Creative Approaches to Race and In/security in the Caribbean and the UK (CARICUK)

Creative Approaches to Race and In/security in the Caribbean and the UK (CARICUK) is a year-long collaboration between artists and educators. It aims to transform discussions about race and anti-racism in UK higher education institutions. It will redefine race as an in/security. This is based on the model of Caribbean In/securities, which sees security and insecurity as perspectival and relational terms that people negotiate in their everyday lives and through creative means. Understanding race as an in/security means that education institutions and black communities should negotiate anti-racist outcomes between them, with listening and change on both sides. The implication is that the fellowship aims to push institutional race discourse beyond inclusion and deficits, and towards education institutions actively participating in anti-racist learning and institutional transformation.

Over a twelve-month period, Dr Pat Noxolo's fellowship will move through three stages: provocation, participation and transformation. Three artistic provocations, designed to provoke discussion about Caribbean and racialised in/securities, will each be followed by public discussion events. An online learning pack for schools, about Caribbean and racialised in/securities, will lead into a large-scale arts participation and exhibition. Finally, three short films and a publishing experiment will push towards institutional transformation.

The bedrock of the project is that UK higher education can learn from Caribbean In/securities, because the UK's current racial disparities are an outcome of its historical relationships with the Caribbean, whilst the environmental and climatic in/securities that the Caribbean is now facing show the UK, itself a collection of small islands, the in/securities it will have to deal with in the future. Historically it was in the Caribbean, during the five centuries of European colonial rule (featuring enslavement, indentureship, and the establishment of crucial aspects of global production and trade) that the UK created its own peculiar forms of racialised hierarchy. These broadly informed the racialised hierarchies in Britain's later colonial practice across Asia and Africa, and have also informed everyday struggles over race relations in the UK for at least the last seventy years, since the symbolism of the arrival of the Empire Windrush from the Caribbean in 1948. Moreover, in the 21st century the Caribbean, rich in global resources and connections, is also key to revealing everyday negotiations over many other forms of in/security that the UK, and islands across the world, will have to negotiate for survival - for example storms and hurricanes, sea level rise, food in/security and the struggle for sustainable livelihoods.

Geography is a key discipline through which to engage a range of overlapping publics - academics, educators, black communities, and arts practitioners - in thinking about this wide range of shared in/securities, whilst centring black perspectives on race in UK higher education. In addition to its expertise around climate science, UK Geography is in the middle of a slow and painful process of reflecting on the discipline's historical and contemporary complicity in the explorations and exploitations that laid the groundwork for the racialised inequalities and global catastrophes that we now face. In particular, decades of calls to transform institutions and to promote anti-racist practice in secondary and higher education teaching and research are building towards an effective shift, and Dr Noxolo, as part of the RACE group of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), is at the forefront of this effort. UK Geography is therefore a highly fertile terrain for mounting a year-long programme of creative engagements that draw on existing research on Caribbean in/securities in order to transform institutional practices around race.