Decolonial dreams: the unmarked scholar reimagines the purpose of post-16 education

Josie: Good evening everyone and thank you for joining us for another lecture in our inaugural lecture series. I'm Josie Fraser. I'm Interim Vice-Chancellor here at The Open University and I'm really proud and very privileged to be hosting one of our inaugural lectures. This is part of a series of lectures that showcase our research, teaching and knowledge exchange portfolios. Today we'll hear from Azumah Dennis, Professor of Education, Policy and Practice in The Open University's Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies. Azumah's inaugural lecture will look at decolonising education, offering a manifesto which envisions an alternative vision of what the sector might be.

But before we begin, a few details for colleagues. The lecture will be followed by a poetry recital by Mackayla Forde: Red Medusa, a UK-born poet and academic who is known for her unapologetic creative modes of expression and her commitment to fighting health injustices. The recital will be followed by a Q&A session with Azumah and then for those of us who are here physically and not online, we will celebrate with refreshments downstairs for anyone in the theatre. Anyone who is joining us online, if you can get to Milton Keynes really quickly, you're welcome to join in too. If you're in our audience tonight and you're using X, formerly Twitter, please feel free to post using the hashtag #OUTalks as on the screen, and please do tag us @Open University so that colleagues and students and alumni and all of our OU family can join us today. If you're watching us via YouTube, please do feel free to use the email address provided and keep your comments and questions brief and we'll include some of those questions from the internet in our Q&A later.

Now it's time for me to introduce Professor Carol Azumah Dennis. Professor Dennis has worked in Higher Education since 2010 and is currently Director of Praxis, the Centre for Scholarship and Innovation in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies. Taking a position as ‘the unmarked scholar’, Professor Dennis believes that what she says is more important than who she is. Azumah's research interests and areas of specialisation are post-16 policy and practice, leading for quality in vocational and teacher education, critical pedagogy and social justice. It now gives me great pleasure to introduce Professor Carol Azumah Dennis. [clapping]

Azumah:  Okay, thank you. Thank you, Josie for that introduction and welcome to my inaugural lecture. I will say it's absolutely brilliant to see people here, not least of all because we're The Open University and we don't often have people in a room together, usually via a screen. So it is lovely to have family and friends, current and former colleagues, students and the simply curious. So my presentation, my lecture is divided into four parts. A Black Woman Professes, “The unmarked scholar”, Against, beyond, and after critique, and A “What-if” Manifesto. The last two sections are shorter than the first two sections, just to help you time your way through.

I am Dr Carol Azumah Dennis, and from the 1^st November 2024 I'm a Professor in Education, Policy and Practice at The Open University, and I could not be more delighted. I have to confess... [clapping]  delighted for myself, but also I have to say, delighted for all the little black girls and boys, little white girls and little white boys too, but for the moment, for the little black girls who loved to get lost in text, and in it I'm reminded of the African-American writer, Toni Cade Bambara, as she recreates an image of a little girl sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of the kitchen while her mother tries to clean up around her, and in the end the mother has to mop the floor and leave her sitting there without disturbing her because she's completely lost in text. So, a Professor In Education, Policy and Practice, but that's not all I am. What do you notice when you look at me? Okay, I know it's obvious, I'm black and I'm female. I'm a British-born, second-generation immigrant of Jamaican parentage. My parents came to what they called “the mother country” as part of the Windrush generation. Unable to rent, they bought houses in South London. Unable to find employment, they set up a small business and were self-employed. I grew up in a largely white working class area in South London, albeit in a family that had middle class aspirations. But that's not all I am. In a recent meeting, a colleague described me as a unicorn. Another colleague, Lurraine Jones, who I know is here somewhere, describes people like me as a raisin in rice pudding. I prefer to align myself with Sara Ahmed. Sara Ahmed, an anthropologist formerly based at Goldsmiths University, I confess to being something of a killjoy. A unicorn because I'm a rarity. There are 74 black women professors in the UK. Now, this is not part of what I want to say, and it shouldn't be part of what I need to say, but actually, I really cannot celebrate my professorship without highlighting the context from which it emerges. I speak from a privileged position. Here I am, at the Berrill Lecture Theatre at The Open University. I am, after all, a professor, and I'd love to just pat myself on the back and wave my professorship around. I'm a special human being. Out of 24,000 professors in the UK, 74 of us are black women. In 2017 to 2018, data published by Advance HE, the body responsible for equalities in UK Higher Education, reveals a really clear professorial hierarchy. 15% of white male academics are professors, and this compares to 6% for white female academics. So white male academics are more than twice as likely to be awarded a professorship in comparison to white women, but race makes a difference. It makes a material difference, and not just race. Blackness is what makes a difference. 5% of black male academics are professors, which is reduced to just 2% for black women. Do I sound as if I'm having a bit of a moan? Well, I did confess to being a killjoy, and I am celebrating my professorship. I really, really am. I would love to say that this professorship is a reflection of my complete brilliance, I admit that I feel brilliant. But that it's such a rare event is a reflection of something structural and systemic that happens within UK HE. I am a killjoy and I have a responsibility. I have a responsibility to thank people who have helped me. Now, there are too many of them to mention (at this moment I feel like I'm at the Oscars). I have to thank the women in Higher Education Network and their activism through the 100 Black Women Professors programme and were it not for that programme I would still be pondering my professorship. I had always intended to apply, but I wasn't in any particular hurry. At the start of the programme, they asked a really clear question, 100 Black Women Professors NOW, and if not now, when? I have to thank my lovely colleague Liz Chamberlain who isn't in the room but I hope she's watching, if not now, at some point. Having achieved her professorship she encouraged me to apply with the words, “You're operating in a professorial space Azumah, you really should be applying.” Then Karen Littleton, bless her. She read and reread and reread my accompanying statement so many times. I could recite it in my sleep by the time it went from initial draft to final submission. I counted 22 drafts, and there were drafts in between that I didn't count and she read every single one of them. Then I have to thank Eric, Eric the Great, Eric, our Head of School. I know that I can say this publicly, Eric Addae-Kyeremeh, Professor in Educational Leadership and Development, who from the moment I stepped foot into the OU, whenever a job came up or something came up, he'd tap me on the shoulder and say, “Azumah, why don't you apply for that?” Words are powerful. Words have power. Words create worlds of possibilities. Now what is the opposite of a microaggression? I had to ask ChatGPT and according to ChatGPT it's a microaffirmation. Liz, Wen, Eric, Karen, thank you for your microaffirmations. They made a huge difference. Now I also have to thank my Executive Dean, Klaus-Dieter Rossade. I've got to admit, this is a bit embarrassing, okay, because I consider it my role to offer senior managers absolutely nothing but scathing critique. But Klaus-Dieter is and remains a hero and I'd really like to thank him for circumnavigating the racialised microaggression of a colleague. I think you all know those microaggressions, the sort of microaggression that says, “Don't get ideas above your station, I'm going to put a stop to that.” She should have known better. Thank you, Klaus-Dieter. There's widespread and commonplace inequalities in HE. It might not be in the bones of the organisation. I know my colleagues do not have a racist bone in our body, but it's in the air that we breathe. These inequalities affect academics striving towards professorship, but they also impact on students, and the experiences of black academics and the experiences of black students are synonymous. The fact that black students have lower continuation rates and are least likely to graduate with a 2.1 when compared to their white peers must be read as part of a broader problem of race inequality that is structurally, historically and systemically located. There should be more of us in this space. There would be more of us in this space. Our absence is not through a lack of dreaming. Data from the UK Parliament in 2023 evidence that 50% of the UK's black population went to university at age 18. Tony Blair, we met your target. This compares to only 32% for our white counterparts, but only 9% of us go to the research intensive institutions and that's the lowest rate for all groups. Somewhere in the ivory tower, lost in digital space, there are black women and there are black students who should have been awarded a first, who should have been promoted, whose lives have changed course because having been through the required institutional processes to be awarded that first and to achieve that promotion, a person refused to acknowledge their accomplishment and demanded just that little bit more from them than was actually required or was actually asked for from their white counterparts.

