research process, in my thinking, but essentially bringing back the human aspect of it and the relationship aspect of it and the humility that this work requires because we don't know what we don't know.
Sandrine: If you're thinking about a new academic, they finished their PhD. They may have done a couple of postdoc. They've given a lectureship position. They're starting to recruit a couple of PhD student. They're trying to get funding for their research. They're trying to build the research team. These people are incredibly busy. They are pulling so many different directions, too much is asked of them, frankly. How is it that they could, in a way, live life as academics, as antiracist academic in the way that they are creating practices and interaction and at a very practical level in term of the way they interacting themselves with others and their peers? What is it that they need to do?
Muna: Often people will say, I want to do this, but I just don't have the time. That question of time always is resurfaces. My response to them is this isn't about additional time. It's about thinking about how you use your time. It's a change in practice. Before you can change what you do, before you can actually do the work in terms of changing practice, you have to do the work internally. That means changing your thinking. Decolonizing your frames of reference, what you see as knowledge, what you view as knowledge, and thinking through an antiracist lens.
That means building up your language and how you are understanding the concepts of race and how they play out. That will ultimately inform the decisions that you make. It just means you make different decisions. It doesn't mean you make additional work. It doesn't mean you become overburdened. It means you reframe your thinking entirely.
When you are thinking of taking on particular research projects, instead of saying, I've got 506 research projects, I want to take on more, but I want to do ones that are particularly around a racial lens. Start to reframe the research projects that you are actually taking on and ask the question of, is this research that I should be supervising? Am I the best person for it? If I do take on this particular research, how am I going to support this student if I don't have the expertise in this particular aspect of the work that they're going to need?
Asking those questions at the very beginning when you are doing the decision-making means your practice will ultimately change when you start to embark on that research supervision role that you take. What's happening, unfortunately, is that because there's so much pressure for academics to take on PhD students, they're taking them on and they don't have the knowledge and the skills required to support either that research project and/or that particular research student. Then they're playing a game of catch-up where they're saying, "Now I'm already immersed in this. What can I do to help you? I've also got all of these other things that I need to do as well."
It's about taking that moment to step back and really reframe your thinking and understanding that sometimes stepping away from research or doing the refusal work saying this research just isn't for me is okay because it's better for you to allow that individual to find a more appropriate supervisor than to put yourself and them in a position where you are not able to take care of them and support them through their research. They are having to navigate a space where they're on their own because the supervisor isn't informed as they need to be.
Asking those hard questions, doing the introspective work, and really making sure that you are reframing your decision-making, I think, would really help.
Sandrine: What do you think he's necessary got? Something that you've told earlier about having a sense of humility, of really listening, but what else should people be thinking about in the way that they may be interacting with their students?
Muna: I think it's knowing who your students are, getting to know them, and not making assumptions. Everybody does this. We make assumptions because we engage with people at the beginning from a particular frame of reference. We assume that if you're working with a student of color, these are all of the challenges they may encounter. If you're working with a female student, these are some of the challenges that they really encounter.
Sometimes those assumptions can mean that we make decisions that are actually problematic and can be harmful. Taking some time to listen, listen to understand, and creating space for students to share. Creating space for dialogue, and building that relationship is a really important part of the supervision experience. Also making sure that you are informing yourself of the issues that this student is bringing to the surface, taking that as an opportunity to learn as much as the student is learning, making sure that you are allowing yourself to be in a space of learning as well.
One of the things I'm so grateful for with the two supervisors I had was the supervision meetings didn't feel as though I was almost being held to account for what I had done to them. It was a space for dialogue. It was a space in which I was asking them questions and they were asking me questions. At the end of it, we all felt like we left the room with new knowledge.
That for me is what that experience should be because you are preparing PhD students for a life of scholarship and the dynamic of a student and supervisor relationship, at the moment, is very similar to that of a student and a teacher, rather than somebody who, when you complete your PhD is going to be your peer and you are going to be part of the scholarship community. The dynamic changes when you start to ask people questions and listen to what they're saying and be guided by the relationship more than being guided by the practices that are inherent within the system.
