Beyond BME: discursive constructions of identities for architecture students

Context
In a political climate where tensions around race, ethnicity and social class have surfaced as separate but increasingly urgent questions of social justice, universities are faced with addressing stubborn racial, ethnic and class-based inequalities in outcomes for students from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME), and lower socioeconomic backgrounds. However, the fixed and separate identity categories employed in statistically-driven efforts to address inequalities are at odds with the fluid intersectional understandings of identity provided by contemporary social and cultural theory (Fraser, 2000; Hall, 1996; Gilroy, 2001). Furthermore, at a policy-level, the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) note that the causes of different outcomes involve a complex mix of wider socio-historical structures, the social contexts of individual Higher Education (HE) providers, and day-to-day communication between staff and students at the level of micro-interaction (HEFCE et al, 2015:ii).

The need for research into the complexities of identity has been highlighted in a number of recent reviews of inequalities in Higher Education and Architectural Education. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) report, Causes of differences in student outcomes noted 'appetite for more research understanding the intersectionality of different student characteristics and their link with progression and attainment outcomes' (HEFCE et al, 2015:95). The Higher Education Academy highlight the importance of treating the BME category as a non-homogeneous group and dealing with disciplinary specific inequalities, (Finnegan & Richards 2015). Meanwhile, reliable reporting of socio-economic classification has been unavailable due to high percentages of missing data (Woodfield, 2014:22).

Research within the architecture profession shows particularly stark inequalities. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA, 2017) show the Black/Black British percentage of student population at entry to undergraduate study to be 6.8%, dropping to only 1.2% on full qualification. RIBA-commissioned reviews into architecture and race have suggested the need for longitudinal studies (CABE, 2005:5) and the need to 'review and address language and communication issues' (CEBE, 2005/6:22).

Aims and objectives
The research project aims to explore processes of identification beyond and across categories of race, ethnicity and social class using sociolinguistics. It will do this by working with first year architecture students who identify as 'BME' to explore the different ways in which identities emerge in interaction over the first year of study. The project takes a linguistic ethnographic approach that connects day-to-day interactions with wider social structures and processes. It will use interviews, linguistic analysis of audio recordings and observations of architecture studio interactions to better understand the ways in which these identifications correspond to, resist, and rework the identity categories used in policy initiatives aiming to address inequalities in education. The analysis of these accounts will draw on and inform relevant social and cultural theory with the aim of providing research capable of contributing to policy initiatives responding to inequalities in HE.


Potential applications and benefits
The research has the potential to address the limitations of categorisations employed in equality initiatives and to inform such initiatives across the HE sector. It will also be of particular relevance to efforts to reduce inequalities in architectural education. javascript:WebForm_DoPostBackWithOptions(new%20WebForm_PostBackOptions("ctl00$oSaveBar$btnSave",%20"",%20true,%20"",%20"",%20false,%20true))The benefits of such applications could ultimately be a reduction of these inequalities.

Additionally, education is just one site in which broad social categories are used to monitor inequalities that require polic