Student antiracist activism and institutionalised equality,diversity and inclusion (EDI) in UK universities

Abstract

This article presents research into trajectories of racially minoritised students to and through antiracist and decolonial activism in Higher Education. For some student antiracist activists, neoliberal equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) agendas provide entry points to antiracist activism which enable them to build knowledge, networks and platforms and make institutional changes, often exceeding these institutional roles to become more independent and radical. This is despite and in tension with the documented limitations of EDI and Student Voice measures of which the activists were well aware. We draw on narrative biographical interviews with racially minoritised undergraduate and postgraduate antiracist activists from seven universities across England, taking a broad understanding of activism to include everyday as well as more spectacular acts of resistance.

Introduction

There has been a resurgence in student antiracist activism in recent years in response to enduring colonial and racist structures and practices in Higher Education (HE) and beyond. In 2015, students in the UK followed South African students in launching campaigns such as ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Why is my curriculum white?’ to ‘decolonise’ universities. In 2019, antiracist student activists held occupations at Goldsmiths, University of London (Frazer-Carroll, 2019) and the University of Warwick (The Boar, 2019) demanding comprehensive antiracist action from their universities and Student Unions, from in-sourcing of (largely racially minoritised) cleaning and security staff, through removal of statues and renaming of buildings, to re-instatement of scholarships for Palestinian students, investigation of racial profiling on campus and development of institution-wide antiracist strategies. In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, antiracism in education as throughout society was in the public and media spotlight with universities compelled to respond. Since October 2023 students have been protesting the Israeli state's ongoing assault on Gaza and the complicity of Britain's HE sector in the violation of Palestinian human rights.

Scholarship has focused on the origins, processes and outcomes of the 2015–16 period of student activism within broader reflections on the theory and practice of decolonising HE. However, limited empirical research has examined the functioning of contemporary antiracist student movements, particularly less visible forms of activism beyond practices commonly identified in the ‘social movement repertoire’ (Tilly, 2005).

To address this, we conducted a pilot research project in 2019–2020, to co-produce research strategies with racially minoritised students engaged in antiracist activism, broadly defined. The emphasis was on understanding trajectories into and through antiracist activism, and their identifications of perspectives and information that needed to be shared. This paper presents one emerging theme from this research. Through narrative interviews with twelve participants, we identified a perhaps unexpected aspect of the relationship between student antiracist activism and the oft-critiqued (e.g., Ahmed, 2012; Bhopal, 2018) neoliberal institutionalisation of Equalities, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) work. Several participants entered antiracism work through official EDI or Student Voice roles, after which they variously continued this pathway and/or connected with more autonomous organising. This runs contrary to the critique of EDI as neutralising political energy for collective change. In this paper we focus on the narratives of the four students who considered themselves to have entered student antiracist and decolonial activism this way. We explore how they identified and navigated openings and constraints and how this shaped their engagement in antiracist activism, both within and against HE institutions.

Activism, antiracism, EDI and student voice in the neoliberal university

A growing body of academic scholarship focuses on how racism in universities might be addressed; increasingly this debates prospects of ‘decolonising’ universities. The literature is animated by fundamental questions concerning the applicability of the decolonisation frame to the (Western) university, the extent to which (neoliberal) universities could be ‘decolonised’, university co-optations of decolonial work, and related slippages between radical notions of decoloniality and more liberal diversity frameworks (Bhambra et al., 2018; Gopal, 2021; Tuck and Yang, 2012).

Despite this developing literature, including first-hand accounts by scholar-activists (e.g., Rhodes Must Fall Oxford, 2018; Shafi and Nagdee, 2022), little research has focused on the paths to and through political engagement and activism that student antiracist activists are forging in the political, social and HE landscape of 2010s-2020s Britain (though there are literatures on other contexts, e.g., Daniel and Platzky Miller, 2022; Motta et al., 2020).

There remain clear divisions between the analysis and approach of institutional initiatives for addressing racism and interconnected oppressions – for which EDI is the term most usual in British HE – and those of antiracist movements and race critical scholars. Lentin (2008) suggests this is a defining feature of antiracisms in Britain: a divide between understandings advanced by the state and its institutions, and those in social movements. Even while terms like ‘antiracism’ and ‘decolonising’ become embraced in institutional policy and measured in audit schemes, they remain embedded in logics of representation and reform which conflict with logics of abolition, reparation and anti-capitalism which more radical strands of antiracist thought engage (Bhopal and Pitkin, 2020).