I'm really curious about those silenced and erased others, a curiosity expressed beautifully by Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance poet, who in 1951 asks, “What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over - like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?”

But all of this is background. This is not what my inaugural lecture is about. What I want to talk about is education, policy and practice. But everything is political and every politics is simultaneously a macro-politics and a micro-politics. My personal biography is an analytical story. It connects personal troubles to public woes, the personal to the universal, the subjective to the objective, the private to the public. All are connected through imagination and story. My experience reveals the public embedded into the private. This life, this story, this experience manages to be achingly familiar while also being utterly unique. This story is mine, but it's not mine alone. I draw on the personal and the biographical because it shapes who I am, a unicorn, a raisin in rice pudding and a killjoy, and being a unicorn, a raisin in rice pudding and a killjoy shapes what and how I know the world.

My preferred approach to writing about decolonising education is to assume the stance of “the unmarked scholar”, a stance which is both desirable and discomforting. “The unmarked scholar” requires no introduction, he doesn't need to explain his appearance in a text. He requires no further markers and no qualification. What “the unmarked scholar” says is so much more important than who “the unmarked scholar” is. He speaks from that place which is no place, that place which is just there. But if such a position, wherever possible, it's already been filled by some other body. I can try to speak as an “unmarked scholar”, but I'm accusatory. Sometimes I'm emotional and I occupy the wrong body. I'm immediately recognised as not from a place of disembodied neutrality. I'm aligned to this or to that struggle, and my being there is strange. I am a stranger, and the meaning of my presence precedes me. The space of “the unmarked scholar” is a space of disembodied neutrality, a Cartesian space predicated on a fundamental difference between the human and the non-human, between the mental and the physical. It claims philosophy as a uniquely human experience and posits a set of problems that are distinctly human, independent of the crude physicality of culture, society and history. But this human status isn't open to all humans, and it's denied to females, and it's denied to those of us racialised as black. Spaces are normed as either civil or wild. This is a violent hierarchy inscribed into racialised and gendered bodies. Black and female bodies are represented as coming from uncivilised spaces, so penetrated by wildness that the door to civilisation is barred to them.

So perhaps I should just name myself more clearly. I'm a diasporian, a child of the African diaspora. This is a phrasing that playfully echoes a tribal identity. I could say I'm a diasporian in the same way and in answer to the same question that others might say, “I'm a Fante” or “I am a Yoruba”. In this I signal a past both mythologised and reclaimed, a past that refuses erasure. But the discomfort of my unbelonging, my status as a stranger doesn't disappear. When I write from a position I assume the right to be just there. But this is preferable to writing about a position which implies a contradiction. It implies my scholarly self needs an introduction, an explanation of its presence, a qualificatory marker of some sort. It requires that I make my invisibility visible. I would like to adopt the stance of disembodied authority, a voice that speaks across time, across space, through centuries of experience and embodiment. I would like to speak to, from and for the entire human condition. Yes, me, the entire human condition. But writing about decolonisation in the guise of “the unmarked scholar” requires that I mask my emotion, that I mask my personhood. Emotion has no place in academic discourse. Emotions are transgressive. They need to be banished or bracketed. They're an unnecessary encumbrance, an epistemic pollutant that betrays the status of transcendental signifiers; method, truth, validity, objectivity, knowledge. Yet, if emotions are removed from the epistemic encounter, is it possible for “the unmarked scholar” to say that they've really understood the visceral ways in which history is sometimes experienced? Can “the unmarked scholar” understand why somebody would throw faeces at a statue? “The unmarked scholar” transcends heritage and political struggle. Decolonisation requires that I speak to, directly to, or from those struggles. To decolonise means to analyse the historical legacies of empire, its genocidal brutalities and its sedimented afterlife in terms of racialised hierarchies. It's at this point that the eruption of emotion is at its most potent. It's not so much that the psychological impact of colonisation is insurmountable. The emotion has been drained, but there's a residue, a residue that is concretised in the form of social and political structures. Guilt and pride define the emotional landscape of “the unmarked scholar”. Guilt and pride, accompanied by systemic amnesia that defines Europe's engagement with its colonial past. This ultimately coalesces into a post-colonial melancholy. Paul Gilroy analyses this melancholy with the help of Freudian motifs. He suggests that the European nations have been unable to get past their loss of empire and their erstwhile global pre-eminence. This inability folds into a pathological tension in their contemporary global encounters, unable to acknowledge their loss of empire, they're unable to mourn that loss and remain in a repetitive ritualised re-dramatisation of the event. Gilroy argues that this chronic ritualisation calcifies in terms of victimhood.

