 Welcome back everybody, from the buzz of the showcase presentations. It gives me great pleasure now to welcome our second keynote of the symposium and our last session of today. And that is Maisha Islam from the UK bringing another international perspective to the symposium. Welcome Maisha, it's fantastic to see you and really looking forward to your presentation. Let me introduce you before we start. Maisha is the student engagement research and projects officer at the University of Winchester in the UK. She's also studying for a professional doctorate in education. Maisha's main research interests lie in the area of Black, Asian and minority ethnic and Muslim student experience in higher education, where she has written and published on these topics. Maisha is heavily invested in the area of racial equality in higher education. For example, she's a member of the university's race equality action group, and has also sat on a university's UK. So that's a national staff panel, which developed a guidance note for tackling racial harassment in universities. Maisha is also involved in work with the Office for Students, the regulator of the English higher education sector by sitting on their student panel. Maisha, we're incredibly fortunate to have you with us today. I think it's probably rather early in the day for you to. So thank you for joining us and over to you. We're going to hear you speak and then we're going to have an opportunity for Q&A. Thank you so much for really good to see you and thank you so much colleagues for having me. I think Emily's kind of going to be sharing my slides so I'll wait for her queue. Thank you Emily. So yeah good afternoon colleagues. It's a real pleasure to kind of be here I'm really happy to be here this is I think my first international keynote it could be my first, I believe it is my first keynote so again like really honored and the pleasure is all mine. I particularly wanted to thank Kate Walsh and again Professor Phil Levy for the invite. So, as Phil kind of mentioned, my keynote is about an area that I'm so passionate about which is, you know, supporting and being inclusive of diverse engagement, particularly in the context of racially and religiously minoritized student groups. So we can build better partnerships that better represent these students. Next slide. Thank you so I'll kind of whittle through this I might share this engagement research and projects officer at the University of Winchester. I know that's a hell of a long job title but I absolutely love it. As Phil said I'm a part time doctoral student and I sit on the office for students as a student panel so the RFS is the regulator for English higher education so I sit on the shoot panel as well. Could I have the next slide please Emily. Thank you. So, I like to start with this slide before most of my presentations actually because we're going to be talking about things like grace and religion, particularly when we get into the Q&A possibly. These are sensitive issues but I do want to reiterate that you know, I want this to be a safe space definitely want it to be a learning community. And so if you say anything or are worried about sort of you know, getting it wrong. Please don't be you know as long as you're being respectful about how you convey a certain opinion or thought or expression, you know we should be good. Only disclose as much as you're comfortable doing so you don't have to disclose anything. But I think the more that we can engage in these types of topics the more that you can take out of them and we can all kind of learn. And then, obviously, I think Chatham house rules can apply so you know whatever said in the four walls of this zoom meeting can definitely stay here and not just you know be tweeted out if it's, you know, if you're not comfortable with that and if we get to the Q&A and we know discussion could possibly be not recorded you know if that's something that people want that's totally fine. And I do want to caveat that this is predominantly from a UK context. I have taken some things from Australia, of course, in prep for this, but I think definitely like the thinking and the practice could also prove to be useful in an Australian context. Is it okay to have the next slide please Emily. Thank you. So, I think one of the key things to being inclusive is just ensuring accessibility that everyone's just on the same page. So I'm going to start by defining just a few terms are probably using throughout the keynote and they may already be familiar to you guys. I think the first one is underrepresented students so these are just students that have particular characteristics where data shows that there are gaps in equality of opportunity, either related to accessing higher education succeeding throughout higher education and then progressing from higher education. And then I'll use a little bit. So it just stands for black Asia Minority Ethnic. It's a acronym that we seem to love to use in the UK quite a lot not sure what it's like in Australia. But there is a growing distaste of this acronym and a recent sort of government recommendation to scrap it all together. I use the words minoritized you might have noticed that I used it just as I was opening up and personally I'd like to use this term rather than like minority, because I think it's a better term to highlight how society oppresses certain groups. It's a bit of a nod to my sociology background, but also kind of a distaste that I have in like sort of labeling individuals as minorities. And then lastly, the term intersectionality. It was initially coined by black feminist Kimberly crunch or basically just acknowledging that people don't occupy like a single identity category. So for example, you know, I'm a person of color, I'm a woman, Muslim as well. So all of those things all of those, you know, identity categories it just means that you know your experiences of oppression are going to be different to, to, you know, other people. Can I have the next slide please, Emily. Thank you. So I wanted to see this keynote as split into kind of two parts. The first part is where I kind of present to you all the case for diversity, you know, what do I mean when I say this, what are the drivers