Essays – JosePhD

It is Finished.

The PhD rewires you… now I’m rewiring back. The last lesson of the PhD isn’t in the thesis. It’s learning how to stop mistaking endurance for balance.

It is finished. Two months ago today, exactly three years from when I first stumbled into this PhD life, as the clock struck midnight, I had fully drafted my thesis and booked my viva for two months later. Last night, I hit submit.

The only thing left on my PhD agenda now is to lie down like a salted fish and do nothing. (Yes, a nod to Chow’s immortal line: 「做人如果冇夢想，同條鹹魚有乜嘢分別呀？」— “If a person has no dreams, what’s the difference from a salted fish?”). Well, my dream at this point is to nap, so I guess I’ve come full circle.

Amazing art piece we bought in Lisbon – Fish drawn on broken tiles

PhD changes you (arguably – without consent…)

Doing a PhD is a huge undertaking. You think you’re just signing up for a degree, a structured thing with deadlines and milestones. But somewhere along the way it slips under your skin and rewires you. You start to realise it’s not just about producing a thesis — it’s about quietly reshaping how you think, how you spend your time, how you relate to others.

There are the obvious things: long hours, early mornings that bleed into late nights, bending time around deadlines like you’re running your own private Olympics. Dreams about work — not the metaphorical kind, but actual dreams where datasets, arguments, and half-written paragraphs chase you around.

I did try to protect myself. Weekends were sacred — my one immovable boundary. But the weekdays? They became a kind of over-compensation marathon. “If I keep weekends safe, I should pay it back by working even harder midweek.” And so I did. For the last year especially, that rhythm hardened: fewer dinners with friends, more nights staring at a half-eaten meal with my laptop still open, declining church commitments, community projects quietly pushed aside.

And yet, people who know me would probably describe me as a bit of an octopus — always dipping my tentacles into multiple things at once. Even during the PhD, that was my counter-measure: to resist being swallowed whole by the project, or by the endless temptation to improve methodologies on an upward-to-infinity scale. It was my way of clinging to variety, even if just at the edges.

At the end of the day, however, these are futile attempts to move an immovable load of work. All these cost sneaks up on you. No energy left to develop hobbies. No mental space to nurture relationships properly. No margin for anything that didn’t have the word “PhD” stamped on it. Life became PhD-centred, and everything else rotated around it like satellites around a heavy, slightly cranky planet.

Once the dust settled, the obvious question came knocking: is this how I want to live?

The last lesson

The final lesson of the PhD isn’t in the thesis. To me, it’s this: how to unlearn those patterns. How to stop mistaking endurance for balance. I’ve trained myself to push through – (to a point it becomes more enjoyable to just stay) — to add just one more paragraph, one more figure, one more revision. That survival mode worked for the PhD, but it’s a terrible blueprint for life. Productivity becomes its own trap: there’s always another article to read, another method to refine, another dataset to clean. The horizon keeps moving, and so do you, until you realise you’ve forgotten how to stop.

So the work now is almost the opposite: learning the discipline of switching off. Letting “good enough” actually be good enough. Accepting that leaving something unfinished until tomorrow doesn’t mean failure; it means you still get to have a tomorrow. Funnily enough, most of my codes do run much better the next day – once I had a cleared out mind to disentangle what kind of crap I scrambled together the night before.

My attempt to self-correct include:

Leave the office no later than 6:30pm.
Work from home a bit more (countering my tendency to loiter at the desk just because I can).
Say “yes” to new things outside of work. For example: training for a half-marathon. Current progress: minimal. (Help me out, runners of the world).

Onwards

I’ll save the spiel about “thesis format vs publication” for another time. For now, I just want to say I am eternally grateful to my supervisors, family, and friends for putting up with PhD-ing Jo. The PhD has taught me to get better at work. Now I need to continue to get better at life. The bettering doesn’t stop here. Here’s to a fuller, more balanced, more experienced life ahead.

Evolving Language in Healthcare: Empowering Patients or Consumers?

Language around healthcare provision has been changing over the last few decades, with a stronger emphasis on people’s role and capacity in making their decisions on the care options they wish to receive. This shift is motivated by the intent to balance the power dynamics between healthcare professionals and people who receive care, with the hope that this would reduce risk of harm/iatrogenic events.

Studies such as this examined people’s different preferences (in a mental health service context), and they all come with a reason – even for the less popular term “Survivor”, as the term appears to be describing their struggle to get relevant help in the system. The term “service user” is being increasingly used, within and beyond healthcare, in other domains such as social care or learning disabilities, where the people’s care needs is not necessarily seen as an illness. There is no good recommendation on which term should be used across all circumstances in people-facing materials.

Let’s take a step back: What the language is hoping to achieve, is to safeguard the relationship between healthcare professionals and people who receive care, such that individuals’ health is maximised. Language is relational. The study above highlighted the same thing: communicate and find out for whom which term is best used, and build this carer-cared relationship with respect.

