 Good evening, everyone. Thank you very, very much for honoring our invitation. Thank you for joining us for this event, which we have tagged furthering Black women in higher education and careers. My name is Dr. Amelia Unyema. I'm the Pro-Direct on Learning and Teaching here at SOAS. And this event is part of our Black History Month events. And I'm in charge of learning and teaching portfolio and section at SOAS. And I'm very pleased to welcome you to this event. This particular event, what we plan to do is, with the help of these three amazing, awesome Black women that we have on the panel to explore how we, from our own personal experience or experiences, navigate the workplace and education while retaining our authenticity as Black women in the UK. And we will take this opportunity to honor Black women who have been pioneers in this space in helping to break down barriers and explore going forward the future, how we can support the future generation. And so I've been asked to say to those of you who are social media savvy to please use hashtag at SOAS or at SOAS alumni or at We are SOAS and to tweet and do all the other wonderful things you do with social media about this event. And so I'd like to introduce my panelists this evening. And before I introduce them, I'm just going to sort of quickly tell us what the structure of the evening would be. We're going to have about 25, 30 minutes of discussions. It will be relaxed, you know, sit back discussions. I'm going to throw some questions at our panelists and they would speak from their own experience and their own views. Follow you in which we will come to answer questions. So please, if you do have questions, just go ahead, post all of that in the chat for the benefit of everybody attending. We'll try and deal with some of those questions and we're hoping that we would, it will be a little bit controversial because, you know, if it is not very controversial, it's usually not very exciting. So ask very serious and important questions. We'll try to deal with that. So the details for CVs and bios of our speakers, we placed those, their web links on the chat so that you can click through and you can then read up a little bit more about our speakers. So I'm going to just give one or two sentences about each of the awesome ladies in front of me. So I'm going to start with Zainab Bedawi, you all know her. Zainab is a Sudanese-British international broadcast journalist. Her connection with SOAS, every one of these ladies went to school in SOAS so we're very, very proud of each and every one of them. So Zainab obtained her master's degree in Middle East History and Anthropology at SOAS and she is the chair of the Royal Africa Society. Then we have Lavenia Stener who is a historian, writer and she recently graduated from SOAS with a BA in African Studies and Development Studies. I'm sure you've all been hearing about her lately and she is the founder and CEO of the Black Curriculum. I saw her on TV the other day and I was like, I think I've seen this face before so I think I'm correct. Yes, she was in SOAS and of course we have Busisiwe Day who is a lecturer at the Department of Jurisprudence at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Anybody who's been following our stories and what's been happening in SOAS knows that we're getting stronger connections with South Africa and a director who starts in January, we've basically poached him from South Africa so it's just a simple joy to have Busisiwe Day on the panel with us. But that's not all. She is also a commissioner for the Commission for Gender Equality in Southern Africa and of course remember I said every one of them went to SOAS so she got her MA in Gender and Law from SOAS and I teach in the law school so there's some connection there but I heard her speak and I was completely blown away and I said to Stephanie we must get Busisiwe to come in and do some to speak for us. So that's the panel we have so ladies can I just give you one word each if you want to say a sentence to welcome our participants and our guests and then I'll start firing the questions at you. Shall we start with Sena? Well hello everybody, thank you very much Amelia, hello Busisiwe and LaVinnia and it's great to be with you all and sharing this event and somebody who as you say did my master's degree at SOAS, I'm always happy to be with the SOAS community and beyond and I'm already looking at some of the messages we're getting here. Why do we only celebrate African history in the month of October? Totally with you whoever asked that. I mean we should just be part of the mainstream absolutely. Thank you so very much Sena. Busisiwe. Thank you everyone, thank you very much. It's great to be included in events from SOAS, it was a wonderful experience and I'm hoping to contribute to the conversation and hopefully we will leave, all of us will leave all enriched with the conversation and the panelists that we have here today. Great, thank you so very much LaVinnia. You are still, you're not, yeah. It's okay, we have to have that, you know it's normal these days, please go on. Honestly, hi Amelia, I'm Busisiwe and Zainab and hi everybody. I didn't expect to be back so soon but it's really nice to be back and just yeah, just really excited for this conversation to learn so yeah, hi. Great and so to our participants that's a nice way of just checking that our mics and videos are all working and you can hear us very clearly. So thank you very much ladies. So I'm going to start with my first question and I would ask LaVinnia to please start kick us off and so the question I want to ask is indeed just a few words, if you tell us a little bit about yourself and your academic journey and what it's been like for you as a Black woman in the UK. Okay, so my name is LaVinnia Stenna, I'm 23 and I just graduated from SOAS, studying development in African Studies and currently my work is the Black Curriculum so I've been found, yeah I've been running it for the last two years and within that we're teaching young people Black histories in the UK because at the moment in schools Black history is not a part of the national curriculum and young people are missing out on an essential part of British history right? So we're providing that information. My academic journey didn't start