In the imagination of a former coloniser, Great Britain is a primary victim of its colonial history. After all, the problem with empire is not that Britain was once in charge, the problem of empire is that Britain is no longer in charge. Thank you, Boris Johnson. Britain resents having been cast aside by its former colonies and is unable to understand the desire to decolonise nor fathom the rage that fuels the movement. The coloniser have usurped the space of victimhood that the coloniser, “the unmarked scholar”, holds as his own. If “the unmarked scholar” assumes the entire space of universal human, she's unable to recognise the significance of difference, of the particular and of the specific, but to dissolve the particularities of difference, of race, of culture, of gender and other embodiments, is to dissolve the experience of being a person. The desire then to write as “the unmarked scholar” is the desire to write from a stance of privileged disembodied neutrality. I am implicated. In this move I'm required to deconstruct not only the external oppressive structures but my own complicit internalisation of and participation in those structures. I am compelled to confront something I'm desperate to avoid. This move is a reflexive reckoning, and it's part of a decolonising repertoire. In questioning the geopolitics of knowledge, I aim to undermine European thought as universal and question the subordination of other modes of being.

At this point, I would like to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari, and in a similar situation I imagine that they would surely borrow from me. I would like to reach not the point where one no longer says, “I”, but the point where it's no longer of any importance whether one says “I”. Amidst the discomfort and the contradiction, I'd like to cite Moten and Harney as they offer a far more dignified stance from which to speak. My unbelonging actively seeks the space of the undercommons. It's a space of self-organisation developed by the despised, the disconnected, the dispossessed. In the undercommons I can write, I can speak, I can dance and I can read poems with or without seeking approval. In this space “the unmarked scholar” doesn't assert a particular identity as such, she instead locates and cultivates a location, a space from which to speak. She participates in an epistemic project that develops in exodus with Nanny of the Maroons in the hidden crevices of the university. In this space she draws on the hegemonic university to develop a counter hegemonic space, a subversity, subaltern in character, a subversive intervention into the conventional idea of a university, and it's from this site of knowledge production that I seek to decolonise.

I return regularly to the Stuart Hall building. When we were all on campus, in the olden days before COVID-19, I sat in the Stuart Hall building. I had a desk and an office in the Stuart Hall building. Each time I crossed the threshold I was reminded of his aphorism, of this Jamaican-born cultural historian and political activist who once worked at The Open University. According to Stuart Hall, “The University is a critical institution or it is nothing.” But in this, my third move, I begin to notice the limits of critique. It has, as Latour explains, “run out of steam”. There are two impulses that sit behind critique, both of which are dangerous; nihilism or naivety. Critique implies a sledgehammer. It dismantles, it destroys, it ridicules, it points to the absurdities and the contradictions. It breaks down structures that have held things in place. But what precisely does that accomplish? The sledgehammer of critique has ricocheted off the walls and turned itself back on the debunkers. Its own limitations have become exposed. Fine, everything is broken, destroyed, smashed to smithereens, and then lie in pieces on the floor around you, shattered. But where does that leave you? And it's at this point that naivety appears. Naivety is the forlorn hope that having taken a sledgehammer to destroy everything, to destroy the edifice of what was holding our educative lives in place, something better will spontaneously emerge from the rubble. This approach implies that behind the current reality there's an alternative reality, a reality that's there and just waiting to be discovered and allowed to live. It will spontaneously emerge from what the sledgehammer of critique has reduced to rubble. Between forlorn hopefulness and the sledgehammer of critique, we need something else. We need something that creates. My naive assumption that a better world will spontaneously appear is abandoned. I need to coax this new reality into being. But this is where the limitations of the sledgehammer become most apparent. The sledgehammer is unable to coax. I need something else. I need affirmative ethics.

I can do nothing but pay homage to Audre Lorde, philosopher, intersectional feminist, poet and activist. But to think with a giant is to think beyond them and against them and so I want to gently subvert Audre Lorde. The Master's tools will not dismantle the Master's house, though to be honest with you, I really like the idea of using them to do just that. But supposing I don't want to dismantle it. Supposing finding it a heavy load, I just want it to explode, and then I want to use the debris from that explosion, along with anything else I can lay my hands on, to build our own houses. This, my final move, is one in which I make passing reference to Braidotti's affirmative ethics, and I elaborate upon my decolonial dreams and the future of post-16 education.

