Shades of Noir: The Centre for Race and Practice Based Social Justice. About Shades of Noir: In 2009 Shades of Noir (SoN) was created by Aisha Richards. Shades of Noir as of September 2020 joined the University of The Arts London as a Knowledge Exchange Center. The centre’s full title is Shades of Noir: The Centre for Race & Practice-Based Social Justice, University of the Arts London (UAL). This transition is important for sustainability of the concentrated evolving practises to support cultural change and embeddedness across this institution. Shades of Noir’s more than a decade of delivery continues to evolve thinking, support conscious intentions and cultivate expertise within organisations or institutions. Additionally, this centre continues to develop, deconstruct and reconstruct practices which inform policy, develop people and evolve practices towards intersectional social justice. Shades of Noir’s approach is rooted in cultural change, which means not doing anything the way it was done before, but instead picking practises apart to support different outcomes. The Shades of Noir recruitment drive is primarily based on 3 key components : 1. what people know, what is it that they do 3. demonstration of thoughtfulness. This nurtures and creates the conditions for building a high-performance culture of genuine change-making. The ability to create innovative and adaptable approaches is why Shades of Noir continues to be the specialist for practice-based social 6 //
justice in the UK and why our delivery is constantly described as uniquely meaningful, purposeful and transformational. SoN is one of the few international programmes that have physical and virtual platforms dedicated to pedagogies of social justice through the lens of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991). SoN reaches over 1 million people globally each year and continuously delivers cutting edge modes of transformation through Richard’s leadership and vision. SoN cohesively embeds identity and belonging as one of the most important aspects of creative education that is meaningful and relevant to students’ engagement, progression, and personal development. Shades of Noir has developed physical ‘safer’ spaces through trust building that offer opportunities to have critical and interdisciplinary discussions about the world around and one’s positionality as we navigate it. It should be noted that safe and safety in this context means space to build capacities to share, consider and develop understandings towards anti-racism work that can be a practice and praxis of intersectional social justice. In many ways Shades of Noir can feel unsafe in the first instance, however, through continuous dialogic engagement, the exploration of contested key terms and undertaking of problem-solving activities; inspires a level of trust which is built for the safety of all. The interventions that SoN has developed and continues to design, inform policy, develop people, and evolve practices in the widest sense. These innovations support purposeful delivery for the SoN team of students and creative academics to learn and build on. As well as providing a variety of engagements that affect