with SOAS, it started whilst I was in college so I went to South Thames College which is in Merton for two years and within that I chose A levels that were really kind of arts focused because my passion has always been in like drama and art and I think kind of going into that environment was really good for me because it was yet enriched me with like wider knowledge that I think studying law and the humanities just don't always kind of provide but obviously that's not kind of, well yeah arguably, but that was something that was contested when I was actually in uni and I started to actually go to lecture so I was going to like LSE, UCL to actually kind of learn about just different subjects around women, around poverty and I think it was there that sparked my interest in the theme of decolonisation. That was my first kind of entrance point into that kind of debates and like education and I felt that there was a strong part you know to play within what we learn as young people but also the truth so that kind of inspired me to go to South, study African studies and throughout the academic journey I think what's been important to me is finding out, finding through yeah finding through all my kind of colleagues and also teachers, the ability to express a lot of empathy and emotion because coming back to those arts the reason that I really like the arts is because it allows you to kind of have a wider discussion you can bring in yourself and I think yeah just kind of being with lecturers such as Ida and Kojo and Chega over the years there was a lot of I guess room for me to really express my identity in connection to African studies so I think like that that part of empathy is really important to play and it's yeah it's helped me in my academic career to kind of bring in that creative side I think for so long was just separated it's like you have your arts and you have your humanities and they don't come together but it's all one great thank you very much so this is your work what is it like being what's it been like for you as well your academic journey well my academic journey has been quite interesting because it was the result of my inability to integrate my career path which was law and to settle within that space with comfort and a lot of my interactions with black academia and interacting with academics who are black actually was solidified at SOAS I always say to people it's actually hilarious that a lot of my work as a black feminist scholar really was cemented through engaging with SOAS because you know within the South African context they had been relatively very little change in terms of how the curriculum is structured and I found that I had more space to broaden my horizon as it were within the legal space as a black academic and so it's been a very I would say antagonistic experience because even within the legal field it's still structured in a way that assumes that the types of professionals that will be types of professions that would be interviewing the legal field are predominantly white in terms of the practices in terms of how the field is structured the traditions and the practices so it has been coming back and bringing all that knowledge and bringing all that activist work a lot of my protest work carried on into SOAS as well Roads must fall transitioning to Roads must fall in at SOAS and through you know the UK chapter of Roads must fall so it's been sort of like straddling and having a quote unquote failed legal career and moving into activism and activist spaces and developing and finally accepting that I belong in academia as well so it's it's being now in in the institution itself it's been interesting to find ways of creating the space that I didn't have in academia that I didn't think was possible and how it's sort of you know sort of you know came full circle and I became and I have become invested in creating the spaces that I didn't have whilst I was a student whilst I was a profession so it's been sort of a bit of sweet sort of transition and experience in that developing a career that you know sees and gives voice to Black women academics as well. Wow thank you so very much I was wondering how many more sentences before I hear the word protest if not I would start doubting new people's heritage SOAS heritage Zena. Thank you very much Amelia lovely to listen to both of you LaVinia and Amelia LaVinia I won't be saying my age as you did at the beginning you can only do that when you've got a two in front of your age and Mr Siwa I'm a little bit like you you say you you know failed legal career I mean I have a failed medical career I always wanted to be a doctor many many doctors in my family and I always thought until about the age of 16 that I would go into medicine and then I found there was a bit of an obstacle in that I couldn't really stand the sight of blood which was you know a bit of a disadvantage let's put it that way so yeah I went to school here in London and then I did my first degree at Oxford University I studied philosophy politics and economics and then I did my master's degree in history and anthropology at SOAS so when we're talking about women in academia you know when I was at Oxford there were less than five you know fewer than five of the students were female where it starts so one in four and a half or so were women women of colour tiny amount black women like me even smaller um women academics very few in the university as a whole black women academics non-existent so things have got better for women in academia I went to an all women's college at Oxford because that was my age you know the colleges were all um you know female or male I think a couple have gone mixed the year I'd gone up but what was good for me going to an all women's college was at least we were surrounded by women in positions of power academics the principal was a woman and so that actually was fairly empowering for me so not black women but at least women in academia was something that resonated with me because of my college at Oxford and then also you could describe female education as my family business back in the Sudan because my great grandfather was the pioneer of girls education in the Sudan so I grew up with aunts um you know great aunts who would be in their 80s now and they have PhDs from western