Sandrine: Going back, Muna, to your own experience of navigating your research career. How did you make a decision at the end of your PhD of what to do next? What did you do straight after your PhD?
Muna: Again, it wasn't conscious full [chuckles], in all honesty. It wasn't deliberate. I was in the final year of my PhD and an opportunity arose for an academic position. It was at the university where I did my undergraduate degree and in the department where I did my undergraduate degree. I knew many of the staff members that were there and the role was recommended to me because I had very little teaching experience beyond teaching on the doctoral training program. I was very reluctant to go for the position. I was told, just go for the interview. There's an opportunity for you to just gain some experience, et cetera.
I was fortunate enough to be given the role and it was a full-time lecturing role. I was very aware that was a privilege that not many people had before completing a PhD. That came with many challenges. I think initially I took the job because when you're doing a PhD, you're told that the end of the road is academia. The PhD is a preparation for an academic job. It's inevitable that this is what you're working towards. If you have the opportunity to get there earlier than other people go for it. I took the job, but I took it in the final year of my PhD and it was a full-time job.
Sandrine: Oh, that sounds really hard. [chuckles]
Muna: Exactly.
Sandrine: That sounds impossible. My God.
Muna: It felt impossible. I was writing up my PhD and doing a full-time job where I was in an interdisciplinary department. I was working across two different campuses with two different course framework, managing them at the same time, multiple responsibilities, but at the same time having to write up a thesis. I was working evenings, weekends, any moment that I could to do this work. It was very challenging. For me, I felt as though the joy that I experienced throughout my PhD, I didn't experience it towards the end, because it just felt very tiring of an experience to go through. In hindsight, I probably would have done things differently but being at the university really gave me an insight into what being in academia is like on the other side. It made me realize that it was very different to how I was seeing it as a student. When I was at that university, and I was doing my undergraduate degree, I almost took for granted the fact that I didn't have any lecturers of color.
It was an all-white staff team, but because the students were so diverse, and so I was surrounded by peers who had similar experiences to me. That allowed me to compensate for what I wasn't experiencing in the classroom. When I was on the other side, and I was the only black female lecturer in the department, I felt completely isolated. I felt completely on my own. I also felt incredibly responsible for the students, because these students now saw me as somebody who reflected their lived experiences. They were all coming to me, I was the person to go to for issues around race, around religion, so on and so forth.
The students were coming in, and the staff were seeing me as the expert in these areas as well. I was working longer hours than everybody else. I was doing more than what my job description actually entailed. Alongside that, experienced a number of blocks to progression, as many black women experience where there is the expectation that because you're carrying all of these roles, within the contract that you have, progressing through the university would mean those responsibilities would have to go to somebody else.
You have people in positions of leadership who want you to stay in a particular position because you fulfill so many things for that department that the other demographic of staff doesn't allow them to fulfill. For me, that felt really constraining. It meant that, number one, I wasn't able to have the joy of research, I wasn't able to engage in research and write, which is a passion of mine. It meant that I was not going up pay grades, but I was increasing my responsibilities. I was doing leadership work, but it wasn't reflected in my appraisals or in the recognition institutionally.
It felt as though apart from the face-to-face work with students, it didn't feel as though I was making impact. I think impact in the sense of seeing change. It was very student-centered, which I loved. It meant that the classroom was the only place I felt safe.
Sandrine: Okay, wow.
Muna: I said that to a lot of people, when I was with the students, that was where I felt the most confident, the most safe, the most inspired intellectually to be able to engage in a lot of issues. The moment I left that classroom, it felt like a very violent space.
Sandrine: Of course, I mean, I suppose also being the only one. It's fascinating because also, I guess, for many departments, for your department, probably quite happy for you to do that work because that's what looks good from the outside, and what the students require. Again, no translation in terms of promotion. I've heard that many times.
