Research lives and cultures
Research lives and cultures
71- Dr Deanne Bell- Weathering the white gaze and inventing post-colonial higher education
Deanne Bell is Associate Professor in Race, Education and Social Justice at the University of Birmingham. When I interviewed her, she was working at Nottingham Trent University as Associate Professor of Critical Psychology and Decolonial Studies. Her research has the potential to shift higher education towards an era where the colonial past is addressed, but first, it means “exposing and dismantling colonial systems of knowledge and exclusion.”
Working in banking and playing tennis for Jamaica were early steps in Deanne’s professional life that could probably not predict the research that she is doing now. Her re-entry into academic life came about through master’s courses. Her sporting life and psychology background articulated her initial academic interest in performance psychology.
She experienced a watershed moment when she encountered Frantz Fanon's seminal text, Black Skin, White Masks. Discovering and analysing this text meant opening the hidden literature of black scholars and intellectuals. This experience seems significant in the direction she started to pursue for her research.
Deanne knows that being a black woman academic in a UK institution puts her in a limited pool of scholars. A recent report by the Women’s Higher Education Network indicates that in 2023, there were only 66 Black Women Professors in the UK out of 23,515 Professors (31% women). It can be hard to feel you belong when you remain one of the rare black woman academic scholar.
Believing that you can progress your academic career to the next level can feel challenging when, by researching racism and coloniality, the opportunities to access research funding remain limited. Accessing research funding is one of the thresholds on the promotion academic career ladder. The limited chance of accessing research funding and the position of her work within the REF structures could make her progression even more challenging. However, this is not stopping her from doing work that she cares deeply about, and that has immense importance in challenging institutions.
Deanne has been involved in several projects with Nottingham Trent University and the Wellcome trust to challenge the structures and framework that maintain a colonial past. This type of “gladiatorial” work is exhausting as it means battling on, and continuously having to justify the ongoing impact of our colonial past on institutional structures. The impact is not residual, it is at the core of how institutions function, educate, research, recruit and promote.
Listening to our conversation will prompt your thinking:
- What do you see in your own institution that remains of a colonial past which continues to shape ways of working, policies, assessments etc. and is likely to impact researchers/ academics from minority backgrounds?
- If you have “white privilege”, how do you use your own voice to challenge practices and policies in your institution or even in your research group?
- Can you break out of the silence and not be a bystander when you see/hear racism or behaviours/ comments anchored in our colonial past?
Read the whole blog post:
https://tesselledevelopment.com/research-lives-and-cultures/deanne-bell
Okay. Let's get started. good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Dear listeners, you are on the podcast, research lives and cultures. I'm your host, Sandrine Soub. And today I have Diane Bell from Nottingham Trent University. Welcome on the show.
Deanne Bell:Thank you. Very good to be here with you.
Sandrine Soubes:So we're going to have a conversation about, your experience of navigating the research environment. And when I looked on the university website, I came across a really lovely video where, you talked about your research. And I was really fascinated to hear that, your, Early career actually was not in academia at all. You worked in, banking and you were an entrepreneur. So I'm really intrigued in term of what made you really want to, to enter academia
Deanne Bell:But I, my plan wasn't to enter academia. I also was I used to play tennis for Jamaica and I used to choke in tournaments. And so I was always fascinated with the psychological aspects of performance. And in a early midlife crisis, I decided to go back to university and study performance psychology. And my plan was to do a two year master's and return to Jamaica. And I would run my business in the morning and then, because we have amazing athletes and at the time we didn't have any sports psychologists, I'd offer my services for free in the afternoon. But once I got to do my master's. I was encouraged to do clinical psychology and I said no to that. Long story short, I ended up doing three different master's courses and then my doctorate. And in my doctorate, in the second semester, Professor Mary Watkins introduced us to France Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. Text. And I'd never read anything like that. I'd done, you know, undergraduate finance and international business degree and then multiple psychology degrees. And I had never heard black thought taught to me in any of those degrees. And I remember Mary was a white middle class woman teaching us about Fanon and putting his work in a much larger context. And I had one of those moments of my mind feeling as if it was expanding in ways that I had never even imagined were possible. And that made me recognize that there was so much to understand about coloniality, about race, about class. about gender. And so that then led me to do my PhD exploring the denial of racism and classism in coloniality in Jamaica with middle class people like myself. And then from there I decided I wanted to teach. So my trajectory was never, Oh, I'm going back to university to become an academic. It was just one thing led to the next thing led to the next thing. I
Sandrine Soubes:The desire to stay in academia was about shaking the system and really trying to change the way that we teach, the way that we research. What was in a way the impetus, the desire to really carry on that work that you had started, during your master or your PhD.