The difference might be usefully thought through in terms of how the concept of institutional racism has moved through British policy. Elliott-Cooper (2023) demonstrates how Kwame Ture (then Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V Hamilton's (1992 [1967]) definition of institutional racism as ‘the process through which an institution produces racist outcomes’ (Elliott-Cooper, 2023: 102) was (with much struggle) incorporated into British mainstream politics decades later but with its revolutionary essence neutered. Lord MacPherson's 1999 inquiry into the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence and its investigation found the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist, with legislative consequences in policing and beyond. Elliott-Cooper (2023) notes, however, the lack of links Macpherson made between the historical development of (institutional) racism, capitalism's reliance on racialised labour exploitation, and the functioning of politics and state power in the perpetuation of institutional racism. That is, while liberal institutions might condemn racism as morally wrong, might even recognise that specific policies and practices of state bodies can reinforce racist outcomes, action and analysis fall short of Ture and Hamilton's foundational definition: that maintaining racialised division and inequality is a purpose, not a failing, of state institutions as currently configured.

One result of Macpherson was the Race Relations (Amendment) Act (2000) and the duty it placed on public bodies (including universities) to promote race equality and take proactive steps to tackle discrimination (now part of the Public Sector Equality Duty following the Equalities Act 2010). The introduction of the Office for Students (OfS) through the 2017 Higher Education Act includes a commitment to eliminating the awarding gap (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly, 2021) – positioned as ensuring ‘value for money’ for students (Campion and Clark, 2022). The translation of such statutory duties into effective practice and better outcomes is belied by the extent to which racialised inequalities remain within HE: in access, qualifications achieved, security of employment, seniority and pay, and interpersonal and embedded cultural racisms (Tate, 2020).

As former activist demands become incorporated into institutional processes in modified forms, scholarship has often found that being seen to be equitable overwhelms goals of delivering equity (Ahmed et al., 2006), with critical analyses suggesting university commitments to social justice are often little more than ‘a neoliberal exercise in managing social difference and a corporate branding strategy consistent with market competition’ (Choudry and Vally, 2020:10). For example, the race equality charter (REC) has been criticised for failure to engender ‘long-term strategies for institutional change’ (Campion and Clark, 2022:34). Working within and against such institutional dynamics can lead to co-option of more radical intent, diversion of energies, disillusionment, overload or burnout (Newman, 2012). On the other hand, ethnographic work within institutional EDI frameworks suggests many practitioners are attempting to be ‘doing the doing’ (Ahmed, 2007), finding and creating ‘pockets of possibility’ (Smith and Lander, 2023) or ‘dialectics of resistance’ (Choudry and Vally, 2020:4) in which institutional change might foment, and on occasion do use these footholds to institute elements of anti-oppressive practice (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly, 2021).

Incorporation of antiracist activist demands into reformist statutory duties is part of a parcel of changes to university life with significant implications for both antiracism and student activisms which one might understand under the broad banner of neoliberalism (Rao, 2020). Increasing marketisation of UK HE is unsurprisingly linked to a shift towards treatment and self-understandings of students as consumers (Bunce et al., 2017), with associated growth of regulatory mechanisms to support this framing (e.g., university regulation by the Competition and Marketing Authority since 2015; and concurrently by OfS since 2018). As a classic neoliberal project, these quasi-markets in HE remain monitored, audited and evaluated by government and quasi-governmental regulations, including (evolving) requirements for demonstrating EDI initiatives, particularly recording differentiated outcomes for student access to education and post-university employment. Each of these areas are points of contestation for student activists.

Similar developments have also occurred in Student Unions (SUs) in England. The extent to which SUs act as and are treated as political campaigning organisations has reduced dramatically (but unevenly) in recent years (Brooks et al., 2015). Governed by charity law with associated restrictions on political campaigning, monitored by the National Student Survey and OfS, Student Unions in England are increasingly corporate bodies. Brooks et al. (2015: 179) identify that SUs have changed in three major ways: ‘taking on a much stronger “representative” role; permanent members of union staff assuming more power; and values between union officers and senior managers becoming more aligned’, with institutional shifts possibly ‘limiting the capacity of unions to take up more questioning, critical and “activist” positions’. Raaper (2020) similarly identifies increased influence of professional (non-student) staff members on the political subjectivity of SU sabbatical officers. Nevertheless, it is commonplace for SUs to have positions to which students can be elected to represent marginalised groups, which can create possibilities for antiracist activists to influence institutions from within - or be captured by them.