A very brief note about method might be helpful here. I now write from a stance that speculates about the possible rather than simply describing the actual. In this frame, knowing is a form of transformative praxis, rather than a process of representation. Entangled in this exploration is the ethical and the political implications of inquiry and their constitutive effects. I suggest manifesto is a form of affirmative ethics. A distinction of course has to be made between the most popularised form of manifesto, wheeled out every five years by men wearing shiny suits, who make promises they had neither capacity nor intention of keeping. It's not that kind of manifesto. I prefer a notion of manifesto in the sense of a statement of principle, a mission statement, a declaration of intent, a prefigurative space that makes manifest through articulation and expression to render perceptible a new order of ideas, an enactment of that which is called for. It operates, manifesto, on the cusp of fantasy and fact. It's future-oriented, it's optimistic, it's revolutionary, and it's subversive. Each demand is like an incendiary lobbed into the colonial edifice of HE, a disturbance that has potential to explode. The manifesto promises new starts, blank slates, big dreams and a fierce mask. What might have been rendered as “we want” or “we demand”, I've softened the tone for the occasion.

So what if the purpose of post-16 education was to cultivate the ethical imagination? I suggest we give voice to an underlying feeling, a sense, an anxiety that something is not quite right. That the promise of more for less, that is of getting more for less, of giving more for less, as a path to trickle down abundance has not been realised. We've been waiting. Should we just accept that it might not, as promised, happen, that this neoliberal fever that has held education in its thrall for the last 40 years has failed, or at least, pursuing the three apocalyptic E's of efficiency, effectiveness and economy has produced unhelpful absurdities. Ah, but I have to watch my tone. My intention was to be affirmative rather than critical, to create, and so the ethical imagination provides an answer to an underlying sense of loss that shapes so much writing and scholarship around education, policy and practice. The ethical imagination is a defence against the neoliberal onslaught that leaves education in an impoverished state, financially impoverished, as according to the Office for Students, in 2023-2024, 40% of HEIs are operating on a deficit. It's envisaged that even after increases in student fees, alongside unwelcome and potentially self-harming cuts in the name of survival, that this number operating at a loss is expected to rise to 75%. Where, when and how does this unrelenting drive for reduced costs leave education? Is it possible that something is wrong? What the ethical imagination does here is remind us of who we are and why we're here. These are questions that the unrelenting drive for efficiency and effectiveness and economy are unable to ask, let alone answer. These are ethical questions written into the ontology of education. Should education be a public or a private good? Is the purpose of education to enable us to fulfil our slot in the labour market? Of course, having articulated an answer to these questions, an even more potent ethical dilemma appears, how do we get from here to there?

What if we placed the disciplinary founding fathers of philosophy and social sciences in their place: contextualising them and their ideas as emergent from a specific time and a specific place rather than universal. I suggest that we assert with confidence and conviction that an equitable future for education is both possible and desirable. Can a refusal be affirmative? Because my starting point here is a refusal. The disciplinary founding fathers have taken the entire space of worthwhile scholarly contribution. They have, as Sylvia Wynter might say, over-represented themselves. Assuming the right to speak for us all, they speak as if they were all. If I wrote a doctoral thesis that excluded female and Global South writers, I suspect it wouldn't even be noticed. But if I wrote a thesis in the social sciences that didn't mention Weber, Marx or Durkheim, I think it would be dismissed. The pillars of what counts as worthwhile knowledge may have very little acquaintance with other worlds, with non-European histories, but this doesn't compromise the quality of their work. Well, what if we simply refuse this? What if we simply refuse their refusal? So this is a refusal that denies, resists, reframes and redirects colonial and neoliberal logics and in so doing it affirms other life worlds. It's a refusal that affirms anger, silence, resentment and resistance as affective practices, as legitimate responses to a past not yet buried. This is a refusal that accepts the “I” role as legitimate feminist pedagogy. This means that we refuse the conceit that knowledge comes from nowhere. The founding fathers of contemporary sociologies who distinguished their subject from anthropology premised on the basis of European exceptionalism that have been exposed and found wanting. We no longer accept the belief that family and kinship or organisation are somehow fundamentally different depending on where they are located. The claim to a universal stance has been routed and categorically demonstrated as emergent from a very particular stance. One way to accomplish this refusal is to ensure that each time we introduce one of these founding fathers we locate them. We anchor them in a specific time and a specific space, a specific social class and an associated set of interests, cultures and beliefs. In this way we can make their silences clear. It is only when this anchoring is made clear that we can understand why the classical sociologist Talcott Parsons could account for modernity without mentioning slavery. But other African-American sociologists like Du Bois could only write about modernity by keeping it firmly in view. When they are located within their ethnographic context, raced, gendered, classed, geolocated, historicised, their worldview becomes apparent. Contextualisation is decolonial exposure. De Santos points out that Ibn Khaldun is a foundational sociologist. His key concepts were read and mimicked by Durkheim without acknowledgement. Perhaps we can accept that it was context that made it difficult for a 19^th century European like Durkheim to cite a 14^th century African Muslim. This cognitive injustice is laid bare only when context is explored and explained more fully.

Okay, I've just noticed the time. I have to say that I wouldn't normally read something but I forgot my login. I've been at The Open University since 2017 and I couldn't remember my login. I use it two or three times a day and I had to go and check it. I'm going to skip to the end because I think that's probably the best thing to do. Three minutes. I'm going to say, what if we enacted post-16 education in which the voices of policymakers, professionals and students engaged in mutually productive dialogue. I'm possibly on more familiar ground here. I've only recently begun to think about decolonisation and it's one of those hard to avoid subjects, especially if you're interested in ethics and equity. Hence, these “what if” ideas are ideas that I'm attempting to breathe life into and represent work that I hope to accomplish over the next few years.

