Ben Singleton, Stuart Munro and Dr Yvette Taylor
Photo by Nick Ballon
Educational Inequality
Yvette’s research in journals such as ‘Education Review’, ‘British Journal of the Sociology of Education’, ‘Gender and Education’ has empirically explored the themes of educational inclusion, investigating initial access routes into university and the ways inequalities often endure beyond the university door. Extracts from interviews across her C-SAP and British Academy funded projects are exhibited rather differently here, enabling these to extend beyond the academic page. This research enables a critical perspective on issues of ‘diversity’ and ‘internationalisation’ resonating with Yvette’s administrative responsibilities (Admissions Officer), where university criteria and policies are negotiated and regulated.
Accessions began with Yvette, Ben and Stuart thinking through how we arrived at university. In those journeys we mapped our dis-locations: geographical, emotional and material barriers had to be stepped over but, having ‘arrived’, were theses were now smoothed over and solved? Our (non)academic selves and subject matters were complicated in re-telling the inside, in and through a sense of the outside: the rhetorical appeal of ‘widening participation’ and the reality of elitism; the drive of public engagement and the economies of impact; the complexities and complicities between power, privilege and (dis)engagement.
Taking a tour around campus rendered many places suddenly strange: the pictorial cordon around a development site already branded the university, depicting its future and its audiences. We felt rather unfamiliar and unknowing in the centralised student services building: its glassy transparent façade was countered by not knowing where to go (no signage) and if we were allowed to be there? Hesitancies continued in walking through campus, realising too the lack of children and older people. Perhaps they had not seen themselves depicted on the cordon? Perhaps they had not yet been targeted or selected… What would it mean to tell stories of various arrivals, successes and failures? What would it mean to open up space beyond the numerical appraisal of ‘diversity’?
Educational (E)quality
Initial ideas revolved around redesigning the UCAS (University Central Admissions Service) form, which enables students to represent themselves – their grades, achievements, and ambitions – to the university. We asked if this form, which contains a series of demarcated boxes to tick, write-in and fill-up, overlaid with bureaucratic codes (circles for school area, squares for mature status and so on) could be stretched or even distorted, in order to allow different stories. But we were cautious about trying to create a casual satire or a new-and-improved form that would have its own problems. So we asked broader questions about doing university differently: What if access was automatic, rather than monitored? What would the city look like if it was run by academics? What would ‘community engagement’ be like if the local citizenry was versed in Foucault, Bourdieu, Butler?
This pushed us towards other ideas, even as the pressure to respond to them with a final, exhibited product intensified. We considered what ‘waste’ is generated in the space of one academic day; what would be given up forever in shredding outcomes and paper trails? We came to see ‘university space’ as what Stuart calls a ‘sensing and sensual environment’, a kind of fog, sea or twilight where data, postures and attitudes continually condense and evaporate – a zone with definite, but not always easily articulated, boundaries and limits. We felt that in what we made, issues of participation, diversity, impermanence, apprehension, and transgression should be integral. The central figure of the work became that reusable staple of educational environments, the blackboard, as a space to combine Yvette’s research with the architectural and procedural interests of Ben and Stuart. This is now offered to an audience that can erase our own images and words: participation as an always ongoing, provisional, contested exercise rather than a completed output.