Newman (2012) notes that ‘working the spaces of power’ can involve being both ‘neoliberal’ and ‘activist’ in the sense of using neoliberal logics to unpick their own consequences. In the current conjuncture, the relationship of race equality to UK HE lends itself especially to relational approaches like those of Hunter (2008), Howarth (2010) and Newman (2012, 2014), which draw attention to how

alternative, even counter-hegemonic, forces can become inscribed in dominant political projects: that is, how social movements may simultaneously generate oppositional projects and become incorporated into dominant forms of rule (Newman, 2014: 136).

This focus on relational and unfixed, contested ways in which neoliberal governmentalities incorporate dissent, allowing some shifts but blocking others, enables us to see the ‘contradictory possibilities inherent’ in recent decades’ shifts in Britain's public sector (Newman, 2005: 207).

In line with the quasi-public nature of universities, the consumer relationship involves ‘customer feedback’, generally referred to in this sector as student engagement or student voice; a neoliberal citizen-subjectivity conjuring instrumental behaviours based on direct self-interest, coupled with commitment to the future governance of a corporate entity of which one may feel/be part and therefore benefit from its future success. As Mendes and Hammett (2023, p.166) suggest, while the roots of student voice could be traced to critical pedagogical traditions, ‘In practice, Universities have adopted the current concept of student engagement as a quality assurance measure’.

Where student voice and antiracism meet can be outside university buildings in activist encampments and protest marches; or in ‘opportunities’ designed to encourage students to share their labour, time, ideas and identities in order to (demonstrate the university's work to) address racialised inequalities within institutional processes. Dominant social movement theory presents a ‘social movement repertoire’ centred on visible, public acts like direct actions and demonstrations (Tilly, 2005). These can be seen as radical and committed in the hierarchy of activist endeavours because they entail risk, drawing attention towards ‘heroic’, public actions and actors rather than everyday acts of resistance or organising (Forkert, 2017). Expectations that activists embody these qualities and engage in activism in these (gendered, racialised and ableist) terms can mean those who do not (or are unable to) do so lack recognition for their alternative political interventions (Craddock, 2019). Likewise, those who find paths to enact change within institutions and not necessarily in an oppositional register may be overlooked as ‘activists’. To document a broad range of antiracist political interventions we spoke with students engaged in various activities they broadly self-defined as antiracist ‘activism’ in the university.

Methods

Twelve students from seven universities participated in a two-day workshop to identify participant-led priorities for academic research into student antiracist activism, followed by biographical narrative walking interviews conducted by the authors. We asked students to ‘tell me the story of how you became involved in antiracist activism or decolonial activism’, either while walking around their campus to show us physical landmarks in their narrative, or in a sit-down interview if they preferred.

All participants self-identified as racially minoritised students involved in antiracist activism. We recruited from seven universities across England, five ranked as ‘high tariff’ (i.e., elite in terms of grade entry requirement) and two ‘medium tariff’ (gov.uk, 2021). Participants included one doctoral, three Masters, and eight undergraduate students. Three identified as male, seven female, and two preferred not to say. In terms of ethnicity, three identified as Black African, and one each as Arab; Arab (Yemeni); Black; Black British; Black British (African); British Indian; Parsee; Somali; and Vietnamese. Eight had British nationality, one EU, two non-EU, and one preferred not to say. Some had been involved in antiracist organising for a long time while others were new to thinking of themselves as ‘activists’; as their definitions of what constituted activism shifted during the project we did not ask for a specific length of time but allowed this to be explored in interviews. Activities they self-described as antiracist and decolonial activism included: representation and advocacy; addressing the race awarding gap; addressing staff and student diversity and labour conditions; curriculum changes; advocacy and support for those experiencing interpersonal racism; knowledge-sharing and coalition-building; occupation of university buildings; protests and demonstrations; mutual aid; and racial justice work beyond universities. Many students we interviewed in 2019–20 saw Palestinian rights as central to their antiracist decolonial activism, prior to invigorated UK student protest on this post-October 2023.

