18 - Making space for Black voices and Black visions: the formation and work of the African Diaspora Postgraduate Network

Summary

When I was an undergraduate student at university in the mid- 1980s I often found myself being the only Black person in the midst of a sea of White faces at lectures. Having been brought up and raised in London surrounded by people from a wide range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, it was very unnerving to inhabit a space of learning where I was a minority of one. In such an environment I was constantly second- guessing myself as to what to think, what to write, how to behave and how to relate to the people and processes that I believed would determine my academic destiny. Fast forward to the 2000s, I had successfully managed to navigate through undergraduate and postgraduate systems of learning and was now teaching and researching in a university. At the undergraduate level where I taught there existed large numbers of Black students, but at postgraduate level, especially at doctoral level, I was continually encountering isolated Black individual students, who were second- guessing themselves and suffering just as I was so many years ago. We were, and are as academics and higher- level students, existing in institutional spaces that regarded Black intellectual endeavour as marginal to the life and work of the university. It is out of this context that the African Diaspora Postgraduate Network (ADPN) was born and continues to operate. In this portrait I will outline how it was formed, the work it has undertaken, its impact and what its continuing existence reveals about the state of doctoral study in British universities today.

It was in 2012 that Professor Robert Beckford came up with the proposal that he and I, as two Black academics based in higher education institutions, should create a space for our respective doctoral students to come together in a supportive Black- led environment. He was based in Canterbury, Kent in the south of England at the time, but the overwhelming majority of his Black doctoral students were based in and around London and found the Canterbury academic environment very isolating. I was based in London and had access to classroom space, and so we came together.