Respect
Photo by Cytonn Photography on Pexels.com

My biggest qualm with the term “service user” is based on exactly this: how the term (potentially) changes the patient-doctor relationship into a consumer-provider relationship. I think the consumer-provider relationship comes with 2 major flawed assumptions:

assumption 1: All problems could be fixed, it is only a matter of price.
This thinking embeds deeply in capitalism that there is always a better solution to the current problem, over-estimating the capabilities of human knowledge on medicine.

assumption 2: All service providers are incapable – there is always someone else who can provide better services – reliance on competition. This is the other end of removing power from healthcare professionals. This removal of respect to professionalism changes people’s attitudes to help-seeking. People now ask for personal recommendations “Which doctor do you know is the best?” – instead of believing in the standards of which the profession is established on. The push to physician associates rides the same tide of the removal of professional standards of medical professionals.

Help-seeking is now dependent on social capital; better service is now linked with cost; the spirit of national healthcare service where health is a basic right is challenged – being healthy becomes a commodity. Inequalities, along with a thriving private healthcare service, will be widened as a result. The lack of a trusting relationship, and move to a transactional relationship between healthcare professionals and people also mean that the end goal of health service provision is no longer focused on individual functioning with alleviated illnesses, but patient satisfaction, which with the false assumption of what level of health is possibly attainable (in certain timeframe), could be impossible to satisfy. This fuels derogatory attitudes towards healthcare professionals, nurses, healthcare assistants, and doctors. No wonder retention rates of hospital staff remains low.

The same phenomenon and patterns are clear in other domains like education, and with the fast development in the capabilities of large language models and artificial intelligence, expertise is becoming less and less valued. Existing potentially trusting relationships between professionals and people need to be reforged and reimagined – and it all has to start with listening and involving people with lived experience in the generation of knowledge and expertise.

Existing **trusting** relationships between professionals and people need to be reimagined
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

Culture changes, attitudes changes, patient may be a term running out-of-date, and service user may be no longer in favour. Healthcare provision has to capture, value and reward the building of trusting relationships, and have a longer-term vision in investing in community building. This is bigger than healthcare planning, but on the relationship between the people and their government and policy makers. The people are watching.

The Value of a Child

“The Dog Who Went To Space” by Mila Punwar

I was honoured to have witnessed the unveiling of the inaugural ‘Children’s Plinth’ winning ceramic artwork ‘The Dog Who Went To Space’ at St Martin-in-the-fields last week. The artwork is part of the Mayor of London’s ‘Fourth Plinth Schools Award’ to put creative children centre stage as they paid homage to the Trafalgar Square’s historic Fourth Plinths.

Historically, women and children are often undercounted, deemed invisible, and their achievements not fully celebrated (see recent uproars on the Nobel Prize in Medicine). There are more statues of animals than statues of named women in London. Children are often discussed in a lens of potentials, what they can become, the next generation, and the future. But they are seldom appreciated as beings with intrinsic value, as valid and living contributors to knowledge generation, or valued members of society.

Who’s voice is heard? Who’s opinions are valued? Who is answering and making judgements to these questions? I observe a dominance of (a false sense of) a need for demonstrating entitlement. One has to earn their spot to be in the “room where it happens”. Under a façade of meritocracy, this need to show “added value” structures societal resource allocation and social policies. For example, the same line of reasoning underline the debates on minimum age for voting, eligibility for state pensions, mean-tested welfare system, and provision of health service. The same old Greeco-Roman attitude of citizenship persists: One has to contribute to society in a certain way for one to be recognised as a rightful citizen, a valued being. Initiatives on expanding participation, public and patient involvement, and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion all serve to challenge this old view, and expand: Young people’s merits is their being. You are valued for their being. (extend/substitute young people with any protected characteristics, gender, sexual orientation etc.)

The same old Greeco-Roman attitude of citizenship persists
Photo by Hisham Zayadneh on Pexels.com

Academics and policymakers learn the keywords quickly – to give a voice to young people, and listen; but many young people still doesn’t feel that they have a voice, and their voices unheard. I want to highlight an amazing work led by Dr Lauren Herlitz and a group of young people who produced a podcast episode on their thoughts and experiencing interacting with primary care services. Lauren put the young people’s voices at the forefront, in a direct, raw form that does not filter out their anger and fear in their voices (listen to the podcast). These voices are now transformed into a different voice – as an academic paper, backed by the academic class. In my view, the academic class has the role and responsibility to amplify and project these voices: we are rooted in scientific methods, evidence and rigor, but has to transform and be (always) unsatisfied with the impact of our collective contributions.

The burden is now with us as adults, activists, researcher academic and policymakers. The public is engaged when relationships are built, when actions are seen, when voices are heard, when history and culture is respected. Investment in long-term planning of public engagement is crucial to inclusive and better research and policy-making practices.