My final point is something of a lament. There was a time when post-16 education, most people would refer to it as FE, felt like it was a profession, or felt at least like it was becoming a profession. While I'm not suggesting that the profession is the peak of workplace accomplishment, the regard, the respect, the expertise and the autonomy awarded to professionals should, in my view, be awarded to all workers. Nonetheless, the professional status felt possible, but the neoliberal impoverishment has taken its toll. I want teachers and students to be able to make their voices heard about what education is and what education is for. When policies are being drafted at a national level and an institutional level, I want teachers and students to be in the room. Is that such a preposterous idea that at every level, teachers, students and those who draft national policies would benefit from talking to each other?

Colleagues, friends and family, Moses, are you still listening? Just checking. This is my mic drop moment. In the run through for this presentation it was 39 minutes long so that gave me a minute to try and sum things up. So what I imagine is that at some point you'll say, “Well yeah I went to Azumah’s inaugural lecture and she spoke for 40 minutes.” “40 minutes? What did she say?” Okay, this is what I want you to tell them. Decolonial dreams are fuelled by the ethical imagination, both of which are the wellspring of hope. None of this is possible without embracing other epistemes, in this case, creative ways of knowing. So we circle back to the imagination, from the root to the source. Imagination creates the possibility of worlds unseen. Poetry is a necessity to help us imagine ourselves into this world and dance around in it for a little while. In the words of Audre Lorde, “Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and our dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, and then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we give name to the nameless so that it can be thought.” And with that, it's my enormous pleasure to introduce you to Mackayla Forde, a poet and a PhD candidate, also known as Red Medusa. Red Medusa will offer a few poems as a palate cleanser between the lecture and the Q&A. [clapping]

Mackayla: Thank you, Professor Azumah Dennis. A big thanks to Professor Dennis for inviting me here and also to Professor Marcia Wilson. Thank you for having me everybody. Thank you all for joining us in celebration of this trailblazing woman, and of course, we thank the ancestors who paved the way for us to all be here right now. So I'm going to open with a poem called These Hands. So many of us in the world of academia, and I tried to write something to preface these poems which I wouldn't normally do, but I thought I'd have a go at it today. So many of us in the world of academia have to navigate it without seeing ourselves represented in faculty. So often we see our reflections in the service providers, the contract staff, and rarely in positions of power and authority. When we do reach seniority, it often becomes our sisters that support us in doing so. These Hands is dedicated to the women who remind us of who we are so that we can become who we're becoming.

I have opened my eyes to find myself face down in the dirt many times, unable to summon the strength to pick myself up, not even the gods could have raised me from the dead. In fact, they had left me there to rot. There have been times when my mouth could not open, sound could not escape, and my cries for help were silent screams echoing in the darkness and my body had married the mud it lay in and waited to be digested and absorbed back into the womb of the earth. But right before I had submitted to the calls of my angels and the joy of my demons, hands held my wrist, waist, neck, back, and feet, lifting me out of that grave and propelling me into the warmth of a midday sun and that warmth warmed the hands which wiped my eyes clearing my vision so that I could see my path ahead. They placed me in healing waters, removing life's heavy debris with salt and flame, making my spirit balanced and whole again. They stood me in the four winds to remind me that to feel was to live, and once I was dry and breathing again, naked and reborn, these hands draped me in white cloth, clothing me with the wisdom of sages, adorning my ears with gems kept safe within the minds of the ancients who had come and gone before I was being put together again, made whole and fed with knowledge. These hands placed swords in my palms and taught me to fight against the world that sought to leave me in this mud. They gave me back my voice by speaking life into my soul. They fixed my crown, weaving gold thread into my locks, reminding me of my connection to the divine and to every hand who had reached out and placed their hands in mine. Those hands who had saved my life over and over and over again were the hands of sisters, daughters, aunties and cousins, maidens, mothers and crones. They were the hands of artists and warriors, survivors and diviners, magicians, musicians, healers and seers. They are queens and princesses, femmes and mistresses, white and black, whole and cracked, strangers, neighbours and friends. They are the daughters of the earth and they were the hands that belonged to women. Thank you. [clapping]

Thank you. My next poem is called Asterisk. Asterisk comes from the late Middle English via Greek “asteriskos”, meaning “small star” often used to denote a footnote. Today I share this piece as a reminder that our presence in academia as black women and our achievements such as Azumah's are not to be footnoted. We are not small stars. We are not asterisks.

I am not an asterisk, an afterthought, something other that's a little bit too different. I'm not a blank space on the form where my black is not the norm, the spaces between B, A, M, and E, and ethnicity with no name. I am not an asterisk, I am not a “by the way”, or another way to say that I do not fit into your prescribed divisive ideals of supremacy. I am not an outlier. I cannot be placed outside of anything. If anything I am the all in everything. I am that which you say does not exist. I am not an asterisk. I am not the acceptable black face that proves your organisation is not racist, nor a get-out clause to meet the quota. I am not your equal opportunities promoter. I am not your poster girl for how much you say you help the poor or the blacks or the browns. I am not your one black friend. I am not your office clown. I am not your foot in the door to black culture. My presence does not give you permission to speak to me in patois. I cannot be summed up in biro, a boring white box ticked. I am not black other. I am not mixed other. I am the sum of my ancestral mothers. I am the strength of all of my brothers. But I am not an asterisk. Thank you. [clapping]

Thank you. To end I'm going to share a new piece which I wrote specifically for you, Azumah, on this occasion. It's a piece that speaks to our roots as the mothers of civilisation, the first storytellers and pioneers, and it looks forward to the reimagining of a future where black women professors, such as Azumah and such as my mentor Marcia down there, are not the exception but the rule.