The authors – a white British secular Jewish woman (Hannah) and a British Palestinian woman (Ala), both in permanent academic employment – have both been involved in antiracist activism within and beyond universities over many years. The research was designed with commitment to co-production of knowledge at its heart, with participants identifying priorities for future research, which we subsequently pursued (e.g. Warwick Antiracism Archive, 2025). To mitigate the unequal power of our positionalities, we built trust with participants through the initial research workshop, at which they were able to make alliances between themselves to challenge some aspects of the project, and some participants co-authored an online publication with the researchers (Sirriyeh et al., 2021). Here, participants and institutions are pseudonymised to minimise risk to them or future activists.

This paper draws on findings from the biographical interviews. One theme which emerged was the pathway into activism through institutional EDI roles, which was the experience of four of our twelve interviewees, and is the focus of the current article.

Tracing paths from EDI to activism

Though the majority in our sample followed perhaps expected routes into activism, such as being involved in other forms of intersectional activism or being politically active before or beyond university, four of the twelve participants began their engagement through institutional EDI roles.

These ‘EDI roles’ were either 1) paid (short-term, part-time) university employment during study to support improvement in racially unequal outcomes, through activities such as research or outreach to potential future students; or 2) elected roles within the SU or university departments, to represent racially minoritised students’ interests – usually these positions are unpaid. Here, we engage with four narratives of students who described themselves as entering antiracist activism this way, noting what motivated their involvement and what this institutional location meant for their activist journey, before concluding with a reflection on implications for future antiracist work.

Gabriel

Gabriel was studying for a postgraduate degree in southern England when we interviewed him, but initially become involved in antiracist work as an undergraduate at another institution. He had not been looking to get involved in antiracism, but his motivation was aroused after applying for paid work to subsidise his studies. On entering the student voice-focused role, he became more informed about challenges faced by racially minoritised students, and motivated to act:

I was sent to the BAME [Black Asian and Minority Ethnic] Attainment Gap Working Group. That was the first time I’d ever heard of the BAME attainment gap… I was shocked… thinking what is going on… learning that nationwide because I’m Black I’m at an automatic 15–20% deficit… What do I do now?

Gabriel approached the staff member running the working group and asked to be involved in work ‘to solve this at the university’. They worked with him to understand the data on awarding gaps, how it was collected, promising and unsuccessful interventions, and the importance of institutional and political context. A harder lesson in the importance of context came when Gabriel moved to a more prestigious university to pursue a further degree, finding:

that no one even knew what the gap was and I was just like, ‘what is happening?’ I tried to look for the data online, I couldn’t find it… no one would even speak about it… I discovered that [university] is actually one of the only universities in the country where the gap is getting wider year on year.

Applying investigative skills he gained at the first university, including the ability to access unpublished information, Gabriel began to act as an unaffiliated activist, without a formal role – but was quickly drawn back in. His activism led to the university inviting him to be part of their institutional approach:

When I got the data I was really, really upset and angry, as you would imagine and I emailed the vice-chancellor… I guess that's really where I got started doing work on race equality… she invited me to join the newly formed attainment gap working group.

Though the working group was not a promising indication of how race equality work was being done (‘It was disjointed, it wasn’t very well organised. It wasn’t really a priority and… there was no allocated funding’), Gabriel's involvement was evidently galvanising as they went on to replicate interventions that had been effective at his first university.

The political nous Gabriel developed and exercised was about moving the institution from within its own structures. For example, on being invited by another senior official to be part of the university's REC assessment team, he expressed that such exercises can be ‘“tick box” and not actually do anything for the marginalised groups the Charter's supposed to be supporting’, and he ‘would only be interested in joining the team if there was going to be actual significant progress in race equality’. Rather than a stance of refusal, he pushed the official to take up a challenge around institutional process which might have tangible effects:

I asked him… to make race equality actions an assessment point for all the heads of schools… Actually, surprisingly, he was willing to agree to that and he agreed to that.

Not a stand-alone achievement or a fluke, this was a specific tactic learned through experience within institutional structures initiated by his EDI role:

To get anything done… you really have to go to the very, very top… If I go to middle management with a proposal and they ignore me, their senior management can say that doesn’t represent the view of the university. If I go to the provost about a race equality mechanism and he tells me to get lost, then that is speaking for the university.

Effectively, Gabriel's initial employment within EDI schemes led to him operating primarily within the institution and its own processes, but not being captured by them - indeed, levering them to produce more radical interventions towards race equality.

