Interview with Dr Javeria Shah
We sat down to talk with Dr Javeria Shah, Central’s Course Leader for the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Programme Leader for Learning Skills and Lecturer of Screen Studies on the MA Acting for Screen.
Javeria is also the author of Informal Learning in a Digital Landscape and Decolonising the Creative Arts Curriculum in White Spaces. In October, Javaria organised a week of events at the School under the banner of #BHInterruptions and also launched the new Network for Staff of Colour. She tells us more about #BHInterruptions and her work and practice, both at Central and beyond.
Q. What are #BHInterruptions?
“Black History” Interruptions! was a week long programme of events that took place in collaboration between the Learning Skills programme and the Centre for Race, Education, and Decoloniality, Leeds Beckett University from the 21st of October to 25th of October 2019. The programme was designed to challenge ideas of segregated histories and the normalisation of the absence of Black History from the curriculum and our national consciousness. The event aimed to disrupt these concepts by offering platforms for a variety of ‘interruptions’ such as workshops from Tribe Arts that examined decolonising theatre in practice, Dr Michael McMillan’s exploration of the ‘Front Room’ in the context of race, identity, and migration, a panel on digital race activism and talks from race scholars such as Dr Nicola Rollock.
Q. Your recent exhibit from Central Saint Martin’s, “Am I the ‘it’ in BrITish?”, featured as a pop up during the week. What inspired this exhibit?
This exhibit was inspired by my own diaspora and negotiation of a British identity in the context of post colonialism and race relations in the UK. Growing up in the 80s during a highly polarised political climate much of my earlier life was spent negotiating hostile racialised dynamics. In amidst it all I always wondered why I wasn’t accepted if I was born here. Growing up I learnt that many of my ancestors had played instrumental diplomatic roles during the time of the British Empire and were regarded as British subjects, yet as someone born here, I often felt as an outsider. It is only after I became an educator that I began to critique my positioning and ask difficult questions such as ‘whether my melanin determined my Britishness?’ and whether I was the “it” in BrITish? – the other, the unwanted, the excluded, a symbol of the accuracy of Powell’s Rivers of Blood. The exhibit brought together my art photography to conceptualise this journey in the context of multiculture, race relations, and colonial legacy.
Q. Tell us more about the work of the Social Performance Network, which you founded.
The Social Performance Network is a project that has organically grown out of my art, research, teaching, and activism. It has taken many years to reach an articulate inception of the work I do which is focused on the centralising of individual voice and lived experience in developing holistic understandings of social phenomenon. Whether this is incorporating learner voice into understanding the possible impacts of educational policy on individuals’ lived experiences and life paths, as I did for my qualitative longitudinal PhD, or whether it is enabling spaces and platforms that include voices that are usually omitted from the mainstream, so to present multiple worldviews. The Network collaborates with artists, activists, and academics, to create such spaces and promotes an ethos of nuance to conversations relating to identity and particularly, race.
Since it was established in December last year, the Network has engaged with a series of events including work with WhiteSpaces, Digital Maker Collective, State Violence Network, COMMON, and Unspoken. We have also participated in events at the TATE London, as part of the Vault Festival, as well as at universities across the country. Earlier this year we launched our Desocialising Through Art series which offers a platform to multimodal artists focusing on issues of diaspora. The Network is currently hosting five artists, including Rachelle Romeo, Yasmin Nicholas, and New York artist Kofi Forson. The Social Performance Network continues to evolve under the mission of ‘research and practice that curates art and discourse on concepts of social performance to facilitate holistic understandings of the social world, and a reimagining of our place within it’ and I am very excited to see where it goes next year. You can find out more about the network by visiting our website or following us on Twitter.
Q. #BHInterruptions also marked the launch of the new Network for Staff of Colour, which you’ve been instrumental in establishing at Central. What are your plans for the Network, and how can other staff get involved?
The purpose of this network is to function as a ‘safe space’ for staff of colour from across all areas of the School including visiting lecturers and professionals. ‘Safe’ spaces will be created using art, performance, and conversation. We will also have a function whereby we can offer dialogue or opinion to the institution on issues of race and/or experience, where appropriate. I hope to see it develop into a strong support network through which colleagues can access a nurturing and creative space that very much feeds into the broader loveliness of Central. Support is very welcome and we can be reached via email.
Q. You’ve led a number of events over the past year, starting with Performing Race which was held at Central in November 2018. How has your work as a practitioner, together with your research, helped to inspire and inform these events?
All aspects of my work connect quite strongly together with a shared aim of doing my part in creating a kinder world. My research and practice are interdisciplinary and straddle the education, sociology, policy, and visual arts fields. In the past year in particular, I have been able to incorporate my sociological work in particular into my work at Central, and expand focus on the connectivity between social contexts, lived experience, and contemporary discourse that myself and other sociologist colleagues are offering to this area.
As discussed when I was reflecting on the Social Performance Network, I have been able to develop my work and its motivation into a more connective way. It is all interlinked and strongly reflects my own positioning as a person, a practitioner, artist, and educator. During the PhD years I was asked to define my positioning and I arrived at Humanist Sociologist. I have kind of stuck to this as it seems the most apt in defining my role and work in institutional spaces.
Q. What’s next for you?
The Social Performance Network will continue to be a project that has my attention for a good while to come. I am also currently working on a book chapter for a race related anthology, more to come on that soon. Institutionally, I very much feel a part of Central’s wonderful community, so will continue to do my bit to help change the world one person at a time through the teaching and learning exchanges I have. I have recently taken on Course Leadership of the Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, alongside programme leadership of Learning Skills and the Screen Studies lecturing I do for MA Acting for Screen. Throw in a number of small research projects on areas of screen, identity formation, and social/educational access, and that’s me for the foreseeable future. It’s all very exciting!