for us to ensure that we are always being aware of diversity. But then, again, you know, what is the place of it in partnership work and how has it, or not, how has it been effective or not effective in kind of being inclusive of diversity. Can I have the next slide please. Thank you. So, within the UK, Australia, you know elsewhere in the world, shouldn't bodies are ever changing. They're becoming increasingly more diverse and what we're really seeing is, you know, higher education really being that microcosm of wider society. And in large part, our diverse student bodies have been the product of government kind of rhetoric so in the UK when Tony Blair took to office in 1997 we saw an increased drive to widen access and participation into higher education for non traditional kind of students. He made a famous pledge in 1999 saying that he wanted 50% of all young people in in higher education and doing some research I found that Australia's High Education Support Act of 2003 provided the basis of your guys is HEP, which is the high education participation in partnership program. He loves an acronym, but really providing incentive for universities to not only improve access into higher education, but also retention and success of particular underrepresented groups in Australia. So I do think terms like diversity can often feel quite ambiguous and overarching. They usually kind of denote what we call protected characteristics in the UK. So basically, an identity category that you legally cannot discriminate against such as you know gender class sexuality. But I think without being specific about what we mean by diversity in particular context I don't think progress can be appropriately made because what are we really referring to you know. So to be clear that diversity for me in this context really does concern as I said racially and religiously minoritized students, particularly Muslim students. Is it okay to have the next slide Emily. Thank you. So, because we've widened access into higher education of course this has resulted in diverse diversity body within the UK, those identifying as female made up our majority. And half of our students are actually identified with some sort of religion or belief. We have seen a steady increase of our Bayesian population, almost accounting for a quarter of our occasion population with a slight increase of students disclosing a disability as well as a higher proportion of younger students in higher education. Could I have the next slide please Emily. Thank you. So, with all this talk of diversity you know why do you even bother analyzing or interrogating levels of diversity within higher education and I think we can come at this from kind of two angles, which I kind of stole from my manager. So credit to him. This case, you know, is the business case to to this because an honest truth is that you know we focus on diversity because we are mandated to do so by various governmental but also non governmental bodies and because they are bodies of authority. They can really put pressure on higher education institutions really to comply so again there's a sort of business case to invest in this area. And as I mentioned, who is the regulator of English higher education when they kind of formed in 2018. You know, we did see this marked shift from kind of access from access into higher education to succeeding in and progressing from higher education for every student regardless of their background. And in relation to student engagement UK quality bodies are also asking providers really to actively look at their diverse student bodies and how we set up and execute our student engagement practices. So you know how do you operationalize partnership work. How is it, how is diversity being taken into account in representation processes you know it's really about interrogating who we are engaging and if it is just the regular kind of suspects. Please Emily. Thank you. So, I found this article by law and culture who wrote in the conversation about the lack of diversity particularly particularly in senior leadership within Australian higher education and they kind of state that despite the diversity that is shown in Australian students and stuff. There is very much a concentration of those from largely white backgrounds in these kind of senior roles. So in 2018 they stated that 96% of vice chancellors, you know came from a white and British background. And they really do identify the kind of consequences of such homogenous kind of leadership in the sense that it could develop a culture where blind spots remain unchecked, or kind of resulting in kind of group think you know. And so in keeping with one of the themes of the symposium, you know they really do argue that diversity is integral to sustainability. And that we should really be empowering those that have been historically others to advise our leaders, you know, be the leaders themselves and actively participate in problem solving and decision making. And so I think the quote on the screen there really cause attention to, you know, thinking about this in a more intersectional kind of lens as they as they say, but also a form of partnership working that is across all levels of a university. Could I have the next slide please Emily. Thank you. There is a sort of growing concern that partnership work can actually pose problems in relation to diversity agendas, and that actually current student staff partnership schemes can seem limited in how they can be truly inclusive to a diversity of students and staff. For example, we know that these partnership schemes kind of tend to engage those that are already in privileged social location so students that have more social or cultural capital to take part in this kind of work. It's also stated that women tend to take on more educational development work, but also in considering the context of each particular university. It might not be particularly attuned to a lived experience of a specific set of students or student group where engagement or you know partnership work is difficult or kind of invisible to a certain extent and I'm going to talk about this more in the context of our population in the UK. I actually co authored a paper with fellow