Black Lawyers Matter UPDATE, 14.9.17

by | Sep 14, 2017 | Uncategorized | 0 comments

Academic Lead (MMU): Dr Ornette D Clennon

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Black Lawyers Matter, West Indian Sports and Social Club, Westwood Street, Moss Side, 5.5.16 UPDATED

Last night’s Black Lawyers Matter event doubled up as a launch of the new Lemn Sissay Bursaries and a progress update of work done on the initiative since last year.

Read more, here.

Here are some discussion points from the public meeting, with my commentaries:

Community-University Partnerships

Commentary

This is an extremely interesting point because the dynamic between universities and communities is very complex and multifaceted. As mentioned, the brutalising nature of academia can be traced to its transactions of whiteness within the academy, where black bodies (staff and students) are made to feel alien or like invaders. The AHRC-funded Common Cause project explores some of these issues.

Related Research

Kagan, C., Lawthom, R., Clennon, O.D., Fisher, J., Diamond, J. & Goldstraw, K. (2017) ‘Sustainable Communities: University-Community Partnership Research on Social Dimensions of Sustainable Development’. In W. Leal (Ed.), Sustainable Development Research at Universities in the United Kingdom. (pp.245 – 262) New York: Springer

Clennon, O.D. (2014) What’s education for, privilege or meritocracy? openDemocracyUK [website] May 21, 2014, Available at: here. [Accessed: 21.5.14]

Clennon, O.D. (2013) Anyone, for a delicious slice of pineapple upside-down cake? National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) [blog] December 18, 2013, Available at: here. [Accessed: 18.12.13]

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Black Study, Black Struggle

Activism, Academia and Black Community Struggles

Black Academia 1.1 (update)

Acknowledging Community Expertise

Commentary

This will call for interdisciplinary co-produced research with communities, especially with local BAME communities.

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Research

Lemn Sissay Bursaries

Commentary

This will need a prioritised forum for intersectional critical race scholarship for this to happen meaningfully.

Related Research

Publications

Intersectional experiences of racial discrimination and the need for further interdisciplinary research

Commentary

Intersectional critical race scholarship on the gendered nature of racialisation to form what bell hooks calls patriarchal terrorism would be useful to explore and understand in this context.

Commentary

An audience member expressed alarm at the prospect of lowering grades via the Manchester Access Programme (MAP) for prospective BAME candidates and wondered whether this would disadvantage them in their consequent academic studies within the academy.

Commentary

The deficit model that is often applied to BAME communities, where assets are (un)consciously ignored, can often be internalised by BAME communities, themselves:

However

Commentary

A whiff of the Politics of Respectability or doing what is necessary to succeed in the system?

Commentary

This is a question about the perceived value of the social and cultural capital already held by BAME communities. Despite their rich social and cultural capital networks, BAME communities still appear to have challenges benefiting from them in institutions that privilege whiteness. This raises important fundamental questions about the specific role of education in terms of BAME citizenry.

Related Research

Clennon, O. D. (2017) ‘We Don’t Need No Education. (Unless You’re Black). De-Colonised Education as a Tool for Political Activism’. In The Polemics of CLR James and Contemporary Black Activism (pp. 83-108). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-47548-6_5

Clennon, O.D. (2014) ‘Making Education a Priority: Where do we go from here? Towards a Community-Led Approach to Education ‘in Clennon, O. (ed.). Alternative Education and Community Engagement: Making Education a Priority. (pp. 122 – 134) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan DOI: 10.1057/9781137415417.00010

Commentary

The Lemn Sissay bursaries can play a crucial role in enabling the BAME student to create additional social capital networks that are valued by the academy and beyond, as many from more socio-economically privileged backgrounds already do.

Socio-legal consciousness

Commentary

Following on from Freirian ideas around a critical pedagogy that examines the role foundational role of education in educating and shaping citizens, Esther Stanford’s concept of socio-legal consciousness follows a similar line of thought. To emphasise this point about community relevance and accountability, audience members suggested that helping the community to set up their own legal advice centres (i.e. not university-led centres) would be a more effective way of building community capacity and acknowledging community expertise (this raises important questions around how we can encourage our BAME graduates to play a part in community building). This idea, of course, leads us back to the vexing conundrum of community-university partnerships, the power dynamic and sometimes conflicting agendas of both sets of communities……

Related Research

Clennon, O.D. (2020) Scholar activism as a nexus between research, community activism and civil rights via the use of participatory arts, The International Journal of Human Rights Vol 24, No. 1, 46 – 61, DOI: 10.1080/13642987.2019.1624535

Clennon, O.D. (2017) ‘Scholar Activism as a Nexus between Research and Community Activism via the use of Participatory Arts’ Paper presented at: Activist Scholarship in Human Rights: New Challenges. School of Advanced Study, London, 28th June

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