universities you know women in my family who would be well over a hundred now who were totally literate could read and write and imagine you know this is at a time at the turn of the last century when the vast majority of women were illiterate so when it comes to women in academia or women in education for me it's you know something which is almost second nature and I think that's always informed what I have done so although I chose a career in broadcasting and in news and current affairs I would say that the work that I have found the most satisfying is the work in education that I've done in the media particularly this history of Africa series about which I will tell you more very good very on great thank you and it's always nice when you have an academic event to throw some data out there I know that we already shared some data on the twitter feed and on the website but it's um there's an exhibition of black female professors in UK university and it's about the showcase 35 female black female professors in UK universities high education institutions and I'm really very proud of the fact that I can actually say that so as can lay claim to three and that is huge if you if you recognize that we have over 100 universities in the UK and we have only 35 black female professors and the school of law that I belong to we can lay claim to two Farida Banda and Diamond Ashi Agbo who's left us and then school of finance and management they have Kemi Yakini it's amazing work um maybe we just don't sing or showcase what the contributions that so is is making in in this in this field but for me personally one of the best student feedbacks that I have ever read must have been from a black female student of mine who said that uh she was she felt so proud being a black woman because she was being talked by another black woman that it's just been you know you get some of those feedback and you're like wow okay I didn't really realize uh that how impactful this can be and that's what you've said to us in the idea that you had uh women that you could look up to it's not the other women in your life were also strong and powerful and successful in their own right as women and I think that is massively important and that's one of the things we want to achieve as well going forward to showcase that there are lots of very powerful very successful black women um out there and so Xena how has this journey impacted your work and career you started talking a little bit about that so we just carry on with that and then I'll come back to the CC way and live in which journey is that Amelia so your academic journey so so so you know your experiences at Sawas uh at at Oxford and your person being a black woman the influence of your aunties greater than all of that yeah so um so I've always thought of women and of course black women as belonging in the academic world be it in schools be it in universities but also you know in in professional life so I suppose you know from the minute from the get go it kind of gave me a certain confidence and that it's only now that I look back on it that I see actually um you know I probably I can't even remember another black woman at Oxford as an undergraduate to be perfectly honest with you there was some brits of Asian origin there were mixed race but well one mixed race woman I can think of but it didn't it didn't make me feel oh you know that I was disadvantaged I think because I had grown up in this kind of milieu so that makes me think that role models are very very very important and so the absence of um black women academics I think it is a problem and it is something that we all need to do something about um one way or another and I I know that we're going to discuss you know perhaps uh positive ways that we can bring this about but I think um you know I would have liked to have gone into academia perhaps you know I only did a master's degree I don't have a phd like you so I couldn't go into academia it's too too late for me now to try and embark on a phd I phd I'd be 106 by the time I finished it but um I I think that that's that's kind of tradition of education is something that stayed with me for my whole career and I was never really interested in the um you know light entertainment part of broadcast journalism or you know it was always the more educative informative side that's really you know motivated me great what's the same question so you know the impact of your academic journey on on your own on your career um sorry I'm taking notes as I wanted to you know um you know echo some the sentiments um Zaynab has just you know articulated so well but I think that oftentimes I have to take a step back and I have to re uh or question you know the over emphasis on you know representation and you know having people who look like us which is very important occupy you know traditionally white institutions my university that I currently um teach was um created to teach white males particularly white off-economy so it is an institution that was is structured to you know specifically exclude people like me and it's very important then that we address the institutional practices and traditions that are that exist within all these institutions that often embed and cement exclusion I found that with a lot and and I keep on bringing it back to my context is that and and is that a lot of my students who are coming into university this is the first time that they have met a black queer woman who is a lecturer for instance and for them if you can see it when I enter into class I do dress a bit sort of like not my age so the first time I'm often mistaken for one of them and you know last year I had bleached hair so it was a really a very um new experience for them that a lot of them would come to my office tentatively fearful I had to encourage them to actually you know come for consultation and ask me questions there's so the point that I'm trying to make is that often these institutions we might see our presence as progressive but we don't understand that these institutions themselves are built on the premise of our exclusion and so it has been important for me to have that in mind whilst also you know actively being part of my students experience and ensuring that even the curricula and the readings that I prescribe speak to their own