Deanne Bell:think it was twofold. I was under the impression that academics actually got time to do research. And so I thought becoming an academic part of my day job would be to teach, to do my own research, and then, you know, some academic community engagement. I didn't understand the, that, that is true for some academics, particularly in Ivy League or Red Brick Universities but not for the average academic and certainly not for Black women from the global South because of how we're treated in the academy. So I was under that misconception and so I thought, Oh, this is great. I'm, I'm actually going to be able to be supported in doing that. But the second reason was In my PhD, we studied critical pedagogy from a Polar Farian perspective and his ideas and then others on dialogue stuck with me. And so for me, I wanted to teach. Or to be in dialogue with other people who are curious, who happened to be, in my mind, typically students. So I wanted to teach people who are curious about understanding social reality and to do my, and to do my own inquiry.
Sandrine Soubes:So how is the, you know, the ideal version of what academic life ought to be like, and the reality of actually doing the teaching and all the pressures, how does this land with you in terms of actually doing the type of work that you want to do? For many academics, It's kind of funny because often we talk about the impact agenda as the secondary thing but for, for many academics, actually the reason that they are into that work is, the curiosity, the desire to change things, whether it's the impact agenda or, you know, but, the reality of the grind of actually doing the teaching, getting the funding and so on, it's pretty tough. So, how do you find yourself in that space now in term of doing the work that you really want to make happen and creating the changes that you would like to see in the world?
Deanne Bell:I, I do. What I have to do, which is to wake up in the very dark hours of the morning to read and to write before the bulk of the job, which is administration and bureaucracy, it's not research and teaching. So before the bureaucracy and admin hits me, do some hours of reading and writing. And then of course, at night, if I have any energy left, And then on weekends, I also do my work, but that's the only way it's possible. And for work that I do, grant funding is. Not likely to come my way for multiple of reasons. So, as much as people will say, well, why don't you apply for this grant? Occasionally I have, but it's pretty much a waste of time because of all the structural and systemic racism and sexism in the system. So, I, kind of put that desire to the side that's, you know, in this system, that's not something that's available to someone like me.
Sandrine Soubes:So how you approaching your own transition within a system that wasn't made in your image?
Deanne Bell:one of the first things is for me is to be in very close community with people who understand the structural and the systemic blocks. It's debilitating to be constantly in explain mode and explaining to people routinely how the system is structured and why it is that people, historically marginalized people, keep pointing to the structures and the system. So, I've been in the academy as a academic, full, full time academic since 2013, so for, for 11 years. And, and so I've learned that in order to be able to save time and energy to do my work, to do teaching, to prep properly, to teach well, and then to do all the admin and the bureaucracy means that I have to conserve energy and not spend energy trying to convince people to look at the system and to therefore do something about the system.
Sandrine Soubes:And, and in a way that's something that is quite sad maybe people have expectation that you are the one who should be leading, the work on, diversity and inclusion. And in a way, I think that from many conversations that I've had the energy that is spent on doing that means that the energy is not spent on doing the writing and you know, the presentation. publishing and so on. So I think that there is an emotional toll that exists. So how do you reconcile that in terms of being a black woman and being, a research leader, you know, you're on the right. And at the same time, doing the work that is going to get you promoted and contributing to, systemic change because it almost feels it's too much of a ask. But at the same time, your work is your own intellectual work. Scholarly work is also about addressing that. So how do you bring things together in a way that you feel is manageable?