Balraj

Balraj was a postgraduate student at a Midlands university, where he had also been an undergraduate. Having experienced alienation from his earliest university experiences, which he linked to both racialised and classed exclusions, Balraj experienced unemployment as a graduate before returning to study. Looking for financial support for this, he noticed an advertisement for paid work as a university Equality Ambassador. His frustration at his experiences in both education and employment searches surfaced in his interview for the role, in many ways echoing Gabriel:

I started doing some studying before I went for the interview… so the attainment gap issue, payroll, BAME employment, kind of pay gap issue… I was in this interview and… I was like, ‘Is this this tick boxing kind of programme… like, I don’t even care about the job’.

With his attention drawn to the structural nature of racialised inequality by his job interview preparation, Balraj's activist orientation was roused. It seemed the interview panel recognised his frustration but felt this could be channelled - and they seemed to be right. Alongside identifying and developing interventions to address race equality in the university, Balraj developed an activist orientation further through building knowledge and connections with other antiracist practitioners:

This job gave me this opportunity to… go places and learn different things… they sent me to this Manchester conference… [one speaker] mentioned about starting from the grassroots, and I was like, where's grassroots for me, where can I start now?

Prepared and enabled to expand his horizons and his skills, Balraj identified an opportunity to ‘struggle where you are’ (Joseph-Salisbury and Connelly, 2021). Reflecting on the under-representation of minoritised students and staff in his discipline, he established a student society to address this, securing institutional financial support and an invitation to present at an international conference, training Members of the European Parliament on microaggressions. Describing this experience, Balraj was overwhelmingly positive, but this was demanding work. He identified how he, as a racially minoritised student, not only experienced racism at university, but then re-lived it in order to educate others, including explaining first-hand experiences, absorbing European Parliamentarians saying ‘some of the most ignorant stuff’ and senior figures ‘being racist’ in an antiracist, minority student-led training session with all the accompanying imbalances of power which try even experienced antiracist educators (e.g., see Hinton and Ono-George, 2020).

Balraj framed his activist mode as avoiding confrontation and taking people with him, ‘in this kind of service kind of peaceful… looking after your fellow neighbour kind of way’. Balraj wanted to be clear that he identified his working within the system as peaceful and non-confrontational – but still activism.

Despite his focus on avoiding confrontation, when Balraj encountered wrong-headedness from senior managers he was willing to challenge it. He described attending a heated meeting and disputing another attendee's suggestion that the university was ‘spoon feeding’ race equality access scheme students:

It made me also realise another thing, to speak confidently. You can win a lot of people if you just speak confidently.

Speaking with confidence was a skill Balraj had honed through his opportunities to practise public speaking as an Equality Ambassador, but again, this came at some cost to himself. After the ‘spoon-feeding’ incident at which Balraj presented himself confidently, he was nevertheless shaken:

I started questioning myself at that time; I went in tears… it's what's called emotional labour isn’t it? You do a lot of emotional labour and I think even the money that you get by doing it isn’t enough because it's just painful, man.

Both Balraj and Gabriel had a ready scepticism about the apparent ‘tick box’ performances universities might use to sidestep real change, yet they found ways to work within the institution while maintaining this challenge. This balancing act took its toll on both, despite the skills, experience and economic recompense it provided.

Natalie

Natalie was an undergraduate student in northern England. On arrival at university, she felt isolated as a Black student, much more in the minority than she expected or was used to. Though Natalie was not naive about racism, she nevertheless came to university with high hopes about new friends and connections and her sense of disappointment about the environment she encountered, and its wounding effects, were palpable:

Fresher's week. Everyone's getting to know each other, it's super exciting… I remember having a really great time and then they started playing Kanye West and Gold Digger… the sense of dread just overcame me. I thought ‘oh, here we go, like here we go’… I knew what would happen. Everyone would sing along to every single lyric in that song including the N word. I didn’t really want to be around that. I was in a roomful of white people… I also remember people touching my hair a lot… Then they would get offended that I wouldn’t let them touch my hair.

A specific incident, and the disappointing response from SU representatives she thought were there to help her, galvanised Natalie to take action. Natalie was on a night out when she and a white friend jumped the queue to get into an SU nightclub. On reaching the front her friend was allowed in but Natalie was stopped. She initially thought ‘Fair enough’, even though her white friend was allowed in while she as a Black woman was not. However, when she got back to the front of the line, she was again refused entry. Her white friend came out to see where she was and ‘escalated the situation further’ by ‘screaming that they were racist’; ultimately Natalie had to go home alone. Finding this experience humiliating, and worried about isolation if she remained excluded from the main student venue, Natalie wrote to the SU president and asked for help.