Australian Lucy Mercer Mapstone, who writes so much about partnership because I'm sure you guys all know, as well as tomorrow read. And in our paper we specifically look at how UK student staff partnership programs were being inclusive of diversity. And actually what we found was that diversity was not a core consideration for many of these schemes, nor was data being collected on student staff diversity. And I think in fact a few administrative staff who were contributing to this kind of research displayed quite naive and I think privileged kind of perspectives about this, you know, one person kind of stating that there's no reason why our projects wouldn't be inclusive to a diversity of excellence and then kind of leaving it at that, or simply by virtue of being open to every single student that in itself inherently equated to inclusivity. And I think that really does reinforce this message that something even as beneficial and inclusive in nature as partnership working right can still neglect how we authentically, you know, includes and staff diversity. And I think authentic really is the key word there, because too often inclusivity of diversity seems to be an afterthought. Rarely do we start by considering diversity. For example, in Barnum's framework for kind of setting up principles of student partnership in Australia, you know they produce this kind of stepped approach for building successful partnerships. And whilst the report kind of states the importance of diversity throughout, we only see that the principle of every student's voice being acknowledged, valued and represented appears in step five of this seven step process. Now for me, it has to be it has to be step one because, because of the kind of systemic inequality that that is present within higher education that has historically kind of marginalized a variety of student groups. So can I have the next slide please Emily. Thank you. So that really does bring me to like the moral case of why we kind of focus on diversity and it really definitely underpins my own motivation right. So I think when I talk about systemic inequality it's really referring to inequality that's in built into the fabric of higher education. I think high education is not set out to benefit people that that look like me. And we see evidence of this by the kind of following so in the UK we talk a lot about our BAME degree awarding gap. So this refers to the fact that currently any student that comes from a black Asian minority ethnic background is around 13% less likely to come out with a two one or first class honors degree so a quote unquote good degree. This has been a persistent issue for decades. Again in an Australian kind of context, as my colleagues found that there was a really interesting anomaly when they were analyzing the Australasian survey of student engagement, stating that although Indigenous students reported positive engagement trends. They actually reported a higher likelihood of expressing departure from studies. And this is realized when Indigenous students report lower rates of completion. And so, go and colleagues really say that we need really need to further interrogate this experience, but it's important to understand both the differences within and among the Indigenous are Indigenous kind of student population in order to really implement more targeted kind of support. And so, whilst it's really positive that we've we've seen an increase of the number of diverse students you know accessing higher education. Enstrom and Tinto really pointedly note that unless these students are and their experiences are supported appropriately, we can't consider this to be an opportunity for them. It's no surprise why you know non traditional students have higher rates of non completion because too few are kind of appropriately supported throughout their time with us. And so their paper really does call on you know institutions to recognize that failure to kind of succeed and thrive within higher education doesn't solely lie within the student themselves. But actually it's in the construction of the environment in which students are asked to learn in. I have the next slide please. Thank you. So, in order to kind of redress these inequalities it's just really important that we understand the experiences of our students. Now I spoke about the BAME degree awarding gap and awarding gaps are most kind of significantly correlated to the experiences of learning and teaching. Now BAME students have consistently reported being less satisfied within our kind of national surveys with their academic experiences. And that's due to things like you know having an ethnocentric curriculum really exemplified by the wise my curriculum white kind of movement that emerged from UCL and other London universities. BAME students don't really take into account kind of a diversity of learning styles, or even lecture kind of bias and lack of tutor support that BAME students feel is given to them. BAME students also kind of note the lack of representation of diverse cultures, social exclusion whilst being at university and racial microaggressions and racism, you know, all of that really impacts upon you know social experiences of university. The psychosocial kind of impact of, you know, being othered, not seeing people that look like you, not being expected to have, you know, to achieve academically. All of those of course lead to kind of, you know, negative self self identity and lack of kind of belonging, all in turn kind of affecting the participation and outcomes of our BAME students. Could I have the next slide please Emily. Thank you. Now some of these inequalities are shared by different, but differentially kind of experienced I think by our Muslim students specifically. Now I think the place of religion and faith within education is marginalized and even in with within diversity debates as sort of barber states. It's sort of like marginalized and not really considered thoughtfully enough, I think that's really exemplified by the fact that in the UK universities didn't have to return data on religion and belief until about 2017-18. So I think when looking specifically at Muslim students, some scholars are starting to kind of realize