experiences this is the first time that they're speaking about gender based violence they're speaking about their own positions and interactions with the law from a very personal space and I use the personal as a very important space of knowledge for particularly for my black woman I'm students and so I think that it is about understanding the institutional aspect of these practices and how they create an environment of marginalization and exclusion although it's important for me to be present physically but I think it's also important the undoing of the institutionalized ways in which you know a lot of my students are excluded you know a simple example is moving between you know I speak four languages so I move between four indigenous languages and English and for a time that was a sort of very confusing space for a lot of my white students because they felt excluded and to use that as a moment of education and say well this is because this whole institution is structured towards ensuring that you feel part of this institution and so it's been sort of trying to navigate the institutional and understanding the broader institutional forms of exclusion that are beyond the individual but also understanding my own purpose and presence as part of creating an institution that is exclusive and two particularly black women and having them understand that this is them this is their space as well. That's really very interesting. Lavigne. Thanks I think just yeah just really to capitalize on what was said before I think there's a lot of foresight and it's a good kind of foresight when you know that there is a black woman who's going to be your teacher, your lecturer, your your mentor because there is that understanding that you know you're going to be supported on your journey and empowered. I think it's just a given it's just a fact for me but then I'm also really careful about that foresight because within that as I see where mentioned you do have these institutional factors which you know the premise of them it favors only a few and so sometimes when you're entering into these environments there's this perception of like well if I'm here no one else can be here and sometimes it's you know it's really understanding the class background understanding the perception of that black woman as well because I think it's just not a case of just representation on the lens of kind of like just skin color. I think it has to be deeper than that but then having said that as well I do think that there is a particular foresight yeah that is also grounded in also recognizing that they are overworked there's a lot of work there's a lot of expectations and so sometimes even if I'm coming in to feel empowered and kind of to make that connection I also have to recognize that they're here to work right and there's a duty there too so it's just understanding the boundaries which sometimes is not always clear but for the most part I do feel a lot I still feel a lot more empowered when I'm around black women inside of the academy whether it's work or having a mentor and it just gives me the opportunity to build so yeah it's a good thing. Great this is really helpful so so can I ask all the panelists to please also keep an eye on the chat because lots of questions and comments and you're already picking up on some of the possible answers to some of the comments so I'm going to stick with Levenia and as we move on to the to the next question and which is again looking to the future so so because we're going to go to the question and for now I'm just going to ask you just one thing what do you think would be one action that you think will help further the careers of black women whether in academia or in other careers just one one practical thing that action that you think we can do? I think within yeah I think within wider society there's a recognition that when black women work you know there are clear results you know we know what we're doing um we're very kind of focused on the goal and we also include the community in that process so I think there's an awareness that the work that we do is transformative it you know it's intergenerational so there's a lot within that but what I don't see a lot of the time is support between women so for example like white women support and black women amplifying the work that they do um finding out how to support each other I feel like there could be a lot more um upliftment of uplifting and between each other and and raising awareness because at the end of the day like um you know it is it is kind of a rat race but um we are better and stronger together um so I would like to see much more women kind of like intentionally amplify you know other women in their spaces and kind of um you know even if it has nothing to do with your own work just recognize like what it takes to get there do you know I mean because we've all been through it so yeah I think that's that's actually quite powerful this whole idea of women first before we then begin to think okay yeah I'm a white woman or I'm a black woman or I'm a green woman or whatever color the person is and so I I work in international arbitration and one of the things we there's a lot of work being done on diversity and moving the you know moving um the the barriers of removing them so that initially started with more women can get involved then after a while you sort of pause and you look at who the women are and it's all white women and it's like okay hang on some of us are in those spaces as well where black women where is that generic women so I think I very much agree with that so so support women you know whether white black in that same space we do need to recognize that great what's this away um I'm going to perhaps this is one of the moments that um that will be controversial but um I know you know there is a sense of not wanting to create or recreate segregated spaces but I you know that's been a question that occupies or has been in my mind as a fresh academic um and somebody who wants to create a career that is you know goes you know decades into the future and you know really you know creating spaces that are centered around black women only and it's it's it's it and it's very important because as Lavinia has said I find you know depths of inspiration um and and and I find myself