Deanne Bell:So a couple of things. One is, You know, I believe you were speaking of me as a research leader. I am not a research leader. I don't see myself as a research leader. And in the British Research Excellence Framework, what they call the REF, which determines how much money universities get for research support. I'm told that I am not referable in psychology, even though that's what my degrees are in. And even though I teach in a psychology department, and I'm told I need to go elsewhere to be part of this framework, which is curious because I was hired precisely because I'm a psychologist. So the system has told me I don't belong. My research doesn't belong within the domain of, of Western psychology. So therefore and also because of my politics for me, leaders. By definition require followers, and I wish to have horizontal relationships. I refuse to, with consciousness engage in hierarchical relationships, so I don't see my work in that framework. and then I think the other thing that you are seeing is, you know, doing this work in the context of getting promotion. In the UK, 2019 data that has stuck in my head is that there were 35 black female professors. out of 20, 000. That's like 0. 002%. So there's almost a 0 percent chance I won't be a professor in the UK. So I don't do my work motivated by becoming a professor because the chances are I won't, regardless of the quality of my work.
Sandrine Soubes:It's funny because I work as a coach and I facilitate lots of workshops. I run, leadership development stuff with new principal investigators and research fellows. For me, the definition is very much about, seeing a problem and wanting to do something about it. And whether you are considered, in the race or whatever, measured things that is not really relevant. And in a way, I feel, in my view, in my eyes, you are completely your leader because,, there is a problem and you are exploring that problem. So.
Deanne Bell:So from a critical knowledge perspective, people who see problems and who engage in how to transform those problems are participants as members of civic society. I mean, in, in a world in which every human being has the capacity to ask questions, which is a fundamental prerequisite for doing our, doing research and who have the discipline to seek answers to those questions, perhaps in theoretical ways that, and, and legible ways. Um, That's just participating in and contributing to a world that we badly need. I don't see that as leadership. But you know, again, I think some of the discourse on these things, which is very colonially laden for me is problematic. And so I choose my words. as much as I possibly can outside of the framework of, of Western discourse.
Sandrine Soubes:If I was going to ask you, okay, what is, within your capacity as an academic, where do you really want to put your energy in the most forceful way in terms of the contribution that you want to make?
Deanne Bell:So increasingly I am engaging with what I think of as the Black archipelago of decolonial thinkers or the Black Caribbean archipelago. So the islands in the Caribbean from which we have Being gifted with knowledge of what has been done to the human consciousness and the human soul in the wake of modernity. And I feel increasingly, and so here I'm thinking Frantz Fanon, I'm thinking Glissant, I'm thinking of both Ami and Suzanne Césaire, I'm thinking of René Manil, I'm thinking of René de Pestry, I think Sylvia Wintour, Louis R. Gordon, Louis was born in Jamaica, I believe he identifies as an American, but all of these people who are from that archipelago, which is where, Modernity began with a horrific act of creating. Plantation economies and ripping African people from their home and taking them across the Middle Passage. We have yet to appreciate what that has done to us, all of us, not only Black people. And, you know, I'm thinking of Robert J. C. Young, who talks about in an extraordinary essay post colonial remains. I mean, there, there's so much that remains from colonialism, which now, of course, is captured by coloniality. So that's where my work is. It's what, what has remained that we're not paying attention to that continues to create. ongoing, everyday suffering. And that has completely distorted our consciousness of ourselves, of each other and the world. That's my work. That's my project.
Sandrine Soubes:How do you feel that you're able to bring this into challenging the research environment? So at the moment, some of the research founders have put a lot of money in research culture and, the concept of research culture brings together and lots and lots of different ideas, but in your scholarly work, how do you bring that to the conversation that are going on now about research culture?
Deanne Bell:So the Wellcome Trust in the UK, one of the largest funding bodies in the world, launched a project last year to, I think, try to make their funding framework more inclusive. And I was invited as an expert advisor, not my language choice, as you can imagine, but as someone to contribute to how they could rethink this. And so I did, and I learned a lot, and I think they learned a lot as well, because of course they fund a lot of medical oriented and, and psychology oriented work, but which is rooted in a quantitative mindset and framework. That's how they think questions, significant questions can be answered. And so it's because of my experiences having done participatory research. And having done theoretical work that comes from a perspective that critiques what's happening, which to borrow from Kohano is can be summarized as the coloniality of knowledge. So epistemic colonization is so obvious if you even begin to scratch the surface of the literature and start to understand it. So I'm, I'm trying to, in, when I get opportunities like that, I contribute in a conversation to share my knowledge and also to learn about these frameworks, because these frameworks are so enormous that we have critical scholars like myself have a lot to learn about their mechanisms. Manan.