The SU are supposed to support and represent students. I am a student, let me see who I can get in touch with and if they can help me… I just contacted the president… We met up, he assured me everything would be okay. The next week I tried to get into the SU club and I was turned away again in front of all my peers, humiliated… he forwarded it onto someone else who wasn’t familiar with my case. I had to recount something that was at the time very traumatic and very emotionally charged for me, to someone who hadn’t been there from the start, who was also a white male.

This experience made Natalie lose faith in the SU, but rather than retreating she decided to run for the role of SU BAME officer and change the institution herself:

By the end of it I just decided that the SU couldn’t do anything, they’re not going to back me up, they’re not going to find me the justice that I want… I didn’t want anyone else who looks like me or who came from the same background as me to experience what I had experienced… I found that I could run for the BAME officer position and I thought that that placed me in the best position to influence, basically make a change from the inside.

On being elected Natalie decided to use her position to create a safe space and night of entertainment for ‘other students who looked like me’ so that they could ‘just have a night where they could just be’.

This venture was something Natalie could create because of her SU position, but she received limited institutional support: the go-ahead, but no budget. Natalie gathered racially minoritised student performers and contacted a spoken word artist from London who on hearing Natalie's motivations agreed to headline for free. Natalie's account of organising this demonstrates how her sense of herself as an activist developed in process, self-motivated and without the mentoring or mutual support one might expect within such an institutional role. The title of BAME officer and the permissions to organise the event were of practical use in creating a context for Natalie's activism, but in practice she operated as an independent activist within the organisation.

I think just seeing what I could do with a title but without a budget, I think that's snowballed into me just doing whatever I need to do. Do whatever I feel is needed in the community.

Natalie developed activist skills and confidence, and found strength and nourishment in the process.

I genuinely feel like being the BAME officer, getting involved with activism, running my own campaigns, I feel like meeting those other two Black girls, like it was literally my safe haven, it saved me and it kept me sane because it meant that I was put in touch with people who thought like me, people who looked like me.

The balance between the toll taken on her in physical, mental and emotional labour of organising from within the institution but without institutional support, and the pay-off in terms of results, is summarised as she describes her feelings of safety and mutual support gained through her activism and connections with peers. From there, Natalie took further steps towards independent activism, relaunching the Why is My Curriculum White? campaign and successfully lobbying academics and the university library to expand their collections. As with Balraj and Gabriel, Natalie moved between having an institutional imprimatur and simply being an activist who had made things happen.

Fatima

Fatima was an undergraduate student in northern England, who like Natalie came to university with high expectations which were disappointed, leaving her feeling alienated:

I think it was just disorientating and just a bit confusing because I just assumed that university would be more diverse, because it's so much bigger than a school […] I was clearly very different to the students who were coming. I didn’t live in halls either, I lived at home.

Like Balraj, Fatima experienced her difference to the majority of students as both class- and race-based. Hearing the way other students talked about parts of the city she lived in, and overhearing lecturers’ comments on other students who did not conform to the norm, stuck with her. Particularly striking is the disorientation she experienced at first: things were not meant to be like this. In some ways this echoes Gabriel's shock on discovering the data on inequality at university (‘what is going on?… what do I do now?’), but at this point rather than being galvanised to act, Fatima seemed to withdraw. Though she was Course Rep during her first year she did not see this as activism, but it did give her a sense of student voice roles, and possibilities they might offer:

I felt like the role wasn’t being utilised as much as it could be. I just thought you could do so much more with it than just sit there and talk about why feedback was released late.

Fatima explained that during her year abroad, experiencing an engaged political culture, living with greater independence, and making contact with other racially minoritised students who shared her concerns, galvanised her activism. Fatima applied to be School Rep on her return. She wanted to address the overwhelming whiteness of the department and its curriculum, and the associated limits on education and student experience.

I think they gave it to me because I was the only brown person that applied, because that's what unis are like. Genuinely, I think that's how it worked. I just thought I could do more with it than the same issues that crop up every year.

