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T SENSORY TRANSITIONS INTO UNIVERSITY CULTURES
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E Miranda Matthews
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‘This is an engaging, insightful, and important book that draws on empirical
research with educators to explore the significance of arts-based practice in chal-
lenging inequalities and creatively enabling belonging. It is an essential read
for anyone working and studying in universities who values inclusive practice,
pedagogy, and pastoral care’.
Dawn Mannay, Reader in Social Sciences and Director of Postgraduate Research,
Cardiff University
‘Miranda Matthews has found an impressively original, creative, and inclusive
way of offering practical solutions to problems experienced by new students
starting life at university. This book will be invaluable for any university lecturer
or administrator who cares about undergraduate students’.
Helen Kara, Independent researcher in higher education and author of Creative
Research Methods: A Practical Guide (2020)
‘A thoughtful treatise centring the transitional experiences of underrepresented
groups whose lives continue to be burdened by racialisation, gendered, and
stratified social (class) conditioning, this book works to gather testimony about
the vitality of creative arts methods that can enable more fulfilling cultural rela-
tions in UK HEI’s’.
Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark, Artist, Researcher and Lecturer at the University
of the Arts London – London College of Fashion
‘Miranda Matthews has crafted a truly inspiring book that makes central the
promise of arts-based methods to generate knowledge about what it means to
navigate a sense of belonging in the contemporary university. The findings and
theorisations, from an intersectional perspective, will be of huge relevance to
anyone interested in issues of social justice in HE. Every page offers so much
to consider, especially in the pursuit of greater equity – it is both timely and
important – I highly recommend’.
Jayne Osgood, Professor of Education, Middlesex University, London
Arts Methods for the Self-Representation
of Undergraduate Students
This timely book explores the transitional experiences of undergraduates in
minority groups studying at university and how arts methods and practices can
play an important role in facilitating these transitions.
Based on research from UK universities, this volume is the first to draw
together the experiences of educators in the humanities and social sciences
who integrate sensory methodologies into the taught curriculum, in relation
to arts educators who add extra-curricular arts practice. It offers an origi-
nal, contextualised analysis of how to enable university structures to adapt to
complexity, difference, and diversity, taking the view that arts practice forms
meeting points for confident interconnection and spaces of self-representation.
It outlines the novel concept of sensory transition in how arts practices can
be used to address issues of inclusion, diversity, and self-representation for
minority groups. Each chapter offers an in-depth analysis of significant issues,
such as dimensions of race, gender, and class and the specificities of social and
cultural group experiences as they occur in arts practice. The book reflects on
the decolonisation of university structures and curriculum and demonstrates
how universities can support students and build spaces for self-representation
in academic courses.
Accessible and investigative, this book is essential reading for academics,
researchers, and postgraduate students in the field of higher education, inclu-
sion, and arts methods. It will also be of great interest to higher education staff
interested in decolonisation, diversity, and university futures.
Miranda Matthews is an author, researcher, and artist educator based in the UK.
Miranda is currently Head of the Centre for Arts and Learning at Goldsmiths,
University of London. Miranda has taught in the arts and education since 2002.
She began teaching in universities in 2011 and started to lead undergraduate
teaching in arts methods in 2016. Miranda researches and writes on issues of
self-representation in the arts. She also develops programmes of practice research
and international collaborations that connect with issues of concern for arts prac-
tice and learning.
Routledge Research in Higher Education
University Autonomy Decline
Causes, Responses, and Implications for Academic Freedom
Kirsten Roberts Lyer, Ilyas Saliba and Janika Spannagel
The Experience of Examining the PhD
An International Comparative Study of Processes and Standards of Doctoral
Examination
Edited by Michael Byram and Maria Stoicheva
Internationalising Higher Education and the Role of Virtual Exchange
Robert O’Dowd
A Conversation Analytic Approach to Doctoral Supervision
Feedback, Advice and Guidance
Binh Thanh Ta
Representations of the Academic
Challenging Assumptions in Higher Education
Edited by Jean McNiff
Arts Methods for the Self-Representation of Undergraduate Students
Sensory Transitions into University Cultures
Miranda Matthews
Engaging Faculty in Group-Level Change for Institutional
Transformation
Disrupting Inequity and Building Inclusive Academic Departments
J. Kasi Jackson, Amena O. Anderson, Lisa M. Dilks, Maja Husar Holmes,
Christine E. Kunkle, James J. Nolan and Melissa Latimer
For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Routledge-Research-in-Higher-Education/book-series/RRHE
Arts Methods for the
Self-Representation of
Undergraduate Students
Sensory Transitions into University
Cultures
Miranda Matthews
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 Miranda Matthews
The right of Miranda Matthews to be identified as author of this
work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-26543-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-26544-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-28877-0 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288770
Typeset in Galliard
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents
List of Figures viii
1 Introduction 1
2 Theorising Sensory Transitions 12
3 Factors of Difference: Changing Environments 44
4 Meeting Points in Arts Practice 79
5 Peer Groups, Inclusion and Belonging 115
6 Community and Student Leadership 147
7 In Conclusion: Opening Narratives 182
Index 198
Figures
2.1 Placemarkers. Miranda Matthews 2021 37
3.1 A still from Locked In, a BA Education Year 1 Creativity
Film made in 2020, at Goldsmiths University of London 56
3.2 The Quixote Annexe. Miranda Matthews 2002, mixed media 74
4.1 Cultural ecologies painting, made by BA Education Arts
Practice Students, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2022 110
5.1 Storying the self with the other-than-human. Miranda
Matthews 2022, three-dimensional collage, mixed media 128
5.2 Case study. Miranda Matthews 2019, pastel drawing 144
6.1 Menstruation Art, Shannon Horace 2022, with permission
of the artist 173
6.2 Zine Rhizome. Miranda Matthews 2022, ink 176
1 Introduction
Contexts for Transition: Experiences of Being
Underrepresented at University
The context for needing to raise awareness about methods for inclusion in
contemporary university education has more than a thousand years of back-
story in Britain. To gather a bigger picture of how complex the transitional
experiences of underrepresented students in Britain can be, we need to address
the current times, while acknowledging historical struggles. This book brings
together the voices of contributors who are working with arts methods in uni-
versities in the four nations of the UK. It supports reflections on how we can
assist students to move through times of shock and disaffection, as they start
out at university, towards sensory self-representation and belonging. Among
the social groups who are particularly underrepresented in British universities
are women of colour, and the working-class, first-generation, low income stu-
dents, who have only recently in the twenty-first century become a focus for
widening participation.
Narratives of internal-external, inclusion and exclusion, began with one, and
then two elite universities in England. Teaching is recorded in Oxford in 1096
(Oxford University 2022). After ‘town and gown’ battles between the towns-
people and Oxford scholars, students fled to Cambridge and started a university
there in 1209 (Philips 1990). For many centuries, there were only these two
universities in Britain, and they only admitted white men who could afford to
pay for their education. In the 1840s, new ‘redbrick’ universities began to open
around Britain (Purdue 2019). Then in 1869, Girton College at Cambridge
became the first institution in Britain where women could study; they could not
graduate with a full degree until 1948 (Chambers 1998, Rawlins 2019).
The intersectional oppressions of combined racism and sexism, which I will
discuss in Chapter 2, have meant that black women have found that changes
in access to a university education have happened more slowly than for men of
colour. There are accounts of a black man – Francis Williams, starting to study
in Britain in the 1700s. The first black male graduate with a full degree was
Alexander Crummell, who was admitted to Cambridge in 1848 (Bates 2011).
The first black woman to study at a British University was Gloria Carpenter,
DOI: 10.4324/9781003288770-1
