Another co-convenor leaving? So soon? If by soon you mean “several months after the last one”, or in terms of my tenure “after nearly 4 years”, then yes. I am making a break for it. I am entering the private sector after spending nearly 15 years working in the public sector in various ways. It’s […]

It started with an email asking if Rashne or I could attend the Hidden REF awards this year. My first thoughts were confused, what were the awards? What had we been nominated for? Checking in with Hidden REF I found we had been nominated by Emily Sena (who likely had told me she had at […]

Islamophobia is seen by many as the last acceptable form of racism and has been described as having “passed the dinner-table test.” It manifests, functions, and reproduces as a form of racism, with Muslim communities being frequently seen and treated as a racialised group. Islamophobia takes many forms from the more overt anti-Muslim hatred in […]

Written by Emily Sena As I end my tenure as co-convenor of our Edinburgh Race Equality Network (EREN), I wanted to reflect on my experience of co-founding a staff network for race equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI), on our history and on what I learnt along the way. How it started Back in 2014, I […]

I read with keen interest a recent UoE EREN blog post on the topic of black internship programs. I am a black academic. I was drawn to the post because I have a personal experience as a parent of two young black persons who applied to undertake a paid internship initiative for black undergraduates and […]

Growing up I was born and raised in Scotland to Pakistani parents and went to school in Edinburgh. There were very few pupils from a minority ethnic background in my school and I was fortunate in having experienced very little racism in primary school and for much of my first couple of years in high […]

2020 was a difficult year but a highlight for me was joining EREN and trying to learn more about how to actively be anti-racist. This little blog post is to share a story with you of one thing that EREN inspired.  It’s a small thing, but I believe it’s important for people like me, who […]

In the wake of the posting of black squares on social media, institutions and academic stakeholders were again rightly criticised for virtue signalling. As a black academic who has been in this “business” for almost 20 years, I have been involved in many conversations with colleagues about how terrible it is we have so little […]

Among the BAME community I can say that I have lived something of a blessed existence. I suffer less than my peers across the board and there is one simple reason. I am mixed race, Colombian-British and as such, I can pass for White. I have lived in the UK my entire life, my accent […]

There are two great challenges when doing anything in this world. The first is starting, the second, finishing. It was in the earlier days of the Edinburgh Race Equality Network that the idea of a blog outlining the experiences of BAME staff at the University was first broached. The idea was that it would be […]