This post is an open letter to everyone who wants to participate in FACE. Please read, reflect, and share widely. Subscribe to the mailing list to be kept updated on latest projects, join our conversations, participate in our programmes, share ideas, etc. Stand with us. Let us work together.
What is FACE?
Forever Africa Conference and Events (FACE) is a Pan-African collective, established in 2017 and brought together by staff and students at the University of Bristol. Our focus was and still remains to creatively find ways to cultivate knowledge for, by and of African and African-descended people. We now want to build a vibrant and wider community within which we can together imagine and craft radical, flourishing futures for Africans and African-descended people. Therefore, FACE’s vision is geared towards both solidarity and action within and beyond academia. This vision thus transcends discipline, institution, and nation-state.
This broader vision has been supported by a number of component aims, including but not limited to the following:
- Eradicate the awarding gap.
- Ensure more students who are racialised Black (and who wish to do so) make the transition into postgraduate taught and research degrees and eventually into academia.
- Strengthen staff and student networks with our communities and with each other – building intellectual and social spaces of solidarity.
Since inception, the organisation of FACE has relied on a vibrant student volunteer group as well as support and guidance from an International Advisory Committee. Our website contains some of the work we have done in line with our aims. I outline some of the work below as well as the motivations for FACE.
The lived experience of being Black in HE: Why was FACE established?
We believe the awarding gap and other inequalities are symptoms of a much larger structural problem around racial injustice in Higher Education. Nevertheless, these remain good measures for us of progress. Despite increasing diversity, being Black in the academy continues to be a challenge. For example, there has not been a significant decrease in the awarding gap; 18.4% is the gap between the percentage of white students and Black students awarded a First or 2.1 in their degree. The increase in the number of Black women in the professoriate has been slow. Of 23,000 UK professors, only about 80 are Black women; in 2018, there were just 25 (Rollock 2019). The plight of PhD students who are racialised Black in academia is of significant concern but often flies under the radar. There are significant funding pipeline problems here; this is illustrated in the fact that over a 3-year period only 1.2% of the nearly 20,000 studentships awarded by all UK Research and Innovation research councils went to Black or Black Mixed students, and only 30 of those were from a Black Caribbean background (Leading Routes 2019). The content of curricula also continues to mask the experiences of people racialised Black (Adebisi 2025).
What have we done?
Our core initial aim has been to build solidarity among African and African-descended members of Higher Education Institutions, in ways that specifically address the fundamental needs of these groups within these institutions.
You can learn more about the Vision and Aims of FACE by watching the linked video. More information about our previous events and projects can also be found through the following links:
- FACE 2018: Launch Event
- FACE 2019: Building the Pan-African Inspired Multiversity
- FACE 2020: Online due to pandemic lockdown
- FACE 2021: Decolonisation in HE in the Global North and African-centred knowledges
- FACE 2022: Learning, Teaching and Researching an Anti-Black World
- FACE 2023: An African research day
We also instituted a student award and have begun planning a Cape Town to Cairo road trip – The Sankofa Caravan of Hope.
Why are we restructuring FACE?
When we started, there was a large and enthusiastic team in place. Even so, organisation of events has always meant a lot of hard work by a small number of already overworked people. Furthermore, since the pandemic started in 2020, we have been hit with financial and human resource challenges. This can be summarised as follows:
- Funding: The crises in the higher education space in the UK at the moment have made it more difficult to get funding for events.
- Timing: We have tried different timings and formats for our events – autumn, spring and summer terms/weekdays and weekends – and there have been disadvantages with each. This has had an impact on attendance, especially of students.
- Location: While the location in Bristol has its benefits, this has left the growth of the initiative open to the vicissitudes of events happening at the University of Bristol.
- Personnel: Some of the points enumerated above have meant that it has been left to me to plan and organise events, which has led to severe burnout and ill health on several occasions.
- Post-pandemic ways of working: Changes to ways of working and networking that were inaugurated during the pandemic have also had an impact on the types of programmes people tend to gravitate towards.
Looking to the future
It would be useful to build upon what has been done and learn lessons from those things that have not worked well. This is why the next stage in FACE is to build a more national (or even global) coordinating committee with members within and outside academia, both staff and students. In this new design Bristol will no longer be the seat of all events. We propose smaller events that are more targeted to groups that would benefit from those specific events. Once that coordinating committee is set up, the following programmes are proposed to be on the agenda to be developed under different leads:
- Book talks/Reading groups
- Movie nights
- Student/Staff research days
- Visiting schools
- Volunteering at community organisations
- Arts and crafts days
- International Evenings
- Podcasts
- Career events
- Online presence and content production – a website and social media accounts
- Continuing with Planned events – Cairo to Cape Town Road trip
- A wider range of prizes to include a revival of the student award
What can you do now?
- Subscribe to the mailing list to be kept updated on latest projects, join our conversations, participate in our programmes, share ideas, etc.
- Volunteer to be part of the coordinating committee
- Invite people to join the initiative
- Join the mailing list to be informed of events and contribute to the conversation
- Let us know about funding that may be relevant.
- Participate in events that you are interested in
- Share thoughts, ideas or comments about the foregoing
- Volunteer to manage our communications, website and social media (as you can see below, they are not in great shape).
Current contacts