I am deeply inspired by Mila Punwar and her ceramics artwork. Listen to Mila talk about her creations. Laika, the dog, was the first living creature to orbit the Earth. Laika died a few days into her mission, partly due to the process, but the crew never prepared for more than 7 days of food. Laika was bound to be sacrificed. Young people’s voices are here to be projected upwards, to the outerspace if need be. Their voices cannot die like Laika.

Who do we value?

The fault in our names – Share your story

I had the opportunity to visit the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at Seattle, Washington. I was greeted by a pair of (portraited) open arms of Chief Si’ahl, the most famous dxʷdəwʔabš chief, whose name was anglicised to – as we now know – Seattle.

Picture of the description text for Chief Si’ahl’s portrait.

I can’t help but think about how Chief Si’ahl’s name would most likely be represented in many different ways in a modern data system. For example, Si’ahl already is a compromised ASC-II representation of his name in his original Lushootseed writing, where non-alphabetical characters are simply not accepted. Even in the anglicised form, his name may be recorded quite differently at different places, namely “Sealth” or “Seattle”. This meant that linkage based on his name would be more difficult than others.

Burke Museum gave me another example of situations when people’s naming systems differ from the Western Forename-Surname structure, they are sometimes forced to conform. Chief Jonathan “Whonnock” (anglicised)’s name is structured as such.

You would be mistaken to think these questionable treatments of names is a thing of the past! I was updating my UCL profile recently, and UCL gave this lovely advice – no names containing punctuation, diacritics, special or non-Latin characters, or names that are too long.

This may be innocent and non-consequential for file names – but you won’t say for people’s names. What truly hurts about “being called names” is about being called names that one does not identify. We live in a culture that claim to respect diversity, but has yet to truly reflect on their practices, in terms of data system design. In terms of data linkage, where names are often used to help identify if multiple records belong to the same person, we have long-established inequalities by racial-ethnic groups – where people from White British groups are most well linked, represented, and included in research. I have written about the technical side of this argument in my own academic work – hopefully out soon (waiting for Arxiv…)!

The Fault in our Names – share your stories.

We need to tell our stories to drive change. I have started a page here to invite your submission to collective tell our story – how our names are misrepresented in data systems, and it’s direct impact on our lives. I hope this will create an archive of our stories, and bring them to light.

One day, our names, all names, will be treated with respect.

That’s Just Common Sense… Or is it?

Esther McVey, A.K.A Rushi Sunak’s “Common Sense” Minister, declared “war against backdoor politicisation” by suggesting a ban of “divisive” rainbow coloured lanyards among civil servants (which caught most of media attention), and a ban on all jobs dedicated to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). This probed my curiosity in what “common sense” really meant.

Here’s a quick summary from reading the Wikipedia page (perhaps GPTs would do a better job here but let’s keep this authentic!). Earlier (~BCE 350ish) Aristotelian definition of “Common Sense” focused on the five senses, how there must be a common way in which people (and creatures) perceive the world, tell apart constructs across modalities, for example “sweetness” from “white”. This understanding of “Common Sense” was mostly translated and updated after Enlightenment, in the late 18th Century, to mean a set of collective and conventional moral consciousness, sense or sentiment that doesn’t need reasoning (with Kant standing against the feeling bits). This philosophical line of representing “Common Sense” as an “universal moral law” has been adopted in Catholic and Christian apologetics, such as CS Lewis’ influential book “Mere Christianity”. Across the Pacific Ocean, ancient (~BCE 300ish) philosopher Mencius wrote (English translation) about a similar concept, that humanness is defined by their innate feelings of commiseration, shame, modesty and complaisance. These philosophies shaped our modern understanding of “Common Sense”: (1) very optimistic view of the human condition, (2) universality of this moral judgement that does not require reasoning or reflection, and (3) “Common Sense” is used to define humanness.

Here are a few quick arguments to the “Commonness” in “Common Sense”. *Assessment of the human condition is not relevant to this discussion so I will just say I do not hold the same optimistic view of human nature as Mencius. A low hanging counterargument to (2) is the shift of what’s deemed to be morally acceptable over time, context, society structure and locations. Killing animals for fun was “universally” accepted, until it’s not. Slavery was “universally” accepted, until it’s not. Given (3) is true, with (2) being relative to space and time, accordingly, what defines humanness (3) becomes relative. The key question, hence lies at who decides what is Commonly Good, and when it is no longer Commonly Good.