We each arrive as once in a lifetime spectacles. Summoned souls of sisters thousands of years old, we are the bones of our griots, strung together by stories, announcing our arrival through rattling jaws, our journeys etched into history as song, dance, and poem. We've created diamonds of the rubbish and the ruin, forged rubies in the furnaces of fury, go scatter our ashes on barren land and witness emerald greens emerge from the earth, seeding life and liberty. Still, like dust, we rise. We are the rose that grows from concrete, pushing back against the dirt of dispossession, bridging false divides, speaking truth to power despite demands for our silence. We insist on being alive. We persist, resist, and thrive. For we are living rivers of rebel's milk spilling from the warrior's breast. We fuel the unfettered defiance of those the oppressor seeks to oppress the dream of freedom, the uncaged bird, the song that can't be unsung. Where we are one, we will be many. Where we are one, we will be many. Because out of many come one. Thank you very much. [clapping]

Josie:  There's literally no way to follow that is there? Thank you so much Mackayla Forde, Red Medusa, new favourite poet for an absolutely fabulous recital and so fantastic to have that following Azumah's brilliant lecture. So now it's time to hear from you in the lecture theatre and online with any questions and comments that this talk has raised for you. We've got some roving mics, so let's start over here.

Speaker:  I'm going to keep it short actually. Can we decolonise if we're still in it, in that sense? As a historian we often talk about colonialism as if it's over. So this idea of decolonisation, it's this fixed idea that we're decolonising something when the violence is still happening. So in that sense can we decolonise something when the violence is still going on? I guess, intellectually, spiritually, physically in areas like Palestine, for example, and university involvement within that. So can we decolonise anything if the violence is still happening?

Azumah:  I think that's a reasonable question, but I'd almost say, well what do we then say? Do we say, “Okay, we accept the colony and we'll live within it, happily or unhappily?” I think that we have no choice but to aim at decolonisation, remembering that the struggle against decolonisation happened from the first moment, the first moment somebody stepped foot and attempted, you know, started that process of colonisation. It's not something that we're just doing now, it’s something that we've continued and have always been doing. I think it's something that we continue to do. Of course I am very mindful, as we would know, that it's easy to talk about decolonisation of just sort of getting the right kind of literature or thinking about things in the right kind of way. It is a physical struggle and it's a land struggle and I wouldn't want to undermine or pretend it's anything other than that. But yes, I think is the answer to your question. Yes, we can and yes, we must.

Josie:  Thank you, great question. For those of you who are online, please don't forget to use the email on the slide and we can take some questions from our online audience too. I think I saw another hand up, I think, didn't I in the room. I'm just looking around. I can't remember where I spotted it now. Have we got an online question to go to?

Speaker:  Lots of love online but no questions. Lots of hearts.

Josie:  Well the nice thing when I can't spot the hand up that I spotted earlier is I get to ask one, so that's always good. Azumah, one of the things I'm really interested in is in your work as a scholar, you're taking some really interesting critical perspectives about the social sciences, about how we present it. Can you talk a bit about how you translate some of that work and that thinking that you described so well in your lecture into the practical teaching that you're involved with here, and how that translates for our students?

Azumah:  Yeah, okay. I guess the starting point for that would be putting those founding fathers in their place, so contextualising them and not allowing us to assume that these voices are the only voices and these perspectives are the only legitimate perspectives and any other perspective is just automatically to not be trusted and not to be taken seriously, to acknowledge the existence of radically different worldviews and to explore those world views seriously and look at what they imply. The person who I cited, and I'm sure I did cite him, Ibn Khaldun. I did sociology, I did it at school and I did it for my degree. If I have a discipline it is in sociology. I studied Durkheim for years but I'd never actually heard of him. When you look at his ideas, they very much predate exactly what Durkheim was saying. It just seems to me really worrying that there are these people who are doing this work, who are doing this thinking, and are completely ignored, completely erased. Actually, we talked about history in real time. We're seeing that happen now aren't we in the States, where somebody's going through websites and deleting people as much as they can. This is what happened, and this is what is happening. I think we've got to say, “No, no, you're not going to do that.” So yes, I do think it is a very deliberate exploration. One of the bits I cut out, which is a conversation I had with Jenny. I think we both were talking about citational politics, and I think we both agreed that we had a real thirst for reading black writers, black women writers, for reading women writers, for reading this work, but we also agreed that we tended to do it almost as if it was this parallel personal project that went on outside of our formal academic work. It was almost like a hobby, a personal project rather than anything else. I say I want to bring those women writers back into the academy. I want to make sure that they are there and that they're recognised and they're cited and they're known.

Josie:  So they're shared with students as well as the classical so-called Muse too.

Azumah:  Yes, absolutely.

Josie:  That's great. Thank you.

Azumah:  I do believe there's a little boy there with his hand up. Is he going to say something?

Speaker:  Who is “the unmarked scholar”?

Azumah:  Oh, who is “the unmarked scholar”? “The unmarked scholar” is a very shifty character because sometimes he likes to pretend he's male and he's white. Sometimes he's black and he's female. She's black and she's female. So he shifts around a lot. Good question. Shifts around, changes gender, changes race, changes location. Slippery.

Speaker:  What’s the pronoun for it then? [clapping]

Azumah:  That one has floored me. I don't know, I don’t think I could do that. Though as I like to cite, I'm not a linguist, but I'm sure that there are people in the room who speak twi or fante, but if you speak twi or fante, pronouns are non-existent. It's the same word for whether it's male or female. So that's the pronoun. They.

Josie:  Yeah, just people. I like that. We've got an online question.

Speaker:  From somebody called London Vibes. One of the problems is how we view discrimination. Is it more practical to view discrimination through the social lens or the mental health lens?

Azumah:  Ooh, okay. I mean, if you say the mental health lens, whose mental health are we referring to? The mental health of the discriminator or the discriminated. I don't think that it's an ‘or’, I think how we understand mental health, there's a social lens that feeds into it, and, I guess I'm just one of those scholars who are in that sort of, not anything goes as much as it doesn't happen, but I think the world is big enough to have multiple perspectives on the same thing. What matters is what insights those perspectives offer us. So I don't feel the need to say, “It is this. It is not this.” It is both of these things at different times and in different ways, and both things provide us with an insight and a way of acting around them.