Muna: Yes, absolutely. I think where I made a decision to ultimately leave was when I started to have conversations around network adviser to black women who were in academia who talked about their experiences. Many of them said to me, the only way to maintain my mental health and to maintain my well-being was to either go part-time, and do something else that would feel fulfilling so that I was able to find a way of almost healing after being in a space that didn't feel very safe.
Others left academia completely. There were very few women who talked about progressing through academia. Those who did talked about the cost of that. Many of them said, "If you're going to progress through academia, you need to know that you're not going to have much of a family life, you're going to need counseling because there's a huge amount of emotional and psychological burden that comes with doing this work. You have to know that there's a likelihood that you will continue as you progress to be the only person of color in the room. You have to think about your own self-preservation, and your own support networks around you."
I gathered all of that information and after about four years of being at the university, made a decision to ultimately leave. Many people have said me leaving was at a time where it was probably premature because I was still an early career academic. For me, the reality was I saw women who looked like me, who had been there for 10, 15 years. I didn't want to leave after the damage had already happened. I wanted to be able to leave when I had the insight.
Sandrine: Can I ask you Muna, and maybe that's me sounds like a really harsh question. Did you ever sense that you were giving up, pulling others back in the sense that if I'm the only black Somali woman in these departments, if I leave, and if I'm not there, then my students will not see black British Somali women in the department? In a way, somebody else may have stayed in position and suffered through the challenges of holding that position, and not necessarily look after themselves in the best way. How did it feel for you to actually leave?
Muna: Yes absolutely. I think every woman of color who makes that decision carries all of those different emotions with them. For me, I ultimately was thinking about leaving after being at the institution for two years then made the decision to leave after the fourth year. There was a lot of reluctance and the things that were holding me back was exactly as you said, the sense of responsibility to students, because you do carry the burden of not just representation, but being able to be an advocate for students in a way where they didn't experience that with other staff members. Feeling that sense of duty, and loyalty to being in that space with them.
There's also the burden of responsibility to the community that you're a part of in terms of representation. Living in Sheffield, there were only two Somali women with PhDs, me and a friend of mine. My friend was working at a university in Lincoln and I was working at the University in Sheffield. The Somali community around us were very aware that I was the only academic in a university in Sheffield that their children could go to. That's the idea of [unintelligible 00:47:24], which I find very problematic. It does come with that pressure of, if I leave this university, we go a step back as a city to now having no representation at all. What does that mean?
Then you have the third pressure of the family space, where this is a full-time job that offers you financial security and the intention for going to university, studying, getting an academic role was really to be able to improve the lives of myself and my family. That knowledge of if you leave academia, what are you leaving academia to go towards, and if it is freelance or consultancy work, the recognition that that is financially unstable and risky. That feeling of selfishness when you think, "I might be leaving, because I need to feel safe."
At the same time, that financial security benefits more than just me. Multiple things go through your mind but ultimately, the decision has to be around your well-being and making that decision. I think, once the decision was made, it was really reaffirming to hear from all of those different communities around me that it was the right decision. I had students that came up to me and said, "I don't know how you lasted as long as you did," because they witnessed some of the things. I had community members that have said to me, "Your PhD still carries weight, and you're still a person that we respect as part of the community for the work that you do."
I'm really grateful for the fact that my consultancy work picked up really quickly. There was that tension around financial insecurity but it allowed me to trust in my own ability when I stepped outside of the safety of a structure that defined my identity rather than me defining what my professional identity was. It was a risk, and I think it paid off in the end.
Sandrine: Can you tell us a little bit more about the work that you do now through the consultancy? If you've got example, I don't know if any of your work is actually with universities. If you can tell us a bit more about this.
