Seeking the university that is ours: understanding, unpacking and unsettling Black students’ racialised (un)belonging in UK law schools

This article unpacks the nature of racialised (un)belonging experienced by law students – why for students of colour, the law school has often felt like a space to which they cannot fully belong. First, it examines the nature of “race” and “racism.” Critical understanding is vital of how the histories and diverse ontologies of “race” and “racism” contribute to epistemic violence in the present. Without this, equality measures in the present may be futile or even harmful. Next, the paper examines how representation and intersectionality have been used to address belonging. A lot of law schools and universities have made valiant attempts to redress racialised unbelonging, yet this is often done without first grounding these efforts sufficiently in the epistemologies of unbelonging. This article will examine this disconnect. It then goes on to analyse the role that the content of the law school curriculum plays in producing unbelonging. The core of law school activity is what happens in the classroom, and this should be (but often is not) a key avenue for law schools to address racialised unbelonging. Finally, the article engages with decolonisation as a remedy to racialised unbelonging, by examining its meanings, methods, challenges, and possibilities.