Radical Reading Groups and Community Building
At the beginning of the 2019/20 academic year, a new colleague from Development Studies Althea Maria Rivas reached out to me to discuss a radical reading group for students of colour. This is work that she had done at the University of Sussex and she wanted to replicate it at SOAS. Althea envisioned a series of co-facilitated sessions with a group of colleagues framed around material chosen by them. I was happy to join this initiative because the time commitment was not onerous. I was being asked to show up for one two-hour session and a final meet up. I suggested that she should consider my colleague at the Centre for Gender Studies Sophie Chamas as an additional facilitator.
In the closing session with the reading group participants, I stepped out of teacher mode. As I listened to the reflections from the students, I thought deeply about how what they were saying was landing in my body. Every time someone spoke, I felt the need to foreground the fact that their experiences are not divorced from those of staff of colour. We travel the university differently, but the root of our experiences remains the same. Of course, we are not on the receiving end of contesting how our papers are read and marked but I am on the receiving end of a range of expectations from students about what it means to be black, African woman teacher in a classroom — many of which I can never meet. We are also on the receiving end of micro-aggressions from students and colleagues alike. I felt that it was important for students to see their lecturers as people who also navigate complex dynamics. In situating these realities in relation to their experiences, the intention was not to derive a pass from them. We were a community of people trying to make sense of these dynamics together.
In bringing ourselves fully into conversations with students of colour, I view this as an embodied dialogue on effective ally-ship. This is not about knocking down colleagues or drawing students into unethical conversations about colleagues, it is a process of parsing out the issues that sustain structural racism. Allyship is about seeing each other without reproducing the dynamics that make life unliveable for all of us. How do we hold each other accountable in institutions that will never be fully decolonised whilst working towards dismantling the structural inequalities that have material consequences for all of us? How does allyship between students of colour and staff look like when we stop expecting staff to do all the labour that an institution should be doing? When we create extra spaces, we are doing work that the institution should be doing as part of its regular business. How does allyship look like when we acknowledge that to survive institutions, we must hold space for each other by cultivating communities of care. These communities of care require that we are not complicit in reproducing racist and gendered tropes about staff of colour and in my case black women. What forms of allyship can be achieved when we recognise that solidarity is speaking up when it is hard, when the repercussions are greater and when the power relationships are more complex.
I leave the reading group seeing it less as a space for learning what is not taught in the classroom because that work needs to be done in the classroom. I see it as a space of radical community building. We are not trying to flatten power relationships which will always exist in some form. However, a radical community evolves when we approach reading groups as a space to build allyship and solidarity through an interrogation of intellectual thought. The objective of the reading group as a site to activate communities of freedom, solidarity and allyship within and without the university has to be front and centre in how we read and occupy the space.