Annual Conference on Equity in Education & Society 2026

Liselle Terret

Liselle is Associate Professor in Performance, at University of East London, and Associate Artist at Access All Areas. She is a socially engaged theatre practitioner, educator, and performance artist who foregrounds her neurodivergent identity. Her practice disrupts theatrical and pedagogical norms through a radical crip, queer, feminist, and collaborative approach. Liselle co-creates politicised, inclusive, co-led performance projects, alongside mentoring and consultancy work.

Keynote:

Disrupting Ableist Hierarchies: Breaking the Code of Silence

Ableism is a historically produced and everyday system of power that ranks minds and bodies against norms of intelligence, “normality,” and productivity. These hierarchies shape what counts as legitimate personhood, credible knowledge, and a life worth supporting. Chapman and Carel (2022) describe this as epistemic and ethical violence, through which disabled people are repeatedly denied credibility, recognition, and respect. Hadley (2014) argues that everyday social encounters can become a continuous, forced performance: when a disabled body (or an “invisible disability” that becomes legible) appears in public spaces, it may be read as spectacle, producing discomfort, pity, stigma, or “commotion” (Smith, 2008; Auslander & Sandahl, 2004 in Hadley, 2014).

As a neurodivergent (ND) and mental health survivor theatre practitioner-researcher, educator, and academic, the presentation is framed through an auto-ethnographic lens and informed by Walmsley and Johnson’s (2003) Emancipatory Disability Research. My crip, queer, and feminist pedagogical practice challenges ableist institutional structures, drawing from the Affirmative (Swain and French, 2000) and Political-Relational (Kafer, 2013) Model of Disability to unpack my own ND struggle and strength to reclaim the ableist gaze, and foreground disability as produced and sustained through relationships, systems, and power that create hierarchies of legitimacy that shape who is heard, valued, and supported.

Dr Syra Shakir

Dr Syra Shakir is an Associate Professor in Learning and Teaching and Strategic Lead on Race Equity and the Race Equality Charter Silver. Syra co-chairs the Leeds Learning Alliance Equity Network and is a convenor for the Race and Ethnicity study group for the British Sociological Association. Syra works on embedding race equity in the curriculum, decolonisation, anti-racist pedagogy, and co-creation with students to build belonging. Syra designs and delivers a range of training on anti- racism and race equity to universities, organisations, and schools. Syra is a qualified social worker and registered with Social Work England. Syra works in community activism, and is a co-convenor for Stand Up To Racism.

Keynote:

Navigating the Margins: Intersectional Leadership, Racialised Labour, and the Politics of Belonging

This presentation examines how intersectional leadership is practised and constrained within UK higher education through the lived experience and praxis of a racialised woman equity leader. Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT), Black feminist thought, decolonial pedagogy, and the concept of the racial regime, it interrogates how whiteness, patriarchy, capitalism, and social class co-produce the conditions under which racialised women lead, belong, and labour in the academy. The analysis foregrounds racialised labour, emotional and political, performed through race equity work, co-creation, and the Race Equality Charter, and situates this within an institutional landscape marked by marketisation, compliance cultures, and enforced silence on global racial injustices. Conceptually, my paper advances a Relational, Intersectional Leadership Model that integrates equity practice, reflexivity, and systemic change, anchored in relational accountability and belonging as structural rather than merely affective and inter-personal. It further introduces the notions of Misogynislam, the racialised and gendered targeting of Muslim and “Muslim-appearing” women, and the racial navigator, the racialised leader who must continually plot routes through hostile institutional architectures. Through critical autoethnographic reflection, I argue that intersectional leadership offers both a diagnostic lens on structural inequality and a transformative praxis for reimagining leadership as collective, justice-oriented, and rooted in care, solidarity, and epistemic justice. I conclude that meaningful transformation requires moving beyond representational diversity and compliance-driven EDI infrastructures toward relational governance, race-literate leadership development, and co-created pedagogies that redistribute power and protect truth-telling within the “white fortress” of the university.