Muna: Yes, absolutely. A large piece of our work is actually with universities. When I set up the consultancy, my intention was to be able to merge all of my passions into a piece of work. I knew I wanted to do something that would allow me to still engage with the community and for that work to never be at a cost to the community so I wanted it to be about free access to knowledge, learning, development, so on and so forth, but I also knew that in order to earn income, I needed to offer training and consultancy to the systems that I was working within, and because my background is in educational psychology, it was around the schools, the university, the colleges, and being able to offer an anti-racist framework for them to develop their practice.
Then the other aspect of it was around, how do I then create a research community? How do I continue to write, how do I continue to collaborate with other researchers and continue to ask those questions without the confines of a university ethics system and the university structures, but doing it in a way where it's scholars that are defining what that research is with the communities that they're working with.
I ended up just combining those three elements into this consultancy that I now have. It truly is a blessing because it means I can work with peers all over the world. We're based in the UK, but we work with clients all over the world.
It has given me a sense of what the education system looks like within a global context and how people work in different ways, higher education in particular, what the dynamics of higher education are, and it's a very unique experience when you see those dynamics as somebody who's external to a university, as opposed to employed within a university as well. It gave me a little bit of insight into the dynamics that I had experienced when I was able to sit outside of it and build a more healthier relationship with those systems that I was a part of as well, but at the heart of it really is about being able to create community learning spaces and do it in a way where it is research-informed.
The communities are able to recognize that the knowledge that they hold have just as much richness as the knowledge that are held within university libraries as well.
Sandrine: What I found really fascinating in the way that you've established yourself is to hold onto your researchers identity in the sense of knowledge doesn't just belong to the academia. You're not just a researcher because you sit in an academic department, and I think that that's something that very few people are able to hold on once they leave a university. I find that really, really interesting.
Muna: There's a lot of things that the university legitimizes in terms of identity that takes work for you to legitimize other spaces, so I found it very hard at the beginning to identify myself as a scholar, once I left the university because, in my mind, scholarship was based within a university. That thinking of how I identify myself took some time. I ended up saying I'm more of a practitioner than a scholar and making that distinction, and recognizing that no scholarship exists, whether you are in a university space or not under structure is not the work. Then exactly the same for the research aspect of it. It took a long time for people to recognize the importance of the research that was happening, because it hadn't been in partnership with the university.
It wasn't in journal articles. It wasn't approved by a particular ethics board in a university as well. It was done completely independently, and there's a thing within the university that is around if you are peer reviewed and if you are approved by particular groups of people, then your knowledge is legitimized within that space. It's seen as significant within that space, and when you leave academia, that's something that you just don't have access to, so it takes time to, but I think more and more people are recognizing now where there are spaces for scholarship outside of academia and where research exists outside of academia as well, holding just as much weight, so I think things are changing, but it took me a while to get used to a different way of working.
Sandrine: That's really fascinating, and what is the thing that if you have a particular example where you feel that your work now as a consultant in that space made the impact that you really wanted to make, because again when you are contributing as a consultant in an organization, you may have an intervention that lasts a day or two days or sometime over several months, but you don't stay within the organization, you move on to the next client and you don't necessarily know the impact that your intervention has had. I would be interested to hear about a case study that you have where you felt, "I know that I'm contributing in a way that makes sense to me."
Muna: Yes, absolutely. Again, that was about carving out at different identity because I went from a university space which was shaped in a particular way to now a consultancy space that was shaped in a particular way. I immediately realized that when you use the word consultant, many of the organizations that you work with have a corporate understanding of consultancy, and so they expect training that is about, these are your legal obligations. This is what you should do, and it's very tick boxy. I made a really conscious decision at the very beginning to say that the work that we do is developmental work, it's long-term work, it's immersive work, so that if you are as an organization wanting to engage with us, there has to be a willingness to go on a journey, and there has to be a willingness to embed this at all levels of your organization.
I think that the core thing that we do is set an expectation from the very beginning about the way in which we work and what our expectations are in terms of the partnership of that working, but also we create something called an anti-racist road map for each of our organizations that is a bespoke approach based on their context because one of the things that we try and emphasize is anti-racism works differently for every organization because it's about highlighting the issues that are unique to your community.
