Peer Review

Peer Review

Shades of Noir has been pleased to invite Arooj Khan and Claire Hiscock to peer review this Terms of Reference.

Arooj Khan

Claire Hiscock

Arooj Khan is the Research and Knowledge Manager for Business in the Community’s Education campaign, and an Urban Geographies PhD student at the University of Birmingham. She is also a Community Arts Facilitator who utilises arts workshops as a medium to discuss area specific issues. She has evaluated programmes on behalf of the Barbican, Create London, InIVA and The Hayward Gallery. She has also partnered with Metal Arts, Thurrock Arts Trail and Hidden Gems to facilitate bespoke arts workshops. She frequently writes and comments on race, creative research methods, the diasporan identity, social mobility, regeneration and neo-liberalism, typically through an intersectional lens.

Claire Hiscock is a Language Development Tutor at the University of the Arts London. She works with both undergraduate and postgraduate students whose first language tends not to be English. Her interest in Language and Power became more focused when studying under Norman Fairclough at Lancaster university. Now she teaches Academic Language skills across the different colleges and the many disciplines at the University of the Arts. Her work focuses on ensuring that language does not become a barrier to attainment and that all students can get the most from their studies. For many years, she lived and worked in Italy, where she developed a postgraduate course that drew on world English literature to develop courses that expanded the vision of the traditional canon. Back in London, she still aims in her work to extend understandings of the richness and diversity of the forms that language can take.

A note from Arooj Khan

Imagine that it’s 3000 AD, and an apocalyptic event has resulted in most of the world being destroyed.

Visitors from another planet approach Earth and uncover a piece of academic writing encrypted within a memory storage device; a modern-day Rosetta Stone.

The language is English. The singular lingua franca of the world for at least 500 years prior to our apocalyptic end.

What nuances, subjectivities and polemics does this text contain?

In order to encourage ruminations regarding the above question, I want to consider language in the context of one of the key domains where people of colour will encounter the very complex power relations at play that will shape the majority of their life experiences: the education system.

Rosetta Stone analogies aside, language and our ability to communicate is indeed powerful. We needn’t look further than rhetoric within the classroom to acknowledge this. Institutions which exist on the basis of human-enforced complex power relations (student, teacher, senior leadership team, school governors etc.) bring with them the preconceived binary of subjugation and superiority. The power of subjugating language, communication and discourse in the classroom has not gone unnoticed. In a recent poll of BAME teachers conducted by the National Union of Teachers, 62% of respondents stated that schools do not treat BAME pupils fairly. This is further supported by the fact that Black Caribbean students are three times more likely to be expelled. When this is broken down by gender, Black Caribbean boys are four times as likely to be expelled compared to all boys, and black Caribbean girls are twice as likely to be expelled compared to all girls.

In order to tackle such disparities in academic performance, a number of research reports and initiatives have been published and championed by the Department for Education in relation to ‘disadvantaged’ students in primary and secondary school. ‘Disadvantaged’ pupils are defined as those who are eligible for Free School Meals and are looked after by the local authority. It serves as an umbrella term under which all of the complexities of intersectional identities, missed opportunities and concrete ceilings lie. Touching upon the issue of race by way of key data trends but never articulating clearly that race, gender and other domains are intrinsically linked to a life of ‘disadvantage’. The use of such incomplete terms contributes towards the complexity of unfair power relations, whereby it proves increasingly difficult to pinpoint the basis of such prejudices.

Discourses in schools have a distinct ability to mimic society’s social ills. This was particularly prevalent during the Brexit decision. According to thirty police forces, there was a 54% hike in xenophobic racial abuse and assaults within schools. There was a particular increase in antiMuslim sentiment (subsequently unrelated to the terms and conditions of Brexit, yet a perfect demonstration of normalised islamophobia), with students and teachers alike being subjected to religion-related abuse. The insidious nature of racist discourse in educational institutions is further perpetuated by the recent academisation of schools. This has resulted in academy schools becoming free from local authority implemented regulations. This lack of regularity has the potential to turn schools into a breeding ground for both overt and covert prejudice.

Another key issue regarding the power of language and communications in educational institutions, particularly in higher education, is the prevalence of a colonised curriculum and the privileging of Eurocentric discourses. This can be identified by the Eurocentric bias of curriculum topics and its affiliated heralded writers. According to the ECU report (2015), internationally excellent academic research is not usually based on the Global South, nor does it touch upon topics regarding the racialized diaspora. The report also shared the widely held belief that academics who do not conduct research on Eurocentric interests were disadvantaging their own career advancement. Respondents to the affiliated survey also felt that their work was less likely to be valued if it were published in non-European or American journals.

In addition to this, the elevation of European thought has resulted in increasingly accepted and systemised views of white racial superiority which has been used to elevate western languages and discourses. Immanuel Kant for example, a key figure on many social sciences reading lists, was particularly notorious for his inability to correlate intellect with people of colour, he once stated that “the race of the whites contains all talents and motives in itself”, whereas in relation to black intellect he retorts that: “it can be educated, but only to the education of servants”.

Furthermore the English language, as the lingua franca of the higher education sector, has presented a complex relationship with the controlling trends in international academia. Which in turn contributes to a decreasing diversity of research topics covered and methodologies used given that the privileging of the English language is inherently linked to the prioritising of Eurocentric conceptual, theoretical and methodological frameworks.

