Understanding to Overstand the education system: The educational journeys and experiences of Black British women graduates

What are the educational journeys and experiences of Black British women graduates? What roles do their families and extended networks play? How do their ethnicities, cultural backgrounds and social class, along with their raced and gendered identities influence their educational experiences and journeys? These questions will be answered in a brand new book. An ambition this fellowship will enable me to fulfil based on my doctoral thesis. In doing so, this ensures the academic findings will reach a non-academic general audience.

The proposed monograph will build on Mirza's ground-breaking book Young, Female and Black and highlight the unique challenges and racism encountered by this group. It will explore Black British women's experiences within different types of educational institutions; their disconnect from Eurocentric curriculums; alongside internalised pressures which impact upon their mental health. The book will illustrate their compelling commitment to achieving educational 'success', which sees them creating and employing individual and collective strategies to overcome challenges. The book will also offer an analysis of the narrow understandings of educational 'success,' which fails to acknowledge the historical inequalities within the education system that makes it difficult for Black British women graduates to achieve; highlighting when they do, it often does not yield the same rewards as those enjoyed by their peers. My original contribution to this field of research lies in the importance of understanding the ways in which Black British women graduates' multiple, overlapping and devalued identities interplay with educational structures. Unique insight will be offered on how race, gender and social class, as well as cultural background and ethnicity, together shape their experiences and journeys within the education system. These understandings will contribute to highlighting the antiblack systemic challenges of the education system, and how this specifically impacts on Black British women.

The main aim of this book is to generate impact and engagement from a range of different audiences (as discussed in the next section) to assist in bettering the support within the educational experiences and journeys of Black girls and women. Through their experiential knowledge, narrated in the book, it will make a significant contribution to the sociology of education, in particular, the field of educational inequalities in relation to race, ethnicity, class and gender.
Moreover, as I will be employing storytelling techniques as a tool to communicate the findings in the book, I will be advancing the theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist perspectives, which are two of the frameworks that I utilise in my doctoral research.

As part of the fellowship, I will acquire more advanced research methodological training, particularly in quantitative methods to support further research on Black women's occupational success following on from my PhD research. I also plan to strengthen my teaching by contributing to substantive modules in education and sociology, as well as research methods. I will also use this fellowship to build my academic network and to raise my research profile through participating in national and international conferences and study groups of the British Sociological Associations, the International Sociological Association, as well as the British Educational Research Association.

At the end of the fellowship, I will have secured a book contract and completed the first draft of a monograph. I will also have developed my quantitative skills by undertaking advanced research methods training, and I will have begun to build international academic networks for possible collaborations in my future academic career.