“My scholarship examines how higher education institutions reproduce racialised relations of dominance and subordination through pedagogy, assessment, governance, professionalism, and institutional culture.
Drawing on critical race theory, socio-legal scholarship, and humanising pedagogies, my work explores questions of legitimacy, trust, meritocracy, punishment, and belonging within legal education and higher education more broadly.
I am particularly interested in how universities present themselves as neutral, ethical, and inclusive whilst reproducing unequal distributions of recognition, authority, and epistemic legitimacy.
Increasingly, my work explores what humanising, anti-racist, and structurally kind universities might require in practice.”
Research and Scholarship Themes
Racialised Institutional Power
My work examines how higher education institutions reproduce racialised inequalities through systems and structures often presented as neutral, meritocratic, and professionally necessary. This includes questions of institutional legitimacy, professionalism, governance, and the hidden reproduction of dominance and subordination within educational environments.
Trust, Sanctuary, and Belonging
I explore how Black students experience belonging, distrust, exclusion, and recognition within legal education and higher education. This work considers kindness, sanctuary, institutional trustworthiness, and the conditions necessary for genuinely humanising and anti-racist educational spaces.
Assessment and Punitive Governance
My scholarship critiques assessment, academic integrity, and disciplinary systems as mechanisms through which inequality is distributed, moralised, and governed. I am particularly interested in how institutional cultures of suspicion, surveillance, and compliance shape student experience and educational relationships.
Humanising Universities
Across my work, I am interested in what structurally kind universities might require. This includes humanising pedagogy, relational accountability, anti-carceral educational approaches, epistemic plurality, and institutional models organised around care, dignity, and trust rather than punishment and exclusion.
Selected Publications
There is no baby, just lots of bathwater: an argument against summative assessment. The Law Teacher (2025), 59(3), 450–469.
Critiques summative assessment as a mechanism that reproduces structural inequality whilst maintaining the appearance of fairness, neutrality, and meritocracy.
Inequity and distrust: imagining the anti-racist law school.The Law Teacher, (2024) 58(3), 310–326.
Explores how racialised institutional cultures undermine belonging, trust, and recognition amongst Black law students, arguing that distrust may represent a rational response to institutional failure.
Dominance and Subordination: A Case Study of Race, Identity and Pedagogy in Higher Education (PhD, 2021)
Examines how apparently inclusive and collaborative pedagogies can nonetheless reproduce racialised dominance, unequal participation, and institutional hierarchies within higher education.
“Why is it my problem if they don’t take part?” The (non)role of white academics in decolonising the law school. The Law Teacher (2020), 54(4), 532–546.
Explores the role of White academics within decolonising legal education and argues that meaningful institutional transformation requires the redistribution of power rather than symbolic inclusion.
Current and Forthcoming Projects
Living “Black at University”: Antiracist Praxis Beyond the Curriculum (MUP, 2026)
An edited collection exploring racialised institutional power across university systems, structures, and cultures beyond curriculum alone. This book will be published in November 2026, you can register interest here.
Sanctuary, Suspicion, and Structural Kindness
Ongoing work exploring sanctuary, institutional trustworthiness, and Black student belonging within legal education and higher education.
Academic Integrity and Punitive Governance
Developing work examining academic integrity as a racialised disciplinary regime organised around suspicion, moralisation, and institutional legitimacy.
What if University Was Kind?
A commissioned monograph (Vanguard Press) project exploring what structurally kind, humanising, and anti-racist universities might require in practice.