How did Esther McVey know rainbow coloured lanyards are “divisive” and are against “Common Sense”? By definition, there is no need of reasoning for Esther to explain her decision. On a personal level, I acknowledge (accept, but maybe not at endorse level) other modes of “knowing” that does not strictly rely on reasoning. For example, faiths, beliefs, trust, relationships, values can not always be meaningfully explained or metricised and quantified into degrees of reasoning. People are rightfully living by their beliefs, without the need of justifying how they have conceived their beliefs, with or without reasoning. I mean, I still can’t fully understand why people voted for Trump, but I am satisfied to not demand their votes to be reasoned before them be deemed valid, and I can co-exist with them in a democratic society. However, in the public sphere, this way of knowing without reasoning removes the transparency and justifiability of decision-making. Relying solely on this way of knowing re-mystifies politics back to the era of empire-theocracy. The politicians (decision-makers) are left with the opportunity to misuse their power of exceptionality. Reason is required for this reason. Fortunately, in a democratic system, there are still mechanisms to challenge this power – We’ll see when it happens (when’s general election?).

There are several foreseeable practical impact on public servants following Esther McVey’s announcement. This instrumentalised view of civil servants as a horde of machines with assumed neutrality might be preparing for large-scale AI takeover. Jokes aside, this un-reasoned power to put restrictions on people – humans – to express themselves will soon be shooting the already weak civil services in their own foot. There are two kinds of expressions that are being restricted – visible and invisible sense of identities (Back to Aristotelian!). Visible ones are like the example, carrying rainbow lanyards, but could be extended to, say, wearing a hijab, looking too Asian, does not drink, revealing ankles etc… When the expression of personal identity conflicts with what’s deemed to be “divisive” or “Common Sense”, it will always be the individuals’ humanness that are disrespected. Heck, “Esther” too is a name originated in Jewish/Christian traditions, should we move to use numbers to call civil servants during their duty hours (hello again, 1984)? Esther McVey’s attempt to promote inclusion in civil servant workforce serves as a recipe to undermine the exact thing she is trying to improve.

There are wider implications on identities that are invisible. Networks to support people from different religion or country of origin are now suppressed. Role models, peer support that were previously more accessible are now hidden. There is no easy way to identify other people who are similarly minded, who are happy to support, for mentorship, informal chats or discussions. This assumed “neutrality” then, again perpetuates a biased resource allocation system towards people with high capabilities (in terms of social capital etc….), and not potential. The already clunky “machine” Esther hoped to fix will keep on failing her expectations.

Would universities and higher education institutes follow suit? UKRI has made precedent in October 2023 by banning Research England EDI Expert Advisory Group (with independent investigation found no evidence of any breach). Will these bans extend to university staff who are technically publicly funded? I had a rainbow lanyard when I was at King’s College London, would they take those away too?

End with a whip of good news – in the latest news today, the lanyard ban does not appear in the actual guidelines. But it was never just about the rainbow lanyards. More is coming, and next time it might concern you, when your sense of individual and humanness is no longer respected, remember, it’s just “Common Sense”.

Temptation of Treating Science as Sovereignty

Science as Sovereignty, and the problem of this.

As Nietzsche shared his observation that “God is dead”, as we enter the (post)secular world, we seemingly departed from the need of revelation from supreme beings to ascertain the truth. However, Schmitt believed that political sovereignty remains (re)enchanted within the same theological framework, that modern national sovereignty is a reflection, or a derivative of Theo-sovereignty. In Chan’s book, he attempts to disenchant the Theo-political relationships in this atheistic age.

I cannot help but project the arguments & discussions in the book to my line of work: in health research and policy making, that Science is disguised to fill the gap of Theo-Sovereignty.

“Follow the science” – Not sure if anyone kept a count of how many times Boris Johnson and his crew repeated this phrase during the pandemic. They certainly walk their talk in at least 2 dimensions: party gate, and in policy making – slow & weak masking recommendations. Nevertheless, “follow the science” stirred up a lot of emotions and debates within the country – arm-chair epidemiologists, experts with polar opposite recommendations, fake news… Amongst the fury of opinions, the government framed science as the rightful king, filling the gap of Theo-sovereignty, as a voice of a justified and absolute authority.

A character of sovereignty is that it is above the law, that the sovereignty shapes the law, and the law serves the sovereignty. Social distancing, no home visits, masking… In this way “science” very well fits this description, determining “What” a society should do. Anything that strays away from “Science” deserves mockery and rejection, if not punishment and persecution.

All sounds good, only if science is as straight forward as a binary yes or no. In my view, science is an art of embracing and interrogating certainty. “It depends.” Science by nature cannot act as a sovereign power to rule a society. Hence what we observed in the UK (and many other places), is instead a colluded form of scientific sovereignty, a nationalism-biased evidence-picked aristocracy. This camouflage of nationalism in science is most evident in global (health) research. In the following paragraph, I wish to demonstrate how current approaches in defining “Who” should do research is colluded with nationalism (national sovereignty).

There is an increasingly popular narrative in academia that global research should be led by people from their corresponding country. Not to be mistaken, I am fully supportive of the said initiatives, providing funding and opportunities for scholarship to develop in the global south. I’ve gone out of my way to support researchers from overseas to learn research methods, statistical software, and job interview preparations.