and point out that religion does affect, you know, she says participation and outcomes. For example, Muslim students report poor continuation rates and fewer than two thirds are actually leaving with a quote unquote, good degree. And so whilst Muslim students in the UK do largely come from BAME backgrounds, Professor or Dr Reza Ghulami kind of states that we should treat this Muslim degree awarding gap as a distinct issue, not a subset issue of the BAME degree awarding gap. Could I have the next slide please. Thank you. So again, you know what kind of makes this experience and I think we can kind of look at this again for through an intersectional lens. So a really comprehensive report released by London Metropolitan University detailed how visibly Muslim women are modifying their appearance in order to kind of avoid prejudicial or Islamophobic kind of treatment. And the politicization of the hijab has been referenced again by Australian colleagues who note that hijabed women are less likely to feel a sense of belonging at university and are less satisfied academically. So it's not always overt. I think Muslim women in higher education, as well as just everywhere can face that triple threat of, you know, Islamophobia racism and sexism. And on a social note, you know, my research and that of others has shown how Muslim women, especially when you know visibly Muslim can feel, you know, even further excluded, even further outside of that university bubble really made to feel like they can't comfortably fit in. Can I have the next slide please Emily. Thank you. So, I think often these issues they go unheard because Muslim students do make up a kind of minoritized group. And that combined with the fact that I think sometimes universities can be rather reactive rather than proactive in their thinking sometimes means that actually supporting Muslim students isn't done thoughtfully enough. I don't always expect Muslim students to kind of put constantly put themselves out there to communicate then to you know communicate their needs, because there are certain structures within higher education, which limit the ways in which Muslim students can exercise their voice and this is where kind of postulate and have theorized this, this concept of satisfied settling. And satisfied settling really does refer to the ways in which Muslim students settle for a less than university experience in relation to their religious needs, when compared to their non Muslim kind of peers. And it kind of starts off by Muslim students, recognizing that on some level, they belong to minority group where society at large kind of caters to the majority. Now, students's own experiences before entering higher education in relation to how faith is accommodated has been pretty poor so you know lack of access to halal food lack of considerations being given when, when fasting during the month of Ramadan. And, and, you know, therefore when Muslim students come to university, they don't expect these requirements to be put in place for them because they're so used to not being considered anyway. And so, instead of raising these issues or kind of feeling empowered to do so, Muslim students are far more likely to just self accommodate. So, for example, if they don't have appropriate press spaces I've had lots of accounts of Muslim students praying in library corners or in empty classrooms in, you know, really undignified ways. And so, sometimes these issues aren't brought to light again because we have to be aware of this kind of climate of Islamophobia. And that might misconstrue a Muslim students's intentions if they were to kind of speak up. And so keeping your head down and getting on with it is just the safest option really. And I do think this is this is what leads to you know satisfied settling you know really settling for a less than university experience and I think the transferability or the application of satisfied settling can again be intersectional and apply I think to other minoritized kind of student groups out there. Can I have the next slide please Emily. So having really established the kind of context and issues pertaining to diverse and inclusive engagement. I kind of wanted to demonstrate some examples of how Winchester is also on its journey to, you know, building better partnerships and these examples represent partnership across all kind of levels of the university. Next slide please Emily. So I've done some research with sense on sense of belonging with Muslim students. And I received a small grant to create a sort of what works case study about how universities could better foster sense of belonging for Muslim students in particular. So belonging, as you guys may know, is really heavily correlated to student success and retention, really key in eliminating kind of degree awarding gaps. Now, what I've sort of theorized is, you know, in keeping with the literature, social and academic experiences really do account for the majority of how belonging is felt. It's really important that Muslim students also require kind of practical requirements in order to, you know, in order to sort of find that their university feels like a sense of place and a home for them. And so I think when we look at sense of belonging for Muslim students it's really key in centralizing Muslim identity within all three of these sort of facets as you can see from the sort of diagram. For example, academically, you know, you may wish to consider providing exam requirements for Muslim students during the fasting month of Ramadan, practically, you know, providing students with appropriate and adequate prayer room and washroom facilities. That was really key for lots of Muslim students and feeling a sense of belonging and socially where is some kind of prohibits drinking and kind of limited kind of interaction between the genders, you know, more activities are needed to facilitate this so Muslim students can participate socially at university. And I've also kind of said that to be deficient in one area of these kind of circles has knock on effects of all the others. So, for example, if you don't provide the practical provision of halal food on campus. Well, Muslim students have told me that they're less likely to stay