As part of her research, Institute Fellow: Legacy, Professor Dina Belluigi has been working in collaboration with Jason Arday (Cambridge University) and Joanne O'Keeffe (Queen’s University Belfast) to undertake a critical quantitative (CritQuant) analysis of administrative data about the traditional routes to intellectual authority through academia in the United Kingdom.

Findings from their research revealed that the social determinants of ‘race’, ‘sex’, ‘nationality’, and ‘religious belief impacted academics’ access to employment in universities in the UK and their positioning once employed.

In their article in Race Ethnicity and Education, 1–27, 2024, the authors argue that shortcomings in categorisation and in the reporting of official data serve to obfuscate transparency and accountability about inequality.

In the conclusion they write:

"It is disconcerting that despite the massive machinery of collection, reporting, surveillance, and monitoring that is part of UK governmentality, and the significant critical scholarship from within UK universities, that ‘data’ remain the most significant limitation of studies on inequality such as these.

Such dysconscious data literacy demonstrates the danger of positioning the transformation of universities for social justice (Tibbits and Keet 2023) and race equality (Achiume 2018), as peripheral to the international human rights’ agenda, international resolutions, and development frameworks such as the SDGs".

Read the article here.