However, this narrative is often reduced into a means of reattribution or reimbursement of the western colonial past. This emphasises on appearance and country of origin takes away from the researchers’ abilities, but more importantly, feeds into the increasingly prominent nationalist agenda: “it is their history, let them research it”, “it is their people, let them help them”, in short, “it is none of our business.” By no surprise, as the UK economy showed signs of slowing, the overseas aid (which is used to support a lot of global research) was immediately cut. This new “scientific” post-Theo-sovereignty is not gentle nor kind, but self-preserving, self-promoting and self-indulging.

Science does not happen in a vacuum. But it if does, we would easily reach the conclusion that researchers from the local countries are more likely to understand the context better, which makes research, communication, implementation and much more easier. The preferential development of scholars from the global south to solve local problems makes sense. These initiatives need not to be framed as promoting diversity, which could be twisted into a form of exclusivity, but simply as a better approach to produce better science.

Why hasn’t in the past global south scholarship taken a larger role in academic research and policy making? Why hasn’t they be considered suitable candidates? Our measurement of capability is always framed by a limited few. Did you graduate from Oxbridge? Did your parents work in academia? Did you publish from x y z journals? It is the university application season soon, have a look at the plethora of university league tables floundering themselves to their potential (mainly overseas) customers, aren’t we all playing by this game a greater authority designed, as they saw that this was good?

We are enchanted by the belief of certainty “Science” provides. This is no fault of the scientific approaches, but the collusion of other worldly powers (e.g., nationalism) that biases how progress is achieved and measured.

This is usually the place I offer a solution, some insight or revelation. But I really don’t have one. As a Christian, I believe in God’s provisions big and small. Researcher is a role equally as impactful to improving people’s lives as any. If God forbids, I shall do as much as I can as a researcher. My life and mission is bigger than this role. And I hope you find yours too.

This blog collects my early reflection from reading Dr Chan Ka Fu’s new book on political theology. I’m still very early on in this book, so I might have misrepresented Dr Chan, if so I apologise!

Chapter 5 – One (Only) Way forward.

I propose that only via shared understanding, relationship-building, a community that preserves space for authenticity and solidarity can truly achieve meaningful representation – with unity in diversity.

The concept of “Global Village” was born in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan, who illustrated how the technical advancements in communication abolishes geographical and temporal boundaries. There emerged an innocent globalist and cosmopolitanism view that harmony in diversity will be achievable in no time. The Culture War narrative took over, as the after-(ongoing) effect of the economy crisis ripples, as the “compete for survival” instincts kicks back in economic and cultural terms, the harmony in diversity fantasy seems much more far away than it was in the 1960s.

In earlier chapters, I criticised HEI’s approaches in promoting representation. I argued that the current measures of diversity could easily be portraited as performative, quasi-pro-diversity mandates that drains energy from both the dominant and minoritized groups, as the former feels like they’ve been unjustly underserved, and the latter tokenised, seeing little actual improvements.

How then, can we create and preserve a safe and empowering space that community can thrive, with harmony in diversity? In my opinion, there are 2 key attributes to such communities: Authenticity and Solidarity. And both of these attributes can only be demonstrated through patient, non-judgemental listening and communication.

1. Authenticity

I believe that our identity is continually constructed through our interaction with our circumstances, with respect to history, personal struggles, evolves and adapt to our environment. If we truly respect ethnicity as “self-defined and subjectively meaningful to an individual.” (ONS, see discussion on this in Chapter 3), we have to allow individuals, especially young people in HEI, to have the courage to embrace and explore this uncertainty. We have to reject label-driven classifications to pre-determine how we should interact with others. Here’s my story to illustrate this point:

I attended a language class at the university in London, this was not too far from when the 2019 Hong Kong Democratic Movements have made the news in the West. The first few terms we learn after “What’s your name?”, “Where do you live?”, would be – you guessed it – “Where are you from?”. I am in a small class of 10, coming from different countries, ranging from Switzerland, Germany, Poland to Pakistan, Iran, China. We took turns to ask each another the question – where are you from.

There is a stark contrast in the temperature of the room when I said I am from Hong Kong, and my other classmate said that they are from China. I was welcomed with a lot of warmth, and them a much less welcoming acknowledgement. It is no surprise that the China = Bad overly simplified narrative has crept into the classroom, and affected how we treat others. I felt it, and I decided to share with the class the cultural similarities between Hong Konger and Chinese people. The class was less hostile (yes.) as they now can see my Chinese friend more as a person, and not as an extension of the communist suppressor as they may have previously perceived.