longer on campus to study and so academically their experiences are being affected. And socially, you know, they can't comfortably enjoy a meal in the canteen with Muslim and non Muslim peers, you know, so they're all kind of interlinked in one sense. Could I have the next slide please Emily. So this is a newly established kind of group at the University of Winchester our race equality action group. Again, it was formed as a direct response from the resurgence of BLM last summer and of course the murder of George Floyd. This week being the sort of, you know, one year anniversary of that. And so the University of Winchester along with many other universities really did, you know, put out statements of support and reestablished their own commitments to racial equality. So on the back of this statement we thought it was only appropriate to form a race equality action group or react as we like to call it for short. Now on the right hand side as you can see, it's myself, our assistant vice chancellor Sam Jones, who was an Australian native, and our student one of our student co chairs Alicia Jukam in. And you can see from the picture how much we all love react we're kind of discussing. So this is the idea for quality assurance agency in the in the UK. But you know we think we've had so much impact in sort of supporting guiding and sort of actually change in less than a year of existence really and here's why we think has been why this has been the case. So we basically started with with honesty, you know, Sam that was realized that issues related to race they're often uncomfortable. That's what it's needed we need to get to that level of you know discomfort. And this is where we want to go as a group so we reaffirmed that. And I think why we've been so kind of successful in such a short amount of time is because of this senior leadership buy in and willingness to engage with these issues that I personally haven't seen in you know my time being here at Winchester. It's been really easy to put off making a group such as this you know in the midst of a pandemic, but the key to our kind of success is also the fact that we have monthly regular kind of meetings. And that's really not detracted from us gelling as a group together students and staff, despite the fact that some of us have never met physically before. At the heart of react is definitely students of partnership. One thing that makes the group really powerful is the fact that students like Alicia lead every single one of our meetings. Now this came about through our very first meeting where a student raised the potentially inequitable kind of way of working if Sam, a white man was leading this group. And so we just said, okay yeah that that's totally valid you know let's, let's, let's have a student co chair and all of our students they've been trained in chairing their work both in and outside of meetings is always compensated and I think that's really important to recognize, you know, experiential knowledge, but also minimize kind of hierarchical relationships forming. And lastly, every single one of our meetings, as I said kind of reaffirms our intent to want to engage with on the ground issues and we constantly reestablish this culture that's open to listening and understanding and as a staff member of color that sits on the group that feels a lot more safe it feels really receptive. So for instance I brought up the issue of press faces on at Winchester and I was met with nothing but openness and even apology from from Sam. And within a couple of weeks I was invited to a meeting with our states and facilities team to discuss not only our existing kind of provisions but also expanding upon our press space provision provisions as well. Could I have the next slide please, Emily. I've also conducted research into our Asian student experience and the report was released earlier this year. So do check out the findings if you're interested. But this project was part of student staff partnership project and I had two student research partners, Isabella Valente and Zimni Khan, and I pin a lot of the success of the project down to them. So Isabella and I kind of recently had a paper published where we reflected on our BAME student staff partnership. And I wanted to share this quote from Isabella on the screen as a female kind of undergraduate at the time, coming from a mixed race background, and just how much she got out of working together. And that was particularly due to the fact because we both came from racially minoritised kind of backgrounds. And Isabella kind of says in the paper that at the time she was going through a sort of racist incident. But despite that she still wanted to engage in the project and actually this project meant a lot to her because it was showing her the university does want to do more to improve the experiences of being students at the university. However, it's really rare to see and hear about a partnership that looks like ours. So our paper really does call for more opportunities like these to occur because of the mutual benefits that we both got from working together. Could I have the final slide or the next slide please. Emily, so again the final bit of activity that I wanted to highlight is, you know, as part of our response to having diverse student groups is this project that I led on to produce co-created student guides, particularly for our underrepresented student groups. What this kind of partnership kind of involved was tailored guides that designed to specifically support student groups, and help them navigate through their Winchester experience to really ensuring accessible kind of participation beyond the point of entry right. So myself and colleagues involved in this project described this partnership as a trilateral partnership, really describing the sort of ways of working between a university, the student union and their students where we could all use our kind of relative strength to support underrepresented student groups and enhance their kind of lived experience with us. Now this has resulted into six guides, a sample of which you can see on the screen there. And we are hopefully ready to launch these in the 2021-22 academic year. Could I have the final slide