um you know uh supported within spaces where um I am able to talk to black women both above and below me you know in terms of generationally in the career in the academic career space and I think that we should lean into this idea of creating spaces that where we can you know have these conversations between us and support us um and be intentional about you know creating spaces that are only for black women and I think institutions should be clear that in supporting these black only spaces it's not premised on exclusion but really fostering an environment where black women are do feel safe do feel that they have these networks and resources that they can draw from I think the the biggest difficulty for me has been creating a network of support um where you know I have people who understand my experiences who understand what I mean when I say that um I am experiencing racial microaggressions and you know the institutionalized racism um the nature of it is not explicit um but it isn't the ways in which expectations about management of admin and work um are are you know we are measured at a higher level in terms of the the productivity and the work that we produce without consideration of the intersectional issues and backgrounds that we have I do not have come from a family that is academically inclined my mother was a nurse and she is one of the first people to have a tertiary education in our family my dad was a taxi driver and so I don't have the experience of you know academia and it for me I have had to draw the support and from networks that exist you know you know across the continent of South Africa of Africa across South Africa even in other universities you know globally as well from other black women academics who have taken on the role of supporting me and so I do think that we should lean into the the the idea that perhaps you know um empowered segregation is where we need to begin in order to create you know spaces where women black women feel confident enough to say I am creating a career in academia and where I struggle I can seek out what to see with to actually help me understand how I can navigate you know balancing the admin portion of my career versus my passions and my phd proposal how do I navigate finding a supervisor for instance that is in line with my work and my values and what I'm passionate about sort of the small things to the larger things and how you can manage a career are very important and I think that part of that is developing strong networks of support and asking for help and saying how do I publish how do I write an abstract that will be um um um accepted you know from the simple small things that seem sort of you know as a matter of course to people who have you know existed traditionally within the space to people who are the first generations like myself who I can't go to my father or my mother to ask these questions or even ask for support I do think that perhaps a practical step is empowered segregation it's a very clumsy way of formulating it but empowered segregation when we develop these networks with the intention of fostering young academic minds and young black women who see academia as a potential space that they can create and foster change and and have impactful contributions in in their fields of study great thank you so very much and if it's just to say that there is such a group um within the UK it's a new group that has just been formed on to help with aspiring female academics inspiring female academics and all of that and one of the super women in sewers uh kemi yakemi one of our female black professors she she's leading uh one of the leaders of that network i'm going to quickly go to to zenab so we can get have one bang tape and then we would move on to q&a zenab please i yeah i agree with with everything that's been said um you know lavinia you said women and men i mean i think that what we need to do is to see where um black women um suffer um problem discrimination problems have disadvantages as a result of their gender something they share with white women and asian women you know where it's gender specific and that might be um you know not enough black women are promoted in stem subjects or computer science for whatever which is something that affects all women and then where it's more specific to their race and then they're no different from black male academics so i think in order to solve the problem you've got to really decouple where black women academics suffer as a result of their gender or as a result of their race and then deal with that appropriately and it may mean that at times they have to ally themselves with white women and at other times they'll have to ally themselves with black men because it's you know it's a function of race i think the idea of networks that british seaweed mentioned is very very important and i think just not only within country but across countries um i plug here shamelessly i just made you know 21 hour programs about the history of africa um traveling 32 african countries over a period of six years i spoke to dozens and dozens and dozens of african academics because this is african history told by africans themselves and amongst them i always sought out women academics and i have to say that some of the finest minds are these african female academics they are there it's just they are denied the international public space and i think that we ought to have networks that transcend countries and you know if you've got nothing better to do all of you out there go on to the bbc africa youtube channel um you know 15 episodes are on this sunday the next five will be going on and you'll see two of the finest women experts on the transatlantic slave trade as it happened you know talking so i think that you know they're out there and the third thing i would say about um women academics and empowering them is you know it what they suffer in academia is not different from the discrimination they suffer in other sectors be it you know in finance be it in the city there's nothing peculiar about black women in academia um you know they suffer discrimination across many many sectors but where it is different in academia i think not just for black women but also black men is the nature of the curriculum and that's something that levinia will talk about