Speaker:  We have quite a few questions coming in now. This is from Rehana Awan. Can we decolonise without dismantling the structures first?

Azumah:  Oh gosh, that's an interesting question and I'd also again want to have more of a dialogue because I think I would see that decolonising is in part a process of dismantling those structures. Part of the structure is a colonial structure and so yes, I don't think that one comes first and then we do the other. Also I don't think there are any blueprints for this. There are no set answers. So I just think we fling everything we've got at it and see if it works really. I don't think it's a very finite process.

Josie:  So we've got another one in the room.

Speaker:  Hello, good evening. Thank you for a wonderful lecture. Can you decolonise without acceptance of the atrocities that the colonisation brought. You mentioned genocide once in your lecture, and I believe education is one of the keys to doing that and also helping people accept the problems, and from there, especially the institutions and the church. As an Anglican coming from Church of England, I know the role the church played in those things. So with more education in universities and in the church, help people to understand what happened and then the powers that be to then accept. Especially genocide denial, if people can accept those things that happened, is that going to be one of the ways to start to dismantle them? So I talk from the background of people that suffered genocide and it is still being denied. The genocide happened as a result of colonisation. I say Biafran and Igbo from Nigeria, who the ancestors lost over 3.5 million people and it is still being denied. Will education in institutions, especially in the church, help the powers that exist now accept those things and thereby help to dismantle them?

Azumah:  Yeah. I mean, that's a really hard question and I think that I probably would not be able to give what I think is a reasonable answer to it sitting here right now. It’s something I'd have to really think about. My instinctive reaction to it is that part of decolonisation is elaborating upon tracing, writing, recording those histories and those current experiences, and making sure that the contours of them are clearly understood and documented and undeniable. But I also think that we have no choice but to acknowledge that there are people who will never, never, never, never, ever accept it. I don't think we can wait for them to be convinced before we pursue the things that we need and want to pursue. Yes, there is a reason why we work in education rather than selling insurance or cars. Working in education implies a certain sort of commitment to a certain kind of world and while there are lots of differences, I'm sure that there are also lots of things that we all agree on. One of them is that we want to come to an equitable understanding of the world and an accurate account of history. I think those histories are there and they are evidenced, but if somebody says the moon is made out of cheese, what are you going to do? You're not going to sit and argue with them. Just do something else. But yeah, I understand that question.

Josie:  Another one in the room and then one online.

Speaker:  Hi. Sorry to take a completely different direction. I'm interested to hear what you would suggest. You say in one of your “what if” questions, the dialogue between professionals and students, a productive dialogue. What are some of the ways that you would suggest, how do we start that? I'm a teacher, an educationalist, and I see the reality on the ground so I'd love to hear what your ideas are around starting such a dialogue.

Azumah:  Yeah, lovely. You're asking me a very practical question aren't you which is fair enough. Again, I don't know that I'm necessarily at this point thinking about that as a practical step one, step two, step three thing. I just know that it's a principle and something that I think should be adopted. What it reminds me of is certainly work that I think I've done. You've got this beautiful policy edifice. This person spent years and years promoting a particular view of policy. It actually was adult literacy, all about skills, all about employment, all about getting jobs. Then you sit and you talk to students. You say, “Well, why are you coming to this class?” and they'll say, “Well, yeah, I just like being with people.” So how they talk about what this educational experience is doing for them is completely different to how the policy is set up. Utterly different, completely different perspective. I think it almost doesn't matter what that policymaker says. They can say what they want. That person has a reason for being in that class and doing that programme. It seems to me it would be beneficial if we set up systems and structures and approaches in which those two people could talk to each other and that's it really. Sometimes I think if it were ever possible that that commitment and understanding was there, then we would then in that moment be able to create the systems that allow it. But actually I know that this is somewhere on the cusp between fact and fantasy, and that's just something I'll need to work through at some point, but I think the principle is that that dialogue is helpful. I think particularly with policy, and particularly with policy in FE, which is much more of my background. There is a sense that what teachers have to say is just utterly irrelevant. They're there as conduits through which we deliver this policy. I think that's not helpful.

Sas:  Hi Professor. I'm conscious that between you and Marcia we've taken up a huge percentage of the UK's black female professors, so I'm just soaking up the moment right now.

Azumah. There is space.

Sas:  Kind of a you and Josie's question, I think maybe. Why is it taking us as an institution so long to get to this stage? and are we now going to open up the floodgates, be inundated with black female professors, stepping on them everywhere we go at the University?

Azumah:  We are going to be inundated. I know that there will be, well, I hope that I'm wrong and no one has yet corrected me in saying this, but I think that I'm the second black woman professor that the OU has promoted. I've got to say, I find that really shocking. Not shocking because, I mean, come on. You know, come on. It's quite shocking. The last person I think was someone called Anne Phoenix, and I think it was about 21 years ago. I suppose if I think anything at all, I love the OU, and I love working here, I really do, and I'm not saying that just because Josie's sitting here or something like that. No, I love working at the OU. It feels like a home, a professional home and that's quite a strong feeling. But if I said anything that I wanted to accomplish, maybe I shouldn't say it out loud, maybe saying the quiet bit out loud, but I think that there is a kind of complacency at the OU. We are open to people, places, ideas, and that is a genuine commitment, but I think that it could do with a bit of a poke and a bit of a challenge. I know that when I thanked Klaus-Dieter for getting around microaggressions, that was a very real, specific incident that I'm talking about. People will talk about equity, but do this other thing. You think, “Well, how are those two things consistent?” So I don't know, you asked me a question. I know that there are a few other black women professors who are in the process of putting in their application who really, only because I'm impatient, I couldn't be bothered to wait, I wanted, doing this, doing this, doing this, that I forged and I did it, and I just wouldn't stop sending in my supporting statement, so they had no choice. They probably thought, “Oh God, it's Azumah again, let's just get this one through.” But there are other black women who will be there very, very soon. It's not going to be another 21 years, that much I know. Hopefully two or three. I can think of two immediately. I won't embarrass them by saying their name because that's not fair. Okay, that should have been Josie's question really. Sorry, I don't know.

