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I have been thinking about the concept of belonging for a long while – especially the ways in which racialisation produces various experiences of belonging. Even though belonging is a very human desire. My thoughts on the way the term “belonging” is sometimes deployed uncritically surfaced in my wider discussions of the limitations of EDI – both in the language and the actual concepts. So, I was overjoyed when I got the opportunity to contribute to a special issue on belonging in law schools. The resulting article was published in 2025: Adebisi, F. I. (2025). Seeking the university that is ours: understanding, unpacking and unsettling Black students’ racialised (un)belonging in UK law schools. The Law Teacher, 59(2), 200–216. In that article, I use the phrase “racialised (un)belonging” to describe the specificity of exclusions that racialised students experience in law schools. My argument was that these specificities must be understood in order for the measures to combat them to find any purchase. In the essay below, I unpack the term “racialised (un)belonging” as I used it in the article. Nevertheless, do let me know if you would like a copy of the published article.

For some time, several colleagues and I have been thinking of how to consolidate and build on the work that we have been doing individually in translating our anti-colonial and anti-racist research into our teaching. There have been a number of false starts; however, as you can see below, we believe we have collectively managed to fashion a vision that we can run with to establish a global research network focused on engaging with how race and colonialism are taught in law and allied social science and humanities disciplines.

When your work is concerned with racial injustice and the law, you get a lot of feedback from everyone about how depressing it all is. “Why don’t you talk about the successes instead?” you get asked. “Why is everything about what is not working?” In a previous post, I explain why I think it is useful to sit with our despair about enduring racial injustice and deflect into triumphalism and empty hope. This post takes a slightly different approach to examine, through the lens of “progress” and the passing of a specific piece of legislation, why our celebration of the so-called triumphs of racial justice are, at the very best, muted and wary. With one eye on the next wave of racial vitriol to take us back.

As this post has ended up longer than intended, I am not going to include in this post suggestions for what we should do instead. However, Bharat Malkani’s book has some good ideas. In a recent article, I also made some suggestions that are directed towards academics. I will expand upon these in a follow-up post. In this one, my focus is on the question of celebration by examining the efficacy of the RRA 1965 as a tool for racial justice within the law.

I have, for a long time, lamented the absence of African history from most centres of education around the world—including, quite ironically, schools in Africa. In fact, I started this website blog specifically to address that lack of knowledge—hence, African Skies. In previous posts, I have also used the medium of the quiz to encourage reflection on current states of knowledge. There is a flags one, a capitals one, and a geography one. This blog post aims to bring those two threads together in the first of a series of African history quizzes. There is also a bibliography below; one of my deep weaknesses as an academic, as frequent readers of this blog will attest, is to try and get people to read stuff! See various reading lists.

Decolonisation is a word that is often thrown about with the presumption (despite strong evidence to the contrary) that we all agree on its meaning. But where did the word come from? What was its first use? A dive into history demonstrates that contrary to common consensus, it was used in French and English in a much wider sense than only to describe the granting of independence to colonised peoples. With the inception of the #RhodesMustFall movement at the University of Cape Town, there has been another restrictive, definitive move to only use ‘decolonisation’ to describe what we do with educational curricula – often going no further than making curricula marginally more diverse. Both these definitions are too narrow and incomplete to encompass a wider temporal, spatial and contextual history, though not necessarily inaccurate. This post uses an analogy and a reading list to underline the broad scope of what the word has covered, is covering and could cover. I also invite a reflection on what decolonisation does not or should not mean.

I am a massive science fiction fan. Always have been. Will probably always be. I think the only things I have liked longer than science fiction are reading and singing. Original Doctor Who [1963-1989] was one of my very first introductions to the genre. One of the reasons that I love this genre is because the idea of imagining a world beyond what we think is possible has always appealed to me. Over the last couple of years, in my work, I have become increasingly interested in using the tools provided by Black-centred science fiction to think through the possibility of the end of racism. This is particularly significant because a close study of the structural nature of racism leads one to suggest that ending racism means an end to the world as we know it—underwritten as it is by extreme inequality and racial injustice.

This post contains my regular roundup of the past year and a look forward to the next. However, its main focus is to address the question of how we build from where we are—especially considering the current state of the world. In this, my summary of the previous year serves as a useful reminder for me of what has happened in it and helps me position myself for the next. (I believe I first started this series in 2016. You can also read the roundups for 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022). For personal reasons that I will not go into here, 2023 to date has been a bit rough on me emotionally. This has not been helped by what seems like a global meltdown on reason, which has included watching the lack of political will to stop the powerful from using their power to pulverise lives in places like Palestine and Sudan. Each year seems to take us farther and farther into perdition. Into the ruin of the earth and humanity.