When you are able to do that and really localize your approach to delivery, there's a higher chance that those that you're working with are going to embed that work and sustain it because they see the relevance to where they are rather than us saying, "This is what anti-racism is more broadly," and then them being left to interpret that however they want to. It's about having that localized, bespoke approach to the way we work as well. Then ultimately it's about relationship building. I'm really fortunate to have a number of associates that work with us and in the approach that we take, we really emphasize the importance of building and sustaining those relationships and holding space for dialogue and holding space for difficult conversations, but also taking a trauma-informed approach to the work that we do.
That just means recognizing that this work carries with it emotional labor, as much as it is as space where we are intellectually developing as well, and that means taking care of those who are in the room but also taking care of ourselves as those who are holding the space as well. In all honesty, the way that I carved out the organization was in the image of everything that I felt the other spaces that I was in lacked, so I started from that position of what did I need in that space? Let me use that as a basis of what I can start to create in this for myself, but also those who work with me as well.
Sandrine: Do you have an example of something where you felt something changed significantly in an organization where you even just within the time-frame of your engagement with people, some of the practices really had changed.
Muna: We worked with the university who initially said to us, "We want some a piece of leadership training because we want the leadership in that organization to be able to become racially literate," and the Vice-Chancellor of that university, actually, it was the person that requested it and attended the training, so there was immediate leadership buy-in to doing this work. Then once we did that piece of training with them, immediately they requested for this to be rolled out to all staff members. They recognized the need for, if there's going to be organizational change, this language cannot be just held by those in positions of leadership, it needs to be shared language, and so we ended up becoming a roll-out to staff and then also a roll-out to students and a model of students being able to engage with that language.
Then that culminated in them reviewing some of their practices, their policies, and really focusing in on the criteria for how they prioritize different pieces of work, so when we did the roll-out around developing racial literacy, the student, the staff, and the leadership formed almost a working group to be able to build on some of these ideas. Then the following work we did with them was around their complaints procedure around harassment of various kinds, because what they were finding is that the issues that were highlighted throughout all of our training sessions were not matching what the institution was holding as data because issues were not being reported and so one of the things that they recognized was in order to be able to meaningfully address these issues, they needed to have the data of the lived experiences of young people, of the students that they had, but also a change in the system that would allow reporting to be done in a more authentic way.
We did a year-long piece of work with them around looking at pathways to support when somebody does encounter any form of harassment. Also, what do we do when a student or a staff member experiences microaggression and recognizing that as an act of violence and not as something that should be dismissed. Putting in those pathways of support that go from, how do you respond to a particular issue, how do you take care of somebody who's experiencing that issue, all the way through to how to you appropriately report an issue to ensure that there is a system of accountability and a system of feedback that takes place as well. A complete re-framing of the way that they work and with within a space of a year after that, their reporting on issues around harassment increased by 200%.
Sandrine: That's incredible. Wow.
Muna: They recognized it straight away. I think they also knew that outward facingly, that would have some reputational damage, because this is the nature of what happens in HE but they knew internally because they had done the workaround racial literacy and understood what this data actually meant, it really gave them the confidence to be able to say, "We made the right call in changing the structures. Now we need to think about how we respond to the process and the reports that have come into place to think about other aspects of our practices." The key themes that emerged from the data around harassment was around classroom dynamics.
That was a really big one around people experiencing different forms of harassment in the classroom. There was a strand that was around research, and the research experience as well, there was a strand around the campus, the experience on campus, the physical space of being in there. This again, because it was generated through that shared learning, through that knowledge-making, the university was then able to say, "This is now the criteria for us to now build on new priorities." The work that we really do with organizations is about creating a learning organization, helping them to develop the practices and the processes to be able to continue on this work, because it is generational work.
It is going to take a very long time to be able to undo the damages that we're seeing at the moment. There are no quick fixes and there are no quick wins but the universities that we see that are doing this work well are the ones who are going straight from starting the conversations to immediately saying, "What are the actions that we can take that is informed action and taking that action."