The more socially acceptable, easy thing for me to do in that situation would be simply add salt to injury, to explain how Hong Kong is different from China. I chose not to do that as that would further undermine the class as a safe space for my friend to explore his identity. But this is not just for him. I can easily imagine that this act of differentiation would drive me further away from my dual Hong Konger-Chinese identity. I admire a lot of the elements in Chinese traditional culture, the food, the language, the art… Yet there is strong social pressure for me to denounce part of my identity, and only by doing that my social standing in the environment can be affirmed. Knowingly or unknowingly, my self-identity would change, not as a result of authentic, soul-searching, but under the influence of social correctness or social desirability.

An environment that truly enables authentic identity building need not to be value-free, but it requires individuals to be treated with no presumptions that is based on group identity one may be prescribed as having. It means that individuals have to choose the hard way, to not rely on mnemonic devices of ‘labelling’ too much when we meet and interact with others. This leads on to the second attribute – solidarity.

Languages by Library of Congress is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

2. Solidarity

A community that endorses solidarity within itself share a key assumption: that every individual in the group is valued as much as the other. There are a lot of discussion on the importance of solidarity so I won’t drill into this too much here.

To highlight how HEI values diversity, a common approach was to collate a long list of cultural or religious events or dates that is happening each month. This was intended to create opportunity for staff and students to demonstrate solidarity with others. I strongly doubt many people read them, or “celebrate with” others. My observation is that, apart from being startled by the sheer amount of “festivals” and “celebrations” that are on the list, the biggest barrier that stops people from “celebrating with”, is the lack of relevance behind those jubilant pictures and exotic foods. I think it is not meaningful to include every festival you can think of purely on the notion of inclusivity. It has to come from the population you intend to share this list with, and it has to be an invitation to “celebrate with” the relevant groups. How do we stand in solidarity if we don’t even know they exist? Representation of non-existing people does not make sense. HEI as a porous community, be it at department, institute, or the University level, must allow individuals to willingly share, and take initiative, and have their skin in the game to allow the above to happen.

Ultimately, the narrative that work and life should be separated, that one’s goal for life is retirement, and that the individuals as just a cog in the system strips people self-worth and sense of community. Under this narrative, your coworkers not worth your time, but another replaceable, disposable piece of work to listen to, understand or build relationship with. But there is no short-cut to diversity and proper representation. There is no laws, rules, or recommended practices that can foster relationship. Authenticity and solidarity needs to be centred at the heart of any diverse community to develop shared understanding. With no understanding, there is no true diversity; with no true diversity, there is no true representation; with no true representation, there is no equity.

An authentic community with individualised understanding and solidarity is key to proper representation, and equity (in the long run).

There is one, only way forward:

“…Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself”
Mark 12:31

“There is no panacea, or utopia, there is just love and kindness and trying, amid the chaos, to make things better where we can. And to keep our minds wide, wide open in a world that often wants to close them.”
Matt Haig, “Notes on a Nervous Planet”

End.

Chapter 4: Superficial Representation and True Beaconing

Chapter 4 aims to suggest that HEI’s must challenge the wider underlying philosophy that has shaped the current approach.

Chapter 3 has identified 2 flaws of the current paradigm of promoting representation. Chapter 4 aims to suggest that HEI’s must challenge the wider underlying philosophy that has shaped the current approach and their flaws.

The UK is said to have engaged in the Culture War. It is “us” against “them”, us as the rightful descendants of Anglos and Saxons against the illegal migrants who are diluting the glory of Britannia. Differences are seen as invasive, as threats that needs to be actively suppressed and neutralised. The British identity is to be like us. If you cannot act, speak, think, see like us, you need to be managed. This mentality puts minoritized groups into a mindset of competition, it’s all for ourselves now. Black history month is for black people, Lunar New Year is for East Asians, it is not uncommon that HEI is becoming more eager to recognise differences, but it is unfortunately uncommon that these differences are not really celebrated. There is no platform to display horizontal cultural appreciation and solidarity when every group tries to keep themselves relevant, we are made to compete for higher cultural relevance in HEI, in politics, in society.

This meant that people from minoritized communities are then expected to take up even more responsibilities – you need to fight for diversity, representation, but also fight for the sustenance of your own culture. It is no wonder we feel exhausted and tokenised, as our efforts rarely translate into true cultural changes, as we failed to see enough improvements in our daily lives. We feel tokenised because our existence merely acts as virtue signalling, because we are used to fulfil tick-box exercises. Tokenised because it is always just us speak for ourselves. This divides the minority groups, instigating a “all for themselves” mentality, as difference is framed as threatening, cultural survival is perceived as something to compete for, that only the fittest will survive.

This cultural assimilation narrative does not only affect the minoritized groups, but it also breeds the resentment in dominant groups that were expressed too often in academia towards the minoritized groups. “You must be a diversity hire.” This resentment and grief do not (always) stem from race-based discrimination, although it is often framed this way, this could be instead an expression of anger or discontent towards the seemingly unfair system where the minoritized are rewarded with more merit than they perceived to possess. This perception of unjust is brewed from the current non-transparent and ineffective way of promoting “socially valued” practices, where genuine communications and respect of differences is left out unmeasured, hence of the scene. People expressing this resentment may not disagree with the principles of equality, they might even be strong supporters of the notion, but they were misconstrued with top-down promotion of visible representation.