please Emily. And then just to close my keynote, I'm sorry if I've gone over by the way, it's just a shameless plug that I have to do. It's just a postgraduate course, a master's course that we run at the University of Winchester all interested in engagement in higher education. It's the only course of its kind in the world. It's specifically designed for colleagues such as yourselves, you know, higher education professionals seeking to improve their student engagement kind of knowledge and become better practitioners. We've enjoyed some of the things that you know we've discussed today, you know, we have discussions around, you know, not only diversity and equality but you know quality, quality processes, partnership, student surveys, and strategic representation and so much more. And these are all led by, you know, we're really lucky to have leading experts in the field of student engagement, you know, teaching on our courses such as Professor Colin Bryson, Professor, or Dr. Ohавal, Professor, Mike Neary just to name a few. So if you're interested in, you know, seeing more about this hearing more about this course. Please do get in touch or you can find our details on the website as well. But I think that's everything from me the next classes sparkle. Thank you for listening and I'm happy for any questions slide so again thank you so much for listening and a real pleasure to be here as well. Thank you so much, Maisha. Gosh, that was a brilliant presentation, brilliant analysis. And I think lots of challenges for us and lots of insights to kind of take on board and think through. So I'm going to hand over to Carmen who's going to lead us through the Q&A. We do have a bit of time for some Q&A. So I'm really looking forward to that. Thank you so much. The MANPG, sir, just sounds brilliant. Wonderful. Thanks, Phil. So before we begin into the Q&A, yeah, do encourage you guys to use a Q&A box if you've got any questions. But as you guys can see in front of us here is this beautiful illustration done by Rachel from Civil Creative who's been impromptu illustrating the discussion today. And I think it's just quite amazing to see it all done in such a beautiful format. I love this. Yeah, it's great, isn't it? So I've got a question here from Aidan who says that your presentation was fantastic. How do you encourage buy-in from those students who are self-accommodating or those who may have been burned in previous interactions with their universities? How do you ensure democratic decision-making that feeds into decision-making places like the REAG, et cetera? So yeah, that's a really great question. I think when students can see that we as a university are actively investing and have a personal kind of stake and drive to improve the experiences of students that look like you, I think that's when you can kind of start building like that trust again. And so if we actively create those opportunities for students, I think that's the first step. I think the first step always needs to be with the university to rebuild that kind of trust. And I've always seen that when we do provide opportunities, like the race equality action group, we held kind of like interviews for students that as our kind of old students kind of leave, we need to recruit more students. And so we open up expressions of interest and we've got a really good kind of batch more than we have spaces kind of available. And we ask them to do a five-minute presentation, either verbal or with slides, stating an issue about in relation to racial equality that they're really passionate about. And you know, I can't when I was like blown away by the level of kind of thought that some of these students put into their presentations and the depth that they were having. And I think that's because we were providing them with that opportunity to really explore their passions and work towards their passion of racial equality. And then I think ensuring how those voices and students are represented in representation kind of committees. I think if there's not already kind of like a quota and I think this is the other thing, like, you know, we can't obviously in the UK, we can't have positive discrimination, but we can do positive action. So I think the latter of which isn't utilised enough as lots of colleagues are kind of saying, you know, there's no reason why we can have particular positions that are specifically for those particular student groups. So at Winchester, we have something called a Student Advisory Council and that's student representatives all across the university that meet directly with our senior management team. Now, there are specific kind of student groups that have a particular space. So there's a space for like, you know, a student from the Health and Social Care, Health and Social Sciences kind of faculty. But then we also have like commuting student rep, international student rep. And this year I said, what about like a religious minority student rep or a BAME student rep, you know, that was only this year that we got it. So, you know, make sure that you are actively creating those positions that students can like sit in. And even if they're not there, then it falls all the more kind of responsibility to our senior leaders of really thinking about who's not at the table and how can we bring those voices in, you know? Yeah, fantastic. Great response to that. And as you, you're mentioning that they, when you kind of met the capacity for the group and what was available that they started, you know, applicants came in with these beautiful stories to tell of why they should be in this position. In what way do you guys put in recognition for the effort that students are putting into this? Do you, you know, is it a pay position or do they get recognition through other means? Anything like that? So, students that sit on the Race and Quality Action Group, as I said, they are paid for their time. And because we were so blown away, can't mind from the sort of applicants that we had, we said we need to do something with the students that we can't take on board. It's so horrible to like, you know, deliver something you're so passionate about and then like, you know, not get the position. And I said, like, why don't