Sandrine: Because it can be easy to just leave the lead by doing a survey and then say, "Okay, that looks very messy and complicated. Let's put the lid back on." Not really digging it and not accepting. It's interesting, the thing that you said also about reputational damage because again, universities are so freaked out about how they perceived from the outside and daring, opening the lid and say, "Yes, t's messy, but we can actually do something about it." In a way it's maybe courageous is not the right term but it's about being prepared to say, "Okay, it needs to change, it's going to be hard but we are committed to do it." Finding universities who are really not just talking about it in a fancy strategy document, but actually prepared to have the conversation is pretty amazing.
Muna: Absolutely. I think what we've seen over the last couple of years with the murder of George Floyd with Black Lives Matters, with COVID is that in a number of different spaces within society, the lid has been completely lifted, and it can't be closed. People are seeing these environments and saying that these systems don't work. They're failing, particularly lots of people and those issues can't be ignored anymore, what can we do about it? There was a real a moment where every organization was just releasing statements to say, "We're not racist.." Essentially what the statements were saying was, "We're putting it out there before you say anything to us. We're not racist, this is our commitment, et cetera." What I often say to people is that universities are one of the few spaces where that lid still hasn't been lifted, not really. I think what we'll see over the coming years in many universities openly saying we are committing to anti-racism, we're committed to the decolonizing practice, inclusive practice et cetera is that because society is developing its racial literacy and the conversations are happening more openly now than ever before, universities will face more scrutiny and they will be held to account more. We will see over the next few years more and more universities who are going to experience reputational damage.
Sandrine: Because there's not doing the work. Absolutely.
Muna: Because they're not doing the work and when they experience that reputational damage, many of those universities will become reactive because they haven't been proactive. I'm really praising the organizations that we work with at the moment because this work isn't easy but now more than ever, it isn't easy, because if you're working within an education context, you have a government that is actively working against you to do this work. This is probably the hardest time to engage in this work but it's necessary because you don't want to be at the point where you're then repairing damage, rather than saying, "How do I be productive and proactive right now?"
Sandrine: Well, you have a lot on your plate. It's really, really incredible that you've set up this consultancy.
Muna: Thank you.
Sandrine: I'm sure that your work is not going to be killed, that's for sure. You have really a lot on your plate, and loads of organization to work on. It's really going to be really remarkable the impact that you're going to have over the next few years. I'm quite aware of time. One of the last questions that- I could be talking to you for hours but it's Friday evening, and I am sure that you've got other things to do. The last question that I have for you is, if you had to think about starting your research career, what sort of advice will you give to your young self to ease the journey?
Muna: I think about this a lot. I think my advice to myself would have been to quiet the noise and to just remember the why. When I'm talking about quiet the noise, what I mean is, there's you go into the research experience with an honest and true idea of what you want to do and what you want to experience and then as you go through that experience, there's a lot of gaslighting. There's a lot of noise around you that ends up becoming a distraction of people telling you what you can and can't do, of people wanting to reshape your research in a different way or de-legitimizing your scholarship in different ways. Sometimes that can feel so loud that you lose the voice that you carried at the beginning. I constantly have to remind myself to just quiet that noise and remind myself of the thoughts and the feelings that are the truest to me.
Then also just remember your why, remember who you're doing this research for and why you're doing this research and always have those questions carried with you throughout the process because in those moments where you think you're going to quit, or you think you can't finish, remembering your why really helps because it allows you to again, move away from the things that are feeling about there are a heavy burden around you to that core focus of, "Why am I actually doing this," and when you're clear on why you're doing something, it makes it easier to move forward.
Sandrine: Well, thank you so much Muna for the conversation. The work that you do is so important. I certainly have a lot to learn myself on this and really, really, really wonderful to have the conversation with you. Thank you.
Muna: My pleasure. Thank you so much.
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