Working within a global-facing art and design institution like UAL has made it clear to me that race, class, and language are not peripheral to education. They are central to how students access learning and feel valued. While institutional rhetoric often celebrates “diversity,” in practice, structures of support and recognition remain uneven. Racialised and international students are frequently left to decipher an implicit curriculum shaped by British art school norms that privilege whiteness and Eurocentric discourse.
In light of this, Garrett (2024) highlights how systemic racism shapes the academic lives of racialised scholars in the UK, from precarious contracts to the erasure of long-term career trajectories. This critique resonates with what I have observed in staff conversations at UAL, where international students, particularly those racialised as non-white, are sometimes described as “challenging” or lacking in “criticality.” These comments reflect more than bias—they reveal how certain cultural and linguistic expressions of thinking are consistently devalued.
Taking this further, Bradbury (2020) identifies how institutions often embed low expectations for bilingual learners. This is especially visible in how we assess and feedback on the work of students using English as an additional language. Rather than seeing their multilingualism as an asset, it is frequently viewed as a shortcoming. Students who articulate ideas in non-standard English or draw on unfamiliar intellectual traditions are seen as lacking clarity, rather than expanding what design education might look like.
In response to these systemic issues, I recently gave a talk at Asymmetry Art Foundation, a London-based non-profit dedicated to supporting curatorial practice and contemporary Chinese art. During this talk, I shared my ongoing research on bilingual design and the politics of local language in visual communication. More specifically, I examined how the act of typesetting Chinese and English together in design reveals tensions between narrative, translation, and meaning-making—challenging conventional typographic principles rooted in Western Eurocentric design traditions. For international students at UAL navigating similar tensions, these practices offer a compelling model of cultural and linguistic resistance that validates their lived experiences.
Connecting these insights to broader institutional dynamics, Sara Ahmed (2012) describes diversity policies as often being “non-performative”: they appear progressive but fail to change the structures that sustain exclusion. This contradiction was highlighted by the backlash against the Advance HE video, as noted by Orr (2022), where anti-racist messaging was dismissed as “wokeness.” However, the problem isn’t the language of inclusion—it is the fact that whiteness remains the unspoken standard across our marking criteria, reading lists, and even knowledge system.
Shifting toward meaningful change requires embedding anti-racism into the everyday practices of teaching. This involves asking difficult but necessary questions: Whose ways of speaking are legitimised in crits? Whose histories are deemed central to design? What types of knowledge are rewarded or penalised in assessment? To move beyond surface-level inclusion, we must create space for diverse forms of intelligence, multilingual creativity, and epistemic difference.
Finally, given UAL’s large population of international students—many of whom bring transnational and non-Western perspectives—it is not enough to simply welcome them into an existing system. Anti-racist teaching involves rethinking that system from within. We must support students in ways that are contextually relevant, intellectually generous, and critically aware. Only then can we begin to realise the inclusive values we so often claim to uphold.
References:
Ahmed, S. (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bradbury, A. (2020) ‘A critical race theory framework for education policy analysis: The case of bilingual learners and assessment policy in England’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 23(2), pp. 241–247.
Fry, T. (2009) Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Oxford: Berg.
Garrett, R. (2024) ‘Racism shapes careers: Career trajectories and imagined futures of racialised minority PhDs in UK higher education’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, pp. 2–11.
Orr, J. (2022) ‘Revealed: The charity turning UK universities woke’. The Telegraph [Online]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRM6vOPTjuU (Accessed: 24 June 2025).