we send them, you know, a letter saying, thank you for your time, but please do keep in touch with the work that we're doing as a Race and Quality Action Group because we like to say that every member is a part of REAG. And we wanted, and I said, like, let's get that signed by Sam Jones, the Assistant Vice Chancellor. So those students can, if they're, you know, going on like a job interview or filling out a job application, you know, they can say that we've got a signed letter from our Assistant Vice Chancellor saying, like, recognizing the effort that we've put in. And I remember saying to a few students that we're doing those presentations, keep a hold of that presentation if you can, go and present it at a conference somewhere because it's, I was blown away, honestly, by these five minute presentations. So it's making sure that, you know, when you do catch those students, realize that actually that could be a really fragile engagement and don't just leave them hanging, especially when it comes to things like, you know, racial equality. It's the equitable kind of thing to do, not to just, you know, leave them, I guess. Yeah, definitely. All right, so going on to another question here from Paper Bell, who is the SVA coordinator in case you weren't aware, Nisha. So do you see higher education as an environment opportunity to move out of minoritizing in other groups? As in, can higher education be a platform to affect social change in relation to diversity more broadly? Yeah, definitely, Paper. I think it's a really idealistic thing and I obviously do wanna get there, but yeah, I think you can't do this kind of work without having hope. And I think hope is like, yeah, it's the thing that keeps you going because constantly you'll still see that, you know, institutional racism is a thing or, you know, it's, you know, it's so ingrained that you always kind of see it and it seems like the same thing, but just a different day. But ultimately, I do believe that higher education can be that kind of model of, this is what we kind of want to look like. As I said, I think higher education is always kind of like, can be that microcosm of society. But then again, like, you know, part of me wants to stay kind of cynical almost, but a better part of me does want to stay hopeful that I do hope, you know, as things improve and things like that, we can, you know, more move towards much more equitable spaces. Wonderful. And from Shile Mate here, sorry if I pronounced your name wrong, Shile. Many thanks for the fantastic presentation. I'm with Sally Varnum and we'd like to enroll in your master's. Oh my gosh, yes. The question however is, do you see the DVC and senior management commitment? Is this manifest throughout the university as students engage with academics and professional staff? I think, you know, I was saying, I was at a Advanced HUE Student Engagement Conference just yesterday and we were saying that, I was saying, you know, when I was an undergraduate student, I had no idea what deputy vice chancellor was. I had no idea what vice chancellor was. You know, I thought it was the person that you just, you shake their hand at graduation and that's it. And so I think it needs to start from, it's gonna have much more impact if it's coming from senior leadership. As I said, we wouldn't have got on the race equality action group if it wasn't for Sam Jones and his investment in this area because they are the people that can start the culture shift. As much as, you know, a lot of this work around, you know, quality diversity has been, you know, very much grassroots and even speaking in a sort of larger society-wise, it does really need to come from senior leadership because when they see it as an issue, that's when the whole institution sees it as an issue. And, you know, we've had, there's a vice chancellor in University of East Anglia in the UK who just outright said, you know, my institution is racist. Every university is racist. And it was like this massive thing for like a vice chancellor to say, but what it just showed is that, you know, he got the issue and he understood that we've got such a long way to kind of go. And so I do think it needs to start from, or at least, you know, be supported by senior leadership if it's gonna have any real kind of impact. Definitely. And some of the conversations that I had in the earlier sessions that we had on showcases, it was talking about that executive buy and that being such that the cornerstone of, you know, successful leadership and governance structures and things like that. Now we do have time for one last question. So I'll just get straight to it from Kate Walsh. So she said, hi, Misha. Thanks so much for your brilliant presentation as always. I was really struck by the idea that access without support is not opportunity. Do you think that sometimes a barrier to creating genuine opportunities for minoritized students is from well-being but naive and ignorant staff who may not really understand the issues that can lead to students feeling unsupported? Definitely. And hi, Kate. Nice to kind of feel your presence in the room. Yeah, and I think sometimes, you know, sometimes it is just, you know, being naive and, oh, I didn't realize. And so actually it feeds into, like, you know, where we talk about what it is to be anti-racist or what it means to, like, decolonize. Like, those are some really big discussions being had in the UK. And so just doing small things like, you know, diversifying who you're reading, what's coming up on your feed and stuff like that, especially if you're not, you know, I think our social bubbles and our social groups largely reflect our own kind of characteristics, our own kind of intersectional identities. And so sometimes it's really difficult to understand, you know, what is the perspective of a Muslim woman in high education or a black female professor in high education, you know, without, if that's not your constant kind of lived reality. So kind of seek that out. So as much as, you know, just being ignorant to it is, you know, you can give some sort of leeway to, I think now is the time that we need to start really interrogating, you know, whose experiences are we considering and what can I do as