Sandrine Soubes:I remember, As part of one of the program that I run one of the session in the program is on assertiveness, being assertive and, assertive conversation, that sort of thing. And multiple times when I've run that program, I've had women who come from various background, black women from, lots of different places who very often come and say, well, So often, you know, when I try to be assertive, I am considered as, the angry black woman and in a way in, through the work that you're doing, because you are bringing, a critical eye to, practices, to ways of thinking, to, you know, the default position that institutions have in doing things. There is the risk of being, perceive as the angry black woman. How do you deal with that? As an academic, how do you have a voice as a critical thinker without being labeled, the angry black woman.
Deanne Bell:So I'm sure I'm labeled that. No one has said that to my face yet, but because of that stereotype, because of that trope, because of that perception, it's affected my voice. So, for example, if you and I met and if this was, 25 years ago when I was in Jamaica you would hear a different Dianne because I'd be far more animated the language choices I'd use are far more alive. My accent would be the same, but I would talk a lot faster. And that's because I felt free to speak in, from that place of affect as well as intellect. And when I was in the U. S., I, which I was there for a long time at different points, but when I was teaching there, I, it was clear to me from via the white gaze that there were some things I, I wasn't supposed to say because it would be too threatening. To people to hear, so I understood that there in that culture and here in the UK very early on, I, mentors made a point to say to me how important it is to speak in moderate tones. And that's code to say, be wary of turning up in a way that gets you read as an angry black woman. So, and of course that has implications because the toll of us not communicating in affective ways gets carried and in my mind is imploded. I mean, the body carries that, that weight, you know, and so. It's, it, it, it affects, it affects me, it affects me presentationally, it affects me psychologically, and it affects me in embodied ways.
Sandrine Soubes:So when, you're reflecting on, the career paths that you've had, what's really helped you? I mean, some people are, lucky enough to have champions. Some people are lucky enough, to have family members who really prop them up. And again, because of the challenges being one of the very rare, black, academic, it's like, who is there to prop you up? Who is there to champion you? Who has been, With you along the way to really, be your champion and also challenge you in taking the next step.
Deanne Bell:So I don't have many people in my life who share and imagine, their imagination. Of me going the next step. So I don't have many people saying, well, you know, you could become a professor. I don't have many people. I can think of one person here in the UK who is an extraordinary human being. She's of Asian heritage, British and a professor, and her way of seeing people is as human beings in this meshwork of hell that we're living through. So she sees the world and she's extraordinarily supportive of all as far as I can tell, all people of, historically marginalized backgrounds that, that she encounters. I've had many, many people along the way at different junctures who have been extraordinarily supportive. And I think if I didn't have those relationships, We wouldn't be having the conversation we're having because you wouldn't know about my work, even though I would be doing it. But I, I believe my father looms large in my psyche. He passed away, had a heart attack in 1989. So I've lived, You know, probably most of my, absolutely most of my life without him, but his presence within me is extraordinarily strong. So sometimes people talk about ancestors I, I don't use that language. And in a way this may sound extremely strange, but I, my relationship with him is alive. And so I, I don't feel as if. Of course he's passed away, he's dead, but I don't feel as if the relationship is with somebody far in my background.
Sandrine Soubes:And now in terms of the relationships that you have with colleagues. I see a lot of people who are. quite isolated. So the, concept of community of practice, which is a very established concept is something that you hardly see, in universities, at least between academics. So what do you feel at the moment is really a process of support that you have, or a process of really engaging in a way that, either brings you joy or, is satisfying because, as an academic, you will be sitting on so many committees on projects where, there is a sense of, little agency of shaping things and so on. So what do you have, or what do you feel that is available to you right now that is really contributing to something?