To enforce these top-down, superficial representation, EDI groups quickly resorted to law and social contracts (that people might not agree). We are told that diversity and representation is valued in HEI, and that discriminatory behaviour will be punished. I argue below that neither of the 2 approaches – legal deterrent or social pressure – address the crux of the problem.

The legal system exists to refrain people from hating each another when they are violated, knowing that any mishaps (defined by law) will be justly punished or reattributed. Social contracts exists to refrain people from loving or caring for each another, when they only need to satisfy the need to demonstrate performative, socially acceptable behaviours to be seen as prosocial. This means that under the social contract of “no discrimination”, people learned that their lack of/unwillingness to love and understand differences will be hidden covertly behind a certain pattern of behaviours. Treating means as goals in promoting EDI becomes a retractive, ahistorical approach that avoids reconciliation and sustains colonial social hierarchy – to continue to see the culturally dominant group as the giver, and the rest of the minority flourishing conditioned on the dominant groups’ approval, that we are never seen as equals.

To demonstrate progress in “Beaconing and Sharing” activities is a key to be awarded the Athena Swan award. If HEI is an epitome of society, (that is, if we can separate HEI from society), beaconing activity must include the active reflection on the philosophy and ideology as we strive to push for a safe and diverse environment for everyone to reach their potentials to the fullest.

My final chapter will hope to suggest what a safe and empowering space for diversity and representation should look like.

Chapter 3: The Flaws of Representation

In chapter 3, I describe 2 flaws of representation:
1) Arbitrary Groupings, Arbitrary Goals
2) Choice of Representation

In this chapter, I will describe 2 main flaws in how ethnicity and ethnic representation is discussed. By the end of the chapter, I hope you can start to see why progress in promoting ethnic equality is slow, and may be illusive.

Flaw 1) Arbitrary Groupings, Arbitrary Goals

Let’s say we take upon the “measurement is gold” mantra, we still have to face the problem that we are constantly moving the goal post of equity, as number of “groups” are ever increased (& prescribed), such that progress is hard to track or make sense of. In the UK, the terms we used to describe minoritised ethnic groups have been changing – people of colour, BME, BAME… And now “It is time we drop BAME” in the Sewell Report. The widening trend and the abandonment of an over-arching term to describe all non-White British people reflects a changing demographic in the UK, and a changing public discourse to use better terms to describe people’s identity. The question lies: Who decides how other’s describe their identity? For what purpose are we classifying these categorically different identities?

The terms we use to describe race and ethnicity is unique to where we are. It is often defined by the dominant groups (e.g., White British). More inclusive terms emerge when minorities were given a larger voice. But these emerging terms do not change the fact that these terms are created by and for the dominant group, and that their group membership do not solely depend on their identity, but depend on the dominant group’s perception. A quick example, people of middle eastern heritage, who speaks perfect English and has pale skin colour is treated vastly different before and after 911. In the UK, from the last 30 years of census, some people groups reported changing ethnic identity, but the ever-stable ethnic identification is White British. Terminology cares less to differentiate Black Caribbean from Black African, but really cares about differentiate “them” from “us”. It is foreseeable that a similar story will unfold, creating more terms and groups to capture “other” groups and “mixed” groups in the UK.

The pattern is clear, ideology is always chasing after the reality: we only care enough to change when there are visibly large enough groups in society that we need to “update our terms”, but not our mentality. In this way, top-down representation or classification into existing categories will forever lag behind, as the UK continues to diversify, as new categories are being created and the goal post of representation will never be attained.

ONS (2003) describes ethnicity as “self-defined and subjectively meaningful to an individual.” Flaw 1 shows the problem of the operationalisation of such measure, that choosing an identity from a limited number of choices that closest resembles our identity, is not truly self-defined, subjective, nor meaningful.

Choice?
Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

Flaw 2) Choice of representation

We do not choose which country we are born, we do not choose our skin colour. As a migrant minority in the UK, similarly, you have no choice but to represent your visibly perceived ethnicity. Representation starts not when you pronounced membership of the ethnic group, it begins “whenever you step into that space” (Quote from Chineke! Ep4. The Anxiety of Representation). During the pandemic, whenever I step on the tube, I can just hide my Asian-looking masked face to get a free 1-metre quarantine zone, no matter how crowded it is. Every Asian looking person became Wuhan, Chinese. Chineseness is dumb down to a simple dimension of fear.

