EDI, “Whiteness” and Researcher Careers (Extended Abstract)

As of January 2022, there were only 38 Black female professors in UK Universities (Arday, 2022), representing 0.16% of all UK professors. This is in contrast to 165 black professors (0.7% of all professors), and to 6,980 female professors (39.6% of all professors) from a total of 23,525 professors in the UK (HESA, 2023). This paper will be presenting various debates of recent years around academic diversity, coloniality and “whiteness” in UK Higher Education and reflect specifically on what this means within a Research Culture / REF context. It will present some of the critical underpinnings, problematise our mainstreamed EDI-contextualised approach and focus on what implications this has for supporting researcher career progression at the professorial level. If “invisible and uncontested whiteness moulds the social-cultural and intellectual imaginaries within higher education (…), suppressing alternative ways of perceiving the world” (eds. T. Welikala & C. Boehm, 2023) then it will and demonstrably has already affected our progression into more diverse, socially just, academic research cultures. This presentation offers a lot of avenues for delving deeper into this subject, provides an example of how “whiteness” has affected interdisciplinary career progression, and puts forward some strategies for moving forward.