Josie:  Well, it is your night, but I can't resist chipping in. I hope we're opening the floodgates. I mean, that's what we would like to think we're doing. I think though to highlight that there can be some complacency in an organisation that prides itself on being open to people, open to ideas, we're not as open as we think we are and we've got to get better. I'm really thrilled, it's nice to see Alice here from the Women's Higher Education Network who started the 100 Black Women Professors NOW programme. It's not just about the amazing black women like Azumah who are part of our academic community getting promoted, it's also about when and the people on the programme, and you said it in your talk earlier, you think it's your job to give senior leaders like me a kicking occasionally, and that's what we need. So the strategic pieces around how do we get better at this in the OU and in the wider sector are at least as important. The challenge there is at least as important as the support and the network and the confidence-building for the individual academics that are on the programme. I hope we'll learn the lessons and expand it. It's not just about the academic community, brilliant as it is to see women professors up here, it's wider, it's across the whole University and all of our staff and students feeling that they have every opportunity to fulfil their potential here.

Speaker:  Maybe Azumah it’s back to that same dialogue between professionals and students that you were talking about.

Azumah:  Maybe it is, yes. There is a thing, Student Voice, and there are people who are promoting that and maybe we just lean into that as much as we possibly can. But to echo I think something of what you said, I know that the OU takes seriously the awarding gap and the sector takes seriously the awarding gap because the two things are not distinct. They're very, very closely connected and they have a very similar set of causes I would imagine.

Josie:  Thank you. We've got another question in the room.

Speaker:  Thank you Azumah for your presentation.

Azumah:  Is that Felix?

Felix:  Yeah, that's me. I wanted to talk a little bit about the methodology for the decolonial dreams because there is obviously some initiatives taking place. But then there is also the issue of speed and the underlying assumption behind my question is that there is a power issue. Your critique of the sledgehammer, if I may say, suggests that we have to coax those with power in a way that enables those who don't have it to gain certain opportunities. You talked about the students who are not getting a first or a 2.1 because someone is expecting them to have that little bit more that they wouldn’t expect from others, and that is an issue of power, as far as I'm concerned. So how do we get people to give up some of their power or at least exercise it ethically, you talked about ethics, in such a way that we can speed up things without using the sledgehammer?

Azumah:  Yeah, thank you. If it's to do with, for example, promotions, and I know that there are people in the room who know much more about that than I do, but I do think it's being very clear about what precisely is it that happens when a black student, a black member of staff achieves. I suppose it's about understanding what sits underneath the awarding gap. Wat kind of decisions are made where that result in those depressed results. But really what you're asking me is how do I coax powerful people to use that power more ethically. My instinctive reaction to this, and this is the danger of having to answer questions because you can only go on instinct and I might want to have a more thoughtful answer, is that people don't necessarily give up that power and that privilege willingly or happily, especially when they don't acknowledge that they have it. So maybe the sledgehammer is helpful in certain instances, but what I think where the sledgehammer has its limitations, is that I've got to have the idea of what that end point is. What is it we want? What is it I want? What do I think is possible and appropriate? If I say, “Well, I'd like to get to a point where there is no distinction between the outcomes for this degree programme or for this University that follows lines of race.” How is that accomplished? Some of that is accomplished within the institution and some of it sits around the institution as well. It's not all what we can sit here and do, but much of it I think we can do. I know that's not an adequate answer, Felix, and I'm sorry but I'll think about it. But the main thing is, I don't think people give up power willingly, so we do have to really, really, really hold their feet to the fire and hold them accountable really.

Josie:  I know we're running out of time, but we have to take one more online I think if that's okay.

Speaker:  Would you agree that we must continue talking about decolonisation, but keep it concurrent with embedding equality, diversity and inclusion in education and our practices so that our children or grandchildren don't find themselves 50 years down the line talking about decolonising the decolonisation?

Azumah:  Yeah, I mean, I don't think those two things are at war with each other or at different even ends of a polarity. I think that we are all able to have several different conversations at the same time, and I don't think we're ever going to move as one monolith at all. Some people find that their take on it is much more of an EDI perspective and that's what they want to pursue. Others are more interested in decolonisation and we can do both things. I don't think they have to set up in contrast at all.

Josie:  That's a great answer, and a concise one which means I can abide by the signal to wrap up. Thank you Azumah, for an absolutely superb lecture. Really enjoyed it. For those of you in the room and online, we strive to continually improve our inaugural lectures and how they work. We welcome your feedback in how we shape the series. So please do complete the feedback form which we'll send out after today's event. This also gives me a chance to just put up a bit of a trailer maybe for our next inaugural lecture, which will be by Professor Joan Simons, who I can see in the audience today getting ready. Great to see you, Joan. She's the Head of School for Health, Wellbeing and Social Care, also in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies, like Azumah, here at the OU. Her inaugural lecture will be on the topic of Empowerment and Engagement in Education and Care: Transforming lives through supportive practices. So hopefully we will see some of you there on Thursday 12^th June at 5.30pm and you'll find details of that on the OU Research website soon where you can register. All that remains for us to say is thank you so much for joining us today and for always supporting the OU and for those of us that are here live and in person it's time to celebrate with Azumah so please do join us downstairs for a drink. Thank you. [clapping]

Azumah:  Thanks everyone. Brilliant. Lovely to see people. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you.