In 2021-2022, the department recruited two race equality interns, to lead on race equality work in the department. These roles were filled by Charlotte Flores (a level 3 undergraduate) and Tareeq Jalloh (a first year PhD student), who write:
We saw the internship as foundational to help further race equality and decolonisation in the philosophy department, but also in the wider discipline, the faculty and the university more broadly. We had at least three aims for the internship:
- to engage in community building: We hoped to contribute to a community and culture in which BAME students feel supported, comfortable, celebrated and able to flourish.
- to take fruitful steps towards decolonisation: We hoped to work closely with staff and students to improve race equality within the department and take fruitful steps towards conceptual decolonisation.
- to do sustainable work. We not only thought of our contributions as being foundational, but we also did not want the department/ faculty’s efforts towards race equality and decolonisation to end with the internship.
We devised our strategy and activities in consultation with the departmental EDI lead and departmental manager and updated it in light of discussions with students throughout the year. Our activities included:
- A community building activities night
- An information and experience gathering focus group, plus community building karaoke night
- The first event in a series of lectures on decolonising
- The development of two applications for future activities: decolonisation talks and a BAME peer mentoring network.
A full report on the internship, with recommendations for next steps, can be found here.
Centre for Engaged Philosophy 