i'm sure but the curriculum is largely designed by um you know non-african non-asian and it does reflect a particular view of the world and so that's an additional challenge that black women in academia have got to confront which is you know we've heard about it decolonizing our curriculum and you know the black lives matter conversation has opened up the space as never before to talk about you know who is in the driving seat of how we see the world whose story are we are we telling and i think that when it comes to history in levinia i'm sure you know you'll speak about this african history has been denigrated written by outsiders or they've been told we've been told we don't have any which isn't you know none of this is true and so i think there is a challenge uh culturally for women in academia regardless of what their discipline is to try to shift this juggernaut so i would say form the networks in country within your universities or regionally or whatever but also across continents ladies you've been amazing thank you so very much the the spread of what we've had to discuss this evening so there's lots of questions i'm going to give you 30 seconds to scan through the chart select one question that you're going to deal with and while our panelists are dealing with that i want to just let our attendees know that on the chat we've posted the link to the bbc program that zina just talked about thank you thank you yeah i mean honestly it's yeah 20 on sunday the last five go on because they talk about the transatlantic slave trade you know the scramble for africa and so on but there's more to african history than just the transatlantic slave trade much much more and i know it's passionate it's an obsession of mine but you know it's anyway what part of what makes us special and you've all spoken to that this whole idea that what we do we're passionate about we believe in what we do and we bring all of ourselves into what we do which is what what helps us excel um should i come back to levinia so one question from the chart that you want to answer and then i will go to busasewe and come back to zina and then we will wrap up i do apologize if we don't pick your question but people are allowed to do two questions if they want go on levinia i'm just going to choose one um so the one that i've chosen is um can you speak about your experience in new zealand as a black woman and how it influence my academic pursuits and eventually the creation of the black curriculum so um in short um traveling to new zealand um as a black woman was um really interesting i've always kind of been interested in in kind of traveling and i think in in in doing so you definitely see um how uh i guess the the luxury of being able to travel um so that paired with like associations of like status when you have like a british passport and then also being black and how that's kind of met when you go to different countries is really interesting so when i was in new zealand it was um i think initially i didn't kind of perceive like um there was i guess there's a perception of me as like um like a rich kind of west and are coming in but i felt very um i guess embraced by a lot of marys who understood um a lot of like black feminist work and so i think from through their perspective it allowed me to kind of connect on that level instead of coming in as like someone who's going to travel and see and like do all this tourist stuff um so in kind of building those connections it was really powerful i really credit all my i guess inspiration for the black curriculum um to the women lecturers that were teaching me i was literally in like all okay apart from one of my lectures but most of them were were run by women um and a lot of them had this i guess like importance of stress of stressing in every class that um you know women are the carriers of culture and it's really um i guess down to us to make sure that uh we are kind of shaping the future for our you know our next generations and things like that so i think because it's part of like their education i was involved in kind of i guess downloading a lot of the importance of um giving yeah just nurturing i guess and i think with that it definitely inspired me to make sure that with all of the information around our teaching and um empowering empowering women to kind of be at the center of these discussions i came back to the uk to actually build with other black women who were really interested in building a black curriculum so that's how it started it started at sawas i met with um befany and lisa who were two women that were just interested in building a black curriculum and we sat down in sawas and we were just like like this is you know this is the next steps and we've done it so i think just kind of just being in that environment and soaking it all up really gave me the motivation and i guess the insight um and i think back now i didn't probably realize it then but kind of thinking back to to the practice of what we was trying to do it is it really is about kind of connecting and like you know um facilitating discussions as women to kind of bring out into the world so that's like what you know happened behind the scenes with the black curriculum um but yeah i think more importantly it is about kind of just articulating our stories and i think even with the teaching of black history it is about centering black black women's experiences as well um because it's it's heavily it's been written by white men um and even with black history as well like there's yeah there's such a such a deep place for us to kind of like break down more more narratives so yeah that's how it's influenced the black curriculum great thank you so very much was this a way which question have you chosen to answer i think i'm going to take the question from melissa let me just find it quickly um but it is about um uh though i think your concept of empowered segregation though i may not agree with the name is a concept that i can get on board with as a young afro caribbean academic i struggle with ways that i can appropriately empower my black female students without modular marginalizing other student students is there any advice that you or anyone can share here i think that part of the practice that i have begun instituting in my classrooms well when we