Deanne Bell:Well, in, in the spirit of being real and honest, and you used a word isolating or isolation, and what I experience and this sadly includes also other historically marginalized people as its source, but what I experience in the UK. a lot is a very toxic environment and An Lúbhaga Seine has written a brilliant piece on gladiatorial scholarship and I actually apply it to the culture in higher education. I think it's very gladiatorial, it's very ego driven, it's very, you know, I've published 10 papers in the last year or, you know, I have 6, 000 citations and it's It's like that. And so the word community which I studied in my doctoral program and sometimes think of myself as a community psychologist, though not in the traditional sense. That's absent in the, in higher ed in the UK. It's devoid of community. That's my experience. And so there are individuals that I'm fortunate enough, my tribe, as I, as I call them, that to be in relationship with and they sustain me.
Sandrine Soubes:So these are people who work on similar topics, but maybe in multiple different institutions,
Deanne Bell:And some not even in psychology. Some in psychology and some outside of psychology, but who share a particular kind of politics.
Sandrine Soubes:but not something so close that in a way, is an everyday thing. The sense of community and being able to, you know, go for a coffee with somebody down the corridor, that sort of thing doesn't
Deanne Bell:No, that hasn't happened in the UK. That was my experience when I worked at Antioch College in the US, but not here. And I think even though the working conditions, the the hours that we worked there were probably as much as hair, there was a different. Atmosphere in the air and hair. It's a very pinnacle way. I think the approach, the idea of the universe to hair to me seems to be it. inextricably linked with political economy, so that, you know, the employability agenda is very high here. So students are sold on by the proposition that they're coming into the university to get a degree to go out and work. And they come to riff off of a brilliant piece of work written about the problems with education in the U. S., is that they are training excellent sheep is the title of the text. And hair, I think the emphasis is on sheep, and I'm not calling people, human beings, sheep, but I'm using the framework, the metaphor that the person used. And I think what we have here is not so much an emphasis on intellectual engagement, as it is of doing things to, move through a series of stages to then get a degree. It's a completely different idea than bringing problems into higher education that we study in order to more deeply understand and we work with in order to transform. That to me is what a university should be. It should be a place where you grapple with issues that appear intractable, that need some focused attention on them, and that. Together, we are able to actually transform them so that they stop repeating themselves. That doesn't seem to be the focus of, or how the Westernized university is is organized and, and is oriented.
Sandrine Soubes:so it's almost, like it's a transactional thing where basically, let me go through the course so that I can get my degree so that I get a job, not necessarily, okay, let's make you intellectual who can think critically about the world.
Deanne Bell:And to add to that, the joy of learning is absent. There is incredible joy in learning, feeling that feeling as if you have been stretched. Today, I came in here thinking about this. And after a couple of hours by being in the classroom, having prepared myself as a student to come in, to have read, to have thought about it, to engage with other human beings who are similarly turned on. That's absent.
Sandrine Soubes:you're thinking about, the next generation of academics and, to be able to have a more diversified, population,, the early career researchers, the postdoc and the the research fellows, what would you say to them in terms of, what matters in navigating that space, especially coming, from a minority background, because there are many who probably aspire, you know, to become academics again, who don't see themselves in the space, but what is it that they should be looking out for or be mindful of in term of being able to be on this trajectory?
Deanne Bell:I'm not sure that this trajectory is in the balance when you weigh the pluses and minuses, that it favors a historically marginalized human being's life. And life energy. I think it grinds us, it chews us up, it spits us up. And I don't know, it would probably take me a long time to think of a historically marginalized person who I know in the economy who isn't experiencing health challenges related to stress. A friend of mine connected me to some, a body of literature called Weathering produced by a white American woman on trying to understand how come there's these huge differences between Black women and other people in these institutions. And. What she found is that discrimination and wear and tear, weathering embodied weathering and psychological go hand in hand. So I, For folks who say to me, they're thinking about becoming an academic, I say, well, think not only about the ideal of becoming an academic, spend some time learning about the reality on the ground, what happens to you, the daily indignity that you face, the blatant unfairness in terms of who does what kinds of roles, even when you're supposedly on parallel levels, the very obvious ways that your work isn't funded and others are. So the various obvious ways in which some people's paths are made to open in front of them and others paths are made to close. So become wide clear eyed about what happens here because what happens here is, it's undermining to a sense of self. So there are a lot of things that happen to you as you go through as an employee in higher ed that are difficult to know beforehand. And so I see this happens to me all the time. I see Black, brown and beige people come into the academy either straight after having defended their PhDs or after a brief pause. And within 12 months, they leave, they can't, they'll take any other job, but stay.
