I am writing this from the garden terrace of a private sports club that charges an absurd monthly fee of £400. I still bring my own tea and mug because it seems decent tea in a stain-free mug is hard to come by no matter how much money you spend in London. The club is situated in an area formerly dominated by light-industrial and manufacturing units and is surrounded by terraces that once housed factory workers, but are now home to the affluent middle class. The adjacent social housing estate has been demolished, but still visible from the terrace is a high-rise council block. I've lived near this sports club all my life, walking past it daily, unable to even peek in due to the fence. It always felt like a forbidden place beyond my reach. Being on the other side of the fence is rather anticlimactic; there is nothing exceptional about it; instead, it is rather ordinary. I go in for free because my sister works here, and I have been struggling to fathom why people are paying for it. Perhaps it is the exclusivity, the filtering out of undesirables such as me? It took me a while to get used to using the space. I no longer fear being chucked out, but I am aware that my presence here is precarious, dependent on my sister's continuous employment. This precariousness, I feel here, has been the underlying feeling I have endured while navigating the world of architecture and academia.

I never imagined I would be working within academia or being paid to write, as the craft of writing did not come naturally to me. Despite catching the reading bug around age seven, literacy was my least favourite subject. I was abysmal at spelling and grammar, and I struggled with the subject throughout primary; if it wasn't for my mother, I would probably have ended up being one of the thousands of kids who leave primary school unable to read in the UK( One in four children leave primary school being unable to read, see: Research review series: English, 15 July 2022). Something happened midway through secondary; I still found writing difficult, but my childhood prayer had been answered suddenly, and I was no longer hopeless at the subject. It wasn't, however, until I was doing my undergraduate in Interior Spatial Design that I began to love it. The experience of writing was still torturous, but I was able to work through it. I preferred the theory modules over design and wanted to know how and I could make a living out of my love for researching and writing. After a gap year, with the encouragement of my dissertation tutor, Shibboleth Shechter, I decided to apply for an MA in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. I was unsuccessful at getting the scholarship, so I ended up doing it part-time, stretching it out over two and a half years and paying my fees slowly over time.

The shift from my undergraduate at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL, to my masters at the Bartlett was rather difficult. While I can’t fully describe what happened in the transition, I know that I felt comfortable and at home at Chelsea, but I felt like matter out of place at the Bartlett. Initially, I struggled, unable to juggle the gripling imposter syndrome and the insurmountable pressure I had placed upon myself. For the first time, I felt the weight of representation; I was the only black and visible Muslim woman on the course. I interrupted the first year and returned the following, but despite achieving high grades, the churning fear of failure never subsided. During this time, I worked multiple jobs to raise funds for my fees, though I was overworked, I was underpaid – meaning things were always extremely tight. I developed terrible habits for coping, falling into a continuous loop of procrastination and burnout. I ignored my body, seeing it as only a vessel to service my mind. But you cannot divorce