Fatima intended to shake things up not just through being physically present as a non-white person but to use the role's status and access to change conversations and address culture and practice. Her cynical assessment that ‘they gave it to me because I was the only brown person that applied’ points to her analysis of how institutions might welcome more non-white representation for the sake of optics, reducing those put in that representative position to (hyper)visible bodies, rather than paying attention to their skills, ideas or qualifications (Puwar, 2004). Whether or not Fatima was right about how she was perceived, she secured the role and used it:

Everyone listens to you because you’re School Rep. They’ll just turn to you in a meeting and be like ‘so, what do the students think, how do the students feel?’ Honestly, you could make up anything and they would just run with it.

Fatima critiques the credulousness of staff to hear ‘authentic’ student voice expressed through one person, but she tactically recognised opportunities she could use for antiracist work:

I got involved with Why is My Curriculum White working group. It's opportunities you don’t get as just a regular student… it was by chance we got involved… Basically this education officer couldn’t make one of the meetings and she was like ‘do you guys want to go instead of me?’… I guess it helped us then thinking about what could be done in [Discipline] specifically.

The ‘we’ here were the other two racially minoritised students from Fatima's Department, with whom she planned, strategised and organised all aspects of her Decolonising the Curriculum event. They did that key political work, then called on institutional resources and support from the SU Education Officer and an SU mentor and marketing staff to execute the event. Connections and contacts seemed central to Fatima's activist journey. There were two kinds: those that helped to spark and sustain her activist goals and energies, and those enabled through her institutional role which were instrumental in accessing resources. In this way, Fatima's activism was independent but her official role helped provide practical, including financial, support.

However, despite initial positive encouragement from academic staff for their event, Fatima and her colleagues encountered obstacles when trying to secure a budget. While their Head of School ‘was really positive about it, really receptive’, Fatima and her colleagues felt they had to ‘justify ourselves quite a few times’ to get funding. They found an ally in the one racially minoritised academic staff member in their School, who was a conduit for communication, in particular negotiating the detailed justification required to release funds. Their first event was successful. Following this and further events, Fatima and colleagues were invited by academics to contribute to curriculum development on their BA programme. They contributed, but then sensed momentum had been lost. She reflected:

We thought nothing really happened… Then we got an email […] I guess during the summer whilst all these changes were happening they incorporated the themes we wanted to see in the new curriculum.

Though Fatima identified significant changes – new course content and expanded reading lists – and that this had been enabled by her institutional role and her campaigning, there remained a sour feeling to how her relationship with the institution ended. From Fatima and her student activist colleagues being a driving force, the final changes to the curriculum were made without their involvement or knowledge, which also sat slightly askew with the student voice imperative. Though she gained access to the institution, she had never felt fully ‘within’ it.

Discussion

Neoliberal reforms of HE have created spaces for Student Voice and dedicated EDI resources presented as addressing educational inequalities. Yet stark racialised inequalities persist within HE, as elsewhere in society, and there are established questions about the extent to which such reformist interventions can, or are even intended to, make a significant difference. The persistence (and growth) of student antiracist activism pointing to these failings, and demanding change, is testament to the limits of existing institutional approaches. Nevertheless, our research found occasions when opportunities nominally created by institutions to address their own racism, however flawed, can act as conduits for students to develop activist skills, lever institutional resources, and in the cases we uncovered, then exceed the space provided by the institution to press harder and creatively for change.

While the students we encountered began their activist journey by working within designated, official roles demarcated by their university, none of them entered this naively. All had experienced racism at university and beyond, and all related acute personal experiences specific to the university's institutional space. For Natalie and Fatima, such experiences directly galvanised them into activism, and they identified formal, defined representative roles their institutions had created through which to begin their campaigning work. For both, seeking those roles itself was a form of subversion as they infiltrated the very institutions from which they experienced racism. Gabriel and Balraj, on the other hand, both indicated that though they lived with everyday racism, their application to paid institutional roles was initially mainly about financial reward. Yet very quickly, these roles made them aware of the extent of institutional and structural racism, igniting a passion to act. Both indicated innate scepticism about the roles, aware of the possibility their employment could be used to ‘tick a box’ rather than make meaningful change – and they were explicit about this in their work.

All four indicated that the formal status of their roles increased the reach and influence of their interventions, even when material support or enthusiasm from peers or staff was lacking. All were invited to train and instruct senior staff members on how to do their jobs better, but this invitation was clearly double-edged as they came up against frustrations, set-backs, and expectations that they would expose profoundly personal and sensitive experiences while in a deeply power-imbalanced context of educating their own educators. While Gabriel and Balraj received financial recompense for much of their work, Fatima and Natalie did not, and there was a toll on all four, in terms of emotional labour, time and effort balancing degrees and other aspects of student life.

