Curriculum studies, like nearly all education scholarship, are predicated on Black suffering and death. Inspired by Christina Sharpe's treatise "In the Wake: On Blackness and Being," we will engage with the difficult questions of what it means to be curriculum theorists inculcated into whiteness and settlement. Pivoting Cheryl Harris's…

This article presents a grounded theory analysis of interviews with eight Black and nine white teachers in Nova Scotia, Canada. Patterned differences emerge between discourses used by Black versus white teachers to understand the roles of Black students' families in academic achievement. In varying degrees and respects, Black teacher interviewees…

Increasingly, institutions are amplifying work on race equality, in order to engage with movements for Black lives and decolonising. This brings universities into relations with individual and communal issues of whiteness, white fragility and privilege, double and false consciousness, and behavioural code switching. Inside formal structures, built…

How can black women academics improve the lives of young people in their community? Etienne and her colleagues explore the ways they can intervene in two persistent and severe problems - the escalating knife crime that costs ever more young lives, and the disproportionately low academic attainment of black students compared with their white peers.…

Racial inequalities in higher education are widely recognised, from the scarcity of black and minority ethnic (BME) professors and vice chancellors, to student attainment gaps and campaigns to decolonise the curriculum. This collection of essays brings together experts' ideas for reducing racial inequality across the sector. It includes…

For much of our lives, we have struggled with not feeling enough in our racial identities, believing one could identify as an Asian or Black person in the "right" way. This quest toward racial authenticity has resulted in feelings of shame and failure, as we strived to reach a marker that was unachievable. In this duoethnography, we…

Black teachers in Canada, Kenya, and the United States share how they have supported minoritized students, even as they themselves experienced marginalizing societal forces, and delineate three guiding principles for affirming the social-emotional and mental health needs of all learners.

The body of research on the career prospects of Black and minority ethnic (BME) teachers cites racism as one of the reasons for BME underrepresentation in positions of school leadership in England. Understanding the nature of such discriminatory practices is needed in order to find solutions. It has also been reported that pioneer BME leaders are…

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a drastic transformation to schooling for students throughout the world. During this period, a number of issues arose in our local, national and global communities, including the death of George Floyd and subsequent protests and rallies organised by #BlackLivesMatter. Living through and witnessing many social…

This article critically interrogates East Asian academics' positional identities in UK universities, internationalisation and diversification against the Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) and Critical Race Theory (CRT) framework. Contemporary UK policy promoting racial equality and diversity is often over-generalised, while the critical race…

At first glance, the Latino male condition may seem impervious to notions of blackness. Critical scrutiny of My Brother's Keeper and the popular documentary "Gang Wars: Oakland" reveals otherwise. This theoretical article unveils how blackness is infused in the interpretation of Latino males via education policy and, in turn, how Latino…

This article examines the tensions encountered and lessons learned when a White teacher mentor discovered white fragility in her mentoring practices with a Black novice teacher. It was the mentor's first attempt to 'wake up white' and acknowledge her White identity in her mentoring actions. The mentor engaged a secondary English as a New Language…

This paper reflects on The Maroon Project, a series of poetry and performance workshops at the Iziko Slave Lodge Museum with a group of previously-incarcerated 'Coloured' men. The project facilitated a process of Spillerian interior intersubjectivity toward a self-authorship that could 'speak flesh' by placing the carceral system under scrutiny…

When I look back before 2020, before the murder of Mr. George Floyd in particular, and think about this special issue, "Black Lives Matter in Literacy Research," a question comes to my mind: "Are we, the field of literacy research, sure that we want to include literacy research among the incalculable responses (already in progress)…

Research into the impact of neoliberalism has shown that institutional and individual pressure on staff working in Higher Education (HE), has changed over the last 30 years. Our first research study showed that the changes resulted in mostly negative experiences for White staff. In a second study we have investigated the impact of neoliberalism on…