Putting in the Work

TLDR:

• Academia can be challenging and triggering.

• Critical Reflective Practice offers a way for academics to check their privileges and engage with their trauma.

• Universities need to do better at providing space for emotions.

Academia can be deeply challenging. Any subject examining the human condition will inevitably confront the way in which people harm one another. Whether you study crime, like I do, or ecology, politics, history, or any other field, human stories are ever-present, and human stories hurt.

I first encountered reflective practice while studying Conflict Criminology. Criminologists who write about prison experiences after having been inside themselves are constantly confronted with emotion and trauma. In fact, anybody facing the realities of imprisonment is likely to have a response. Yvonne Jewkes1 talks about this as a key educational resource, arguing that the detached perspective associated with the sciences is unhelpful.

It is undeniable that our experiences shape how we approach research. No study is truly neutral, and you can quote me on that. While some may disagree, I believe every aspect of who we are affects how we interact with the world and, therefore, how we interact with our research. It also guides our focus and interests. Ask any (in my experience) academic about what pushed them towards their subject, and they will talk about passion and timing. Passion for justice, learning, or truth, and listening to the right talk at the right institution at the right point of their life.

The challenge then becomes how to prevent burnout. If emotion and passion are what makes the work worthy, and we are unable to avoid learning more about the treacherous human condition, how do we encourage young scholars to validate their responses?

If you search for ‘academia and reflective practice’ on the internet, you will find that almost every university has its own toolkit. Some will reference ‘Gibb’s Reflective Cycle,’2 arguing that after each challenging event, you should evaluate what happened and create an action plan for next time. Others will provide sentence starters and lists of words that should (or should not) be used in reflective practice34. While it seems like most institutions recognise reflective practice, they, on the whole, encourage what I will term ‘general reflective practice’ or GRP as opposed to ‘critical reflective practice’ or CRP. Where GRP is creating intellectual resources, learning how to write a CV, or seeing an emotional experience as a failure and thus creating a plan to ‘do better,’ CRP is that most challenging work that asks you to unpick your biases.

“Critical reflective practice is the intentional and often difficult self-evaluation of how power relations around aspects of identity like race, ethnicity, nationality, dis/ability, class, gender, sexuality, and religion inform teaching” - Emily Jean Hood and Sarah Travis.5

The ‘ongoing, messy, and difficult’6 process of introducing CRP, especially after worldwide events that highlight just how entrenched racism and other forms of systemic bias are in our society, has perhaps become the worthiest work of all. The entrenched racism within academia, especially in fields like criminology with its colonial roots, should not be forgotten. Criminology has historically been used to control and criminalise marginalised communities, and many of the ‘foundational’ texts reflect this legacy. While the coloniality of criminology is a topic for another blog7, it is critical to acknowledge that racism is not confined to history. Reflective practice can help us confront its ongoing influences.

What's the key takeaway here? Well, universities must do better. They must actively encourage students to challenge their biases, but equally, they must provide spaces where emotions tied to decolonial, queering, feminist, or any other re-traumatising work8 can be freely expressed. They must do more than provide links to helpful external sources and crisis lines and bring the collaborative work of trauma-informed practice in-house. The proactive creation of antiracist spaces where students and staff explore their privilege is essential, as is providing room for students who have endured trauma to express their pain.

This blog was written with no AI.