In all the narratives, friends and mentors were crucial. For Natalie and Fatima, finding other students with similar experiences and politics boosted their confidence to begin their activism, and sustained them in collective work. For Gabriel and Balraj, key figures tended to be professional staff who encouraged, trained and advised them. The sense of both achievement and frustration was similar for all four, but, perhaps linked to their access to peer networks, Natalie and Fatima came closer than Balraj and Gabriel to giving up on ‘working within’, choosing instead more independent organisation not reliant on university consent. None of them appeared to have been ‘captured’ by an institutional agenda. While Balraj appears to come closest, his willingness to pose direct challenges to senior figures persisted, despite his lack of affinity with standard activist repertoires. For the other three, experiences within the (somewhat) supportive framing of institutionally-defined roles gave them opportunities not just to use resources and networks, but to build knowledge, experience, skills and confidence which they then applied beyond the limitations of formal roles.

It is worth noting the specific areas of antiracist work on which these four activists focused: the race awarding gap, staff and student representation, curriculum content, interpersonal racism and spaces for support and welcome for racially minoritised students. Each of these to greater or lesser extents can be relatively easily converted into objectives for better ‘customer experience’ and therefore improved financial outcomes for the university ‘business’. This is a fundamental difference from other forms of antiracist activism in which many of our other participants were deeply engaged, most notably pressures for ethical investment practices and ending of complicity in production of weapons, particularly those used in Israel's ongoing attacks on Palestinians. These latter demands of antiracist and decolonial student activists are less easily reconciled with profit-driven market imperatives of contemporary English HE, as they have significant financial implications which appear to trump ethical imperatives. While universities have incorporated ‘decolonisation’ into their institutional lexicon, this has tended to reach only as far as reform of curriculum content and a handful of funded scholarships for under-represented groups. Nevertheless, our research suggests such co-option of radical language and aims can also work to undo itself as students engaged in neoliberal ‘decolonisation’ projects come to realise the limits of such programmes, and use the institutional political insights they gain to push for much more than is offered.

Conclusion

What is striking about the narratives presented here is that each of the participants identified the beginning of their activism as enabled by formal institutional EDI or Student Voice measures. These activists were not neutered; rather their perspectives about racism in universities and possibilities for action to address were widened by these formal roles, and the activists then extended their action beyond the roles’ confines. As such, those working towards antiracism ‘within and against’ university institutions should neither dismiss nor uncomplicatedly embrace EDI and Student Voice initiatives but recognise them as one pathway to antiracist change-making, including into more traditional forms of activism. Recalling Ture and Hamilton's (1992 [1967]) theorisation of institutional racism in which the institution's purpose is to sustain racist order, the footholds and ‘pockets of possibility’ (Smith and Lander, 2023) activists might find in such institutions can only go so far and, as our participants describe, working these spaces of power (Newman, 2012) is demanding in itself.

The persistence of the more oppositional forms of activism most familiar to the social movement repertoire – direct action, campaigning, protest – is clearly still an important part of student antiracist activism. It is worth reiterating that the narratives discussed here are only a subset of our research; the majority of participants described what might be more expected forms of student activism (demonstrations, occupations and protest). The priorities of student antiracist movements are always likely to exceed what universities enable through formal engagement roles.

Explicitly decolonial, antiracist and intersectional movements are not easily incorporated into Student Voice or EDI. For example, in response to the ongoing student-led Palestinian solidarity campaigns which have taken on further urgency since this research was conducted, English university management has used force (Bashar, 2024), property law (Asokan and Pilgrim, 2024) and shared surveillance of students with police (Walawalkar et al., 2024) to remove protest rather than incorporate this element of student voice. In part university management (and government) suggest this reflects concern about what they construe as possible antisemitism within criticism of Israel – despite consistent presence of Jewish students, staff and community at pro-Palestine demonstrations, and the movement's position against all forms of racism (Shearing and Nagesh, 2024). Beyond this, material resource demands are much more challenging to incorporate in neoliberal management frameworks than branding and engagement, as our interviews showed. The serious challenges and limits of such reformist work mean it will continue to exist alongside a wider constellation of forms of activism, within, against and beyond the institution. Nevertheless, student antiracist activism may benefit from recognising EDI and Student Voice initiatives can be a pipeline into (as well as sometimes a diversion from) more radical work towards change.