an individual to improve? Like, there's so much I can do to improve, you know, when the whole, when we had the resurgence of Black Lives Matter, I realized I just, I didn't realize the sort of like oppression that Black people have faced for decades, you know. So even I'm on that journey of wanting to learn more. So this is definitely something that I think our teachers, especially our teachers, you know, lecturing staff really need to be attuned to because otherwise then it just kind of leads to kind of faux pas like you minoritized very, like person of color in the group, tell us your experiences, you know. And that's coming from a place of like, oh, maybe they want to give that person a spotlight to have their experiences heard. And it's just never okay to pick on someone like that to disclose like an experience. So even though it's coming from like a well-intentioned place, it's just still not okay, you know. I hope that answers the question. I feel like that did pretty good. Well done, thank you. Fantastics. I think that's pretty much kind of have to wrap that up, although I feel like we could have chatted about this for a fair bit more. And we do have more questions coming in now. So it's a struggle, but I might have to pass it back over to Phil who might close us up for the day. Thank you very much, Carmen. And gosh, it feels hard to be in the position of winding up for the day because this discussion is so important and so interesting and so important. Maisha, thank you so much for that incredibly useful analysis. And thank you for your remarks about the role of senior leadership and management that you just made. Lots of food for thought there. I've learned a lot from your presentation today. And one of the things you said earlier that actually is ringing around my mind in relation to my institutional kind of role and thinking but also around the SVA itself, you said you asked the question, does partnership perpetuate systemic inequalities inadvertently? So the approach, and that's really, I think, it's an uncomfortable question. It's an important question for all of us as we take forward these student voice, student partnerships, student engagement initiatives together. So thank you for that. Really, really great presentation for us. Carmen, before we do close up, what are your takeaways today? I think there's, it's hard to sum up completely everything because I think we've learned so much. And in a space where we are still constantly here at USC developing what our governance structure looks like, I think currently at the moment we're in formalization of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Student Leadership Committee as we speak. So I think we've got a lot to learn and we're kind of slowly integrating what this, what it looks like to actually have clear diversity and good representation without it being tokenistic, like having that one person thrust into, like you say, Misha, having that one person going, okay, well you happen to be Aboriginal, great. We're just gonna ask you all your experiences and think we're getting a diverse range of representation of what that looks like. And so I think today has really highlighted some of those things. And I think I'm gonna chat with my colleagues and the other student reps and bring that forward. So I thank you for all of these opportunities for learning and learning from each other as well, especially with those showcases today that we had the ones that I sat in. I definitely got further insight as well, it's been fantastic. Thank you, Carmen. Well, I think we are coming towards the close of the event and I would like to thank everybody who has contributed. In, I think it's been an incredibly, for me, powerful affirmation of the value of student voice, student engagement, student partnership working. And the power of that work. We've seen and heard so many examples of changes being made. And this is about a change agenda, isn't it? And it's so exciting to hear and see really the momentum across the sector from different international perspectives, from across Australia and in different institutions. And also, I think the impacts of change that we've heard about from the personal stories at the personal level, from many of our speakers and presenters today. I think for me, one of the main takeaways has been, key things for me in both days of this symposium has just been this opportunity to listen to student voices and I think to arrange a diversity of voices. And I think as a network, the Student Voice Australia network has some really useful and clear pointers to help guide us in our collaborative work as we move forward together. So thank you so much to everybody who has made that possible. I am going to call out some in particular. So Maisha to you and our previous keynote, thank you so much for what you've brought to all our presenters. You have all been brilliant. It's been fantastic to everybody who joined us. Thank you for coming. Thank you for asking great questions and I'd also like to thank Rachel for this. Carmen, you've already mentioned this absolutely brilliant visual that we now have that we can keep and take away with us and kind of use as a point of reference, but it's such a beautiful piece of work. Thank you so much Rachel for that. I'd like to thank you Carmen for being a great co-host and I'd also like to thank the Adelaide team, Chantelle, Piper, Rebecca, Emily. Thank you so much for all the great work you've put into the organization of the event. As everybody knows, this kind of thing doesn't just happen by itself. There's a lot of work that goes into it and we've been experimenting as well with the format and everything has worked absolutely beautifully. So thank you so much to everybody. I hope I haven't missed out anybody out, but just I will close the session there. I look forward very much to continuing on with our collaborations and our work together and I think we've been energized by the symposium. It's been fantastic. Thanks so much to everybody. Enjoy the rest of the day and I'm looking forward to paths crossing as we go forward together. Thank you. And thank you Phil as well for your excellent co-convening. Thank you Carmen. Goodbye all. Bye everybody. Bye.