The Architecture of Whiteness: How institutional whiteness shapes academic careers in the UK

The UK’s academic landscape is currently suffering from a significant underrepresentation of racialised minority academic staff, emphasised by the increasing disparity between staff and growing racialised minority student populations. Primary reasons for this underrepresentation stem from racist practices being perpetuated in career progression and stability, where racialised minority staff are less likely to be promoted and are more likely to leave their institutions or be on precarious contracts than their white counterparts. Inequalities in careers also includes emotional impacts on racialised staff who have reported feeling undervalued and unbelonging to their universities due to racist experiences. A stark disparity arises when tracking progression from undergraduate study to professorship, where racialised minority students progressing from undergraduate to professorship are significantly decreasing at the student to doctoral researcher (DR), and the DR to early career researcher (ECR) stages of academic career pipelines.

This thesis aims to examine the reasons why the UK’s higher education sector is grappling with a marked underrepresentation of racialised minority academic staff. To do this, the thesis focuses on the early stages of career-building for racialised minority DRs and ECRs in UK universities. Bringing together conceptual underpinnings of whiteness, I locate the ‘bricks’ that have constructed a metaphorical notion of the ‘architecture of whiteness’. This metaphorical notion of whiteness being a structural feature of the UK university space – both physically and metaphorically – focuses my investigation on spatial features that are built into the walls of the academy, which continues to perpetuate underrepresentation and discrimination of racialised minority academics. My research objectives investigate the shared experiences of career trajectories of racialised minority DRs and ECRs, determine the impact of racial identity on mentorship in academic career-making processes, and assess the influence of whiteness on imagined futures.

Utilising a mixed method approach of 27 semi-structured interviews and 185 online survey responses, the thesis combines theoretical resources from Critical Race Theory (CRT) and intersectional feminism to centre the voices of racially marginalised DRs and ECRs, thereby transforming their narratives about career agency in the context of systemic oppression into tools to dismantle the architecture of whiteness. I empirically uncover that the bricks of whiteness have been used to build an environment where all racialised minority DRs and ECRs attending UK universities are subject to unequal career building experiences, irrespective of their individual characteristics, location, institution, merit, or previous experiences. The relationship between racialised minority DRs’ and ECRs’ career self-efficacy and their perceptions and experiences of discrimination in academia is also explored to enhance understandings of how agency is portrayed in the context of systematic oppression.

This thesis contributes new empirical knowledge addressing racialised minority DR and ECR experiences in UK higher education. Additionally, it conceptually brings together multiple arguments about how whiteness is a structural feature of the university as opposed to an individual experience. By adopting a collective spatial perspective, the research situates university career-making beyond individual meritocratic outcomes within spaces that understand how structural whiteness collectively disadvantages racialised minority DRs and ECRs. By adopting a spatial perspective, the research situates university career-making beyond individual meritocratic outcomes into a space that characterises whiteness as a structural architectural element that is collectively disadvantaging racialised minority DRs and ECRs in academic career trajectories.