Despite the above, it is heartening to see that those in power and those who hold a distinct privilege are coming to terms with the advantages that a diversity of intellect brings to academia. It is becoming commonplace for publications to be made on a combined ethical and intellectual basis in order to challenge the Eurocentric privilege and to continue to champion the discourses of the unheard through the power of language. Furthermore, teachers as part of the NUT have also been vocal regarding the dangerous stigmatisation that Operation Prevent attributes to Muslim students.

Therefore, given the above, I echo the writers in this edition of Terms of Reference. I wholeheartedly agree that words are not neutral. Language, its meaning and implications are politically and ideologically driven. The manipulation of discourse and power are characteristics of complex, overarching power relations. For many years, language has been used to frame the discourse of taught curriculum’s within educational institutions. The power to establish educational discourse is a common narrative for white intellect, one that continues to place people of colour’s intellect, language and discourse as significantly inferior in the education system and out.

A note from Claire Hiscock

Many years ago, I had the privilege to offer a home for a short while to a 12-yearold Deaf girl from Belarus whose main language was sign language. The weeks we shared were given over to much conversation, laughter (and bickering) with my daughters who were of a similar age. What might be considered unusual about this is that, although they had 4 languages between them, the girls did not have one in common: my daughters don’t sign or speak Russian, but speak Italian and English. Ana preferred not to use oral language but could read and lip read Russian.

Despite the lack of a common language, Ana told us all about her family and about her dreams: she wanted to become a beautician. It was language that bound my daughters to Ana, but Ana’s reluctance to use oral language was frowned on by her teachers. I always wondered why her teachers, who signed, but were from the hearing community, were so insistent that Ana play to her weakest language when her strengths were in signing and using gestures, images and a dictionary to tell compelling stories. I suspect it was because they believed their job was to be bring their Deaf students into the hearing world because oral language was ‘best’. I wondered how this hierarchy of languages, where oral language was superior to signing would play out as Ana grew up and wanted to achieve her dream of becoming a beautician. Ana returned to Minsk and temperatures of -30C in a flimsy jacket that she had decided was the chicest thing she owned. Her last question was to ask when she could return. Belarus is a troubled country. I received no reply to the letters I sent. The connection between Ana’s school and my university was broken, but Ana has her own place in my heart.

Why am I telling this story? This volume is about the power of language, and the contributions included are potent testament to that power. They speak of the human need and longing to connect, to reach out to others through language and the beauty there is in that connection. The pieces here are made of written text, images and sound and show the wealth of ways which we use to communicate. But they speak also of the abuse of that power, of language used to exclude. Ana’s story is an illustration of language bringing people together and a warning that establishing a “hierarchy of languages” will always lead to exclusion, not only of entire groups of people, but also of an individual from their very inner being, a point made very movingly in Charisse Chikwiri’s elegant, heartfelt love letter to the Shona language and Pamela Sakyi, in her documentation of the endangered languages of Ghana.

The beauty of the many different forms of human communication is another thread that connects the contributions of this volume. The contributors include artists and sculptors, poets, film makers and designers. They communicate through written, oral and sign languages. The very diversity of the pieces shines a light on the eloquence these different languages. Louise Stern asks ‘why are we so driven to try defining ourselves and our experience of the world through language’. Her suggestion that the answer lies ‘at the heart of the mysterious, joyful, and sad human condition’ is a leitmotif of this volume.

A theme that also echoes through the pieces is highlighted in Joseph Hill’s reminder that ‘in language, there are codes that are related to power and oppression and it can maintain our worldviews in a way that allow us to reproduce social inequalities.’ That the use of language to maintain structures of inequality is of great concern in education is the substance of my piece and is raised by other contributors including Linett Kamala, who reminds us of the greater proportion of black pupils and pupils from mixed ethnic origins in pupil referral units in mainstream schools. Hillary Wan takes up this point about the damage caused when language is used for exclusion in HE and argues passionately for different languages and the cultures they express to be brought into to the system rather than be shut out.

Which brings me to the other argument in this volume. An argument that Joseph Hill emphatically reminds us of when he says that ‘not only do we have to be aware of the power of words, we have to be aware of the personal and societal narratives that come with the words.’ The point is that language, is inextricable from culture, or, as Eva He puts it, ‘words impose ideology’. Recognising this should have consequences for how we live our lives. Kerian Preddie speaks of ‘fractured perspectives’. The contributions appeal for recognition of the importance of valuing languages and cultures that are not our own. Connor Mclaren writes that, when language and culture are inclusive, ‘nothing will be greater than feeling that sense of belonging.’

This volume, then, is a call for no one to tell us what language we should use just because our language does not conform to their norms or expectations. A call for us to celebrate all the languages that we do use. The languages we use to communicate what is most important to us, and that we use to cry and to laugh in. The languages that we fight in and have to continue to fight for. As Hillary Wan, puts it, we need to take up language as an arm ‘to fight for the rights that should have never been taken away in the first place.’ To return to my Ana and the wealth of her language, we need to fight for a time when we can all rejoice in all the polyphonic, polychrome, diverse forms language takes.