Meet our EDII Champions

As an African Caribbean woman who came to London from the Caribbean as a child in the 1960s, I am part of what many call ‘the Windrush generation’ drawing on the symbolism of the Empire Windrush ship, which came from Jamaica to Tilbury Docks in 1948. This is often considered to mark the beginning of mass Caribbean migration to the UK. In fact Black Caribbeans had come to the UK long before the Empire Windrush docked by sea and air. Many of my generation do not identify with the appellation ‘Windrush generation’ for Caribbeans who arrived in Britain between 1948 and 1971 (a rather long generation!), particularly since the relatively recent romanticizing of the arrival of the Empire Windrush obscures the history of African Caribbeans in the UK. I identified more with the ‘Windrush generation’ once I learned that Caribbean people who, like me, had migrated to the UK between 1948 and 1973 already as British citizens because of the history of the Caribbean had, in the 21st century, been wrongfully detained, denied rights, and threatened with deportation (or actually deported) by the Home Office if they could not prove when they came to the UK.   The ‘Windrush scandal’ raises numerous issues of belonging, racism and identities as well as equalities and intersectionality. While it is an unusually clear example of discriminatory treatment, other smaller scale and more implicit examples of everyday racism are also important. One of these more subtle examples occurred when I was an early career researcher in a meeting where I described my research on young people’s identities to a visiting professor with the head of my department present. The research sample I talked about included young people from a range of racialised groups and I discussed their narratives of racism. The visitor said ‘What you are doing is not research, it’s advocacy’. He seemed entirely unaware that his social research, only with white people could be seen as advocacy just from his group. For him, including Black people and reporting what all the sample had to say about racism was not objective research because I am Black. I was both surprised and disconcerted by this example, but it helped me to understand how deeply taken-for-granted are notions about the racialisation of proper researchers and the lack of value accorded to Black people’s accounts, and analysis of, racism.   

I am the BR-UK Leadership Hub Manager and have been in research management and administration for over twenty years. My career started at the “bench” working on the human genome project at the (as it was) Sanger Centre in Cambridgeshire.  Over the course of a few years, I moved away from the practical aspects of research to the more administrative, organisational aspects when I became the first scientific research administrator at the Centre working with Dr Jane Rogers who was leading the Sequencing Division at the time.  Jane was also the only female member of the Board of Management for the Centre in those days when the vast majority of leaders of research in the life science sector were male.  The aim of the human genome project was to make to decode the genetic information within the human genome and to subsequently share that data freely with others to ensure that scientific information should be freely available to all and prevent genomic data being patented. I’m a huge advocate of ensuring that research teams are diverse and within teams everyone has an equitable chance to progress their careers.  I also believe that research outputs, particularly those that can address societal challenges, increase human health and/or reduce health inequalities, should be freely available to others to access and build upon. Doing so avoids duplication of effort and increases the impact of vital research funds.