had classrooms was looking for uh particularly you know uh articles and works that center the black experience with colonialism and apartheid and that was something that was lacking i also teach first year so it was a struggle to find works that were at their level of comprehension but were able to present the concept so this year i prescribed boogie what yongos um you know a language in african literature and although it's not you know um in related to the legal space but it was an interesting way to explore the concept of language as a device or language as a device of exclusion and my black students who come from all over the country who speak multiple languages um were able to latch onto that piece and relate um to um what yongos um um you know writings and really you know bring them to their legal work as you know future legal scholars um another art you know chapter that i prescribed was um not really a chapter but examining marikana as uh uh you know protest action and the historical development of the regulation of black bodies i mean you know my students i found that my students are able to really take in these big concepts that i thought were insurmountable before if you relate them to experiences um that are rooted in in sort of like their own black experiences and yes it does often create a sense that other students are excluded but i think how we also look and understand what exclusion means often it means not centering whiteness and i've all i've also had to take on the work and it is emotional work it is taxing to have my white students understand that just because this you know the curricula and how i've set up the syllabus does not center your experience doesn't mean that you're being excluded it's an opportunity for you to enter and and understand experiences of you know a population that you have been taught um is not important i go into examining the geography of South Africa and how the law has been sort of like a very fundamental part of constructing the spaces that we live in and you know my students have surprised me because they completely understand it of course they understand it um um it's because of how you change the the work it is a struggle to find work that is you know understandable at day level but if you do the work and if you make sure that you're just willing to take them through the steps of understanding that their experiences the personal is a space of knowledge the personal is a space of legal inquiry um your students often amaze you and particularly my black students you know they they've really inspired me in how they they've just blossomed um and you sort of like taking on the law or taking on the law as a space that they thought was not a space that included them and their experiences so perhaps that's how I would answer that question um it's not easy it's exhausting but you know you just have to change you know how you understand who is the subject of knowledge and who is able to produce knowledge and affirm that constantly that their personal experiences are spaces of knowledge that you know this university is not a space that is outside of them but is a space through which they can interpret the experience through their own you know interactions with the academic space as well great thank you if I if I just keep keep listening to you I will come I will move over to South Africa and take your course thank you so so Zina which question do you want to answer we have less than uh yeah I won't be long I mean I've looked at all of them and I think there's a kind of you know a current running through all the questions so I really just perhaps try to unite them in a theme and you know people asking about what do they do if they don't have a mentor you know how do they try to overcome barriers and so on that look you know I'm a great pan-Africanist you know and we are all sitting here we're listening to Bissisiway in South Africa how inspiring is she Lavinia of a British Caribbean background me born in northeast Sudan you Amelia and so on that I'm from Nigeria Nigeria there you go I used to be able to say I was born in the Sudan the biggest country in Africa you know now we've gone down to number three what can we do with what I would say is you know if you feel isolated or you feel that you know you're in Amelia where you're the only voice you know black woman because as we know as you said what 700 700 black women academics in the UK professors it's a big world out there look you know it's we're having a global conversation now and I would say that you know nurture foster international links you know as I said I was blown away by these black women academics I encountered in Africa and you know at the click of a button now you can find people you know women who will inspire you who will share their stories with you so I would just say to all of you who are asking questions you know go out there internet means that you can connect with people all over you know whether they're in the Caribbean whether they're in Africa or in the United States if you're a black woman you're part of a big black diaspora family and also with those on the continent seek those out and also share knowledge about you know the kind of topics that you're dealing with particularly if you're working in the you know in the social sciences and so on that you know the kind of stuff that Lavigne was talking about the curriculum what you know so black women unite across continents to assert yourselves on the social political cultural agendas of whichever country you're in thank you so very much and I would say without fear with all confidence you're entitled to be in any space and and you can own that space and there is absolutely nothing to be afraid of and that's the Nigerian in me speaking which is which is you know which is great and so it's left for me to say a huge thank you thank you to my wonderful wonderful wonderful panelists thank you to all the attendees thank you for honoring us with your presence with your questions please if you have any comments just email us at events at sewers.ac.uk we look forward to welcoming you back to another event thank you and have a lovely lovely evening and watch the history of Africa watch the history of Africa please thank you thank you thank you thank you bye ladies thank you thank you