Perceived membership is not always a good indication of subjective identity. Let’s look at another example. Some migrants from Hong Kong (Hong Kongers) yearned to differentiate themselves from being called “Chinese”. There is an ongoing, traceable, consensual process within the Hong Konger community to build and define Hong Kongness, but this difference is often not respected by Chinese and the wider popuation. This highlights the dynamic nature of ethnic identities, and that visible representation is not sufficient a marker to denote group membership. This varying nature of ethnic identities is not unique in migrant populations. To oppose same-sex marriage in Hong Kong, a lot of conservative politicians claim that it is in Chinese culture and tradition to uphold a heterosexual, monogamy marriage. However, as Marco Wan illustrated in his paper, the traditional Chinese marriage was never monogamous. Chineseness was influenced by (western) modernity in their own invention of their marriage “tradition”. Within people groups of the same ethnic origin, with shared language and nationality, their notion of ethnic identity and what it entails can differ. The attempt of using top-down categories and language to restrict how ethnic identity can vary limits our ability to truly allow people to choose how to express their own.

Non-dominant groups do not have the choice to be un-represented, the “Single Outlier” explanation is never accepted for non-dominant groups. The “Bad Apple” excuse is too often used, and accepted, when say e.g., a White man has breached the law. This is another way of explaining why the “unconscious biases” remains pertinent in the UK, the dominant group rejects any potentially negative connotation linked with their White British ethnicity, but are too quick to label and stick with stereotypes they assign on minoritized groups. The dominant group has to power to choose to be un-represented. “I’m not like those White men.” Can non-dominant groups do the same? Look at the disproportionate rates of stop and search in young black men, the colonial spirit lives on, the same spirit that separated families, enslaved cultures, and maintained the hierarchical caste of social class within the UK. Minoritised groups can’t help but feel like their every step is watched, and that they will forever be the other. The reliance on appearance representation amplifies the power imbalances between groups.

The direct implication of the reliance of appearance representation is the risk of under-representing the rights of the less populated/less vocal “sub-groups” within the same ethnic category umbrella term. The indirect consequence is that it creates an illusion of progress (which can be infinitely perpetuated by keep on moving the goal posts), when the underlying resource allocation system does not change, that people from non-dominant groups are still viewed as lesser.

Chapter 2: Current approach to ethnic representation

Construing means as outcome may overestimate true progression to a more equitable HEI.

21^st century is an era of metrics. Measuring and demonstrating impact becomes essential to research publications. This realist “only measurable changes are true changes” perspective dominates how “evidence” is conceived. The same line of logic was applied to promoting EDI initiatives.

We often treat EDI representation as visible representation, as they are more measurable. The aim is to get people of certain membership of a group (e.g., Asian) to attain an ideal proportion in a certain measurement of equity (e.g., promotion). For example, proportion of non-white people on interview panels, international student percentages etc. However, in pushing for a wider visible representation (definition 1) to be achieved, we assumed people who share those characteristics (1) are necessary to represent the groups’ rights (definition 2).

Assumption that AR leads to RR, which in turn leads to Equity

AR is not necessary nor sufficient to attain Equity

For example, in the Sewell report, the ethnic diversity of the police force becomes a target of intervention, with the underlying theory of change that once the (appearance) representation problem is solved, minoritized communities would regain equitable rights compared to their white counterparts. Another example, EDI groups in HEI often require a certain demographic make-up, inadvertently putting pressure on minorities to contribute. This follows the same line of logic that once the EDI group is diverse, the diverse needs will be addressed. There are numerous counterexamples that visible representation do not automatically achieve rights representation, black on black violence, the countless stories about those who made it became the gate-keeper to enter “high society”, hey ho, look at the faces behind UK Illegal Migration Bill 2023.

No doubt, having representation from minoritized groups can be a reflection of underlying change in power structure, equality and resource allocation. But that cannot be the only means of measuring change in our society. As Universities are incentivised to push for different awards recognising their efforts on EDI, when the only outcome measure focuses on superficial appearance representation, we might overestimate our progress to equity.

We need people who can fight for the rights of the underprivileged, and empower the minoritized, such that appearance representation would be the natural outcome of a changed landscape. This is a strong argument for people in power, often White and British, to take initiative. The misplaced emphasis on “measurable” outcomes became a hinderance to progress, as we phantasies for an easily measurable solution. Our current approach to ethnic representation does not promote this vision.

This conflict in apparent progress and on-the-ground experience among ethnic minoritized members of HEI is a source of frustration. I shall touch on this in more detail in Chapter 4.

In the next chapter, I will describe 2 flaws in how ethnicity and ethnic representation is discussed, and hoping to elucidate the power constructs that were so deeply embedded in our social interactions that may slow, or mimic progress in promoting ethnic equality.

* Appearance Representation: A depiction or portrayal of a person or thing, typically one produced in an artistic medium – definition 1.

Rights Representation: The action of standing for, or in the place of, a person, group, or thing, and related senses – definition 2.