Sandrine Soubes:Quite a long time ago, I, I interviewed somebody who was based at Sheffield Hallam University, and she's a Somali, a British Somali academic, who had been a PhD student at the University of Sheffield. And she worked there for a few years. I can't remember how many, but what she described was been really drained because basically she was the only black academic in her department. So also this particular university brings in lots of black students, but she was the one, so everybody would go to her. And basically it was just too much because the pastoral care that She had to deliver, was like, well, I can't, I can't do all that because I need to do my work as well. So she left and actually she set up a consultancy now where she's working with universities to, bring, anti racism, policies to get people to reflect. So she's actually making a massive contribution in her work, but that's certainly something that she experienced herself of wanting to do good, wanting to support the student, but being. I will not say the victim, that's not really the right word, but you used the term weathered earlier. And I, I feel that that's probably what she experienced. So what do you think that,, people like myself need to think about? What are the things that you think I need to be really mindful of when I run session, when I have. group of people, who come from lots of different backgrounds and,
Deanne Bell:It's hard for me to speak in abstract, I mean of the most debilitating things I experience when I'm in a situation where there's active, overt racism happening. is the silence, the bystanding. And that's not only something people produced as white do, people produced as black, brown, and beige do that too. But certainly because of the power differentials, I think people produced as white have a lot of power. And the ability to actually name things and when racism, sexism, patriarchy, misogyny, ethnocentrism, ableism, ageism, whenever, whenever these ideologies have become active in the room, the people with the most power in the room, I've noticed the few times in my life this has ever When they name it, stuff happens. So for you, I would imagine that When you're able to break the silence and to, in that moment, identify and analyze. what's happening. Um, you know, it has the opposite effect of gaslighting. And if gaslighting makes us mad, I think when reality is named, it makes us seen or seen her.
Sandrine Soubes:anything else that you, you know, that you've observed that's, make a true difference because now each university has, a tennis, one charter, and then it's race charter. And, you know, everybody's got these beautifully drafted, charters that only a few people read. but the reality on the ground is something different. And in a way where, you know, Within the institution that you're in, what do you see as the thing that actually makes a difference, In the way that various committees, that you're involved, what have you observed that actually you have a sense that there is a shift, there is a move, something is being stirred?
Deanne Bell:But I want to believe in 2022, I was on a secondment with the vice chancellor of my, of education at my current institution to, you know, Introduce university to the argument for decolonizing the curriculum, and I created a workshop series to engage people in the theory, you know, the key, I thought it, there was so much energy and so much engagement across the entire university, and I thought, here's a moment where some of the veil and some of the veneer over people's hearts, you know, has sort of dissolved. And perhaps we can move forward. And you use the word stir. It felt like you were stirring soup in a pot, but nothing has happened with the pot. So, that for me, my bar isn't how to stir things. I know how to stir things. My bar is, how do we transform things? And I think it's a privilege for people to say, how do we make small change? I hear that all the time. People say, Diane, can you share an idea that we could implement? No matter how small, or maybe we just need to start small. And I'll say, no, I don't have those kinds of ideas. I think those ideas are cruel to Black people. It's like a tease. And so I withdraw from spaces that want to do EDI work, for example, because I don't know which human being in their right mind would want to be included in a colonial institution. So the idea cannot be, how do you make the existing institution more diverse? How do you bring people in? And people can read Sarah Ahmed's. On being included to get a sense, and it's written in a very accessible style, to get a sense. of why people wouldn't want to be included. So I guess if, if there's something to be done, the first step to me would be to actually break free of the neoliberal ideas and the neoliberal frameworks that people are using. You know, the EDI industry is a billion dollar industry worldwide. Lay that down, doesn't work. If it worked, it wouldn't be necessary now because it's been in operation for so long and in so many institutions. It's like implicit bias training or something that they do. Research shows it doesn't work, lay it down. You're kidding yourself with these things. You know, they're, they're, these things are there to stabilize the system. I'm not part of that.
Sandrine Soubes:There is a book, I can't remember the, the author, it's called um, More Pirate or something like that. Have you, I don't know if you've come across how to be more pirate
Deanne Bell:No, but I get the spirit of it sounds right.
Sandrine Soubes:Because in a way that's what, that's what is necessary in terms of changing the structure of institution. It's like almost like starting from scratch. we need.
Deanne Bell:kids. I mean, it takes a radical perspective to change from what we now have. And I think people are afraid of the radical. They think of the radical as they conflate it immediately with either communism or terrorism. And in this McCarthyism of that we seem to be living through you know, everything is bad. That's not white and Western, but radical actually means foundational.
Sandrine Soubes:So how can we be radical in the way that we challenge institution
Deanne Bell:we need to learn though to analyze the institution. Some people just say things at the surface. So they'll say, well, we need to change the institution. Well, actually you need to have an argument for what's wrong with the institution. You need to have an analysis of the institution. And from there, you will actually formulate. A body of ideas. That's what I did when I came to NTU. I identified things that were wrong with the institution, which nobody wanted to hear, except two people did. And those two people said, you are absolutely right. Tell me what we need to do because we have power. Those two people are no longer here. One retired and one moved on to another institution. But if it weren't for those two people, I wouldn't have got, been able to do some of the curriculum decolonization thinking and some of the work I've been able to do.
Sandrine Soubes:So if we are to look at the end of the tunnel and, and get a bit of glimmer of hope in terms of the work that, each of us needs to do, what is the glimmer at the end? If you're thinking about, PhD student, postdoctoral researchers who are entering these spaces, who actually really want to be part of, academic work. And, you know, we are fully aware that these spaces are not spaces in their image and they, may face lots of challenges, but if you want to give them a sense of energy and possibilities that they can be part of the change. How do you bring this energy to believe that change is possible?
Deanne Bell:There's one thing that I would say to people and do say to people and that is study radical theory. It'll give you all the hope in the world that you need. It'll give you so much beautiful hope it may explode you. It's that gorgeous.
Sandrine Soubes:Like to ask you a final question if I may, Diane. It's about what, what gives you joy? In your research life.
Deanne Bell:I want to answer that by sharing with you something that happened to me this morning. So. I am in this process of giving written feedback on students in my social transformation lab, which teaches them participatory action research. This is at the undergraduate level, but this is our capstone module, 80 percent of their grade. And so I was you know, doing this slowly and one student has so blown my mind and when the, his paper has been marked, I will email him afterwards to tell him the effect his work had on me, because What he has, he has taken psychosocial theory and used it to understand ethnocentrism in the world happening right now through media discourses and what he has done is It speaks to the kind of education, the kinds of possibilities when people are introduced to ideas, theory, and methodology that help them to address the problems that they see in the world, that they are passionate about addressing in the world. It made, it makes my 60 to 80 hours a week. work load feel like it's, it's worth it. This human being has made me feel as if we joined together in this academic year to engage in study and engage in inquiry in a way that can actually do something fundamental in the work. I don't think this person is, more than 22 years old. So I have hope because of how he has engaged.
Sandrine Soubes:And in a way, what's necessary is for more, more people who are prepared to do that that work.
Deanne Bell:If we, if that's what I saw every day, all day, I would have, I would believe that all the crises, the climate crises, the horrific genocides around the world, the horrific pandemics of depression and anxiety that people are experiencing around the world. The horrible, horrible misogynistic attacks physically and verbally and spiritually against women. I mean, and on and on we go, and I would have faith that we can overcome these challenges because of the kind of work this person is doing. It is possible.
Sandrine Soubes:And it's our role to to engage younger researcher and students to do that work. Thank you, Diane. It's been really a privilege to have this conversation with you really cherish that moment. Thank you.
Deanne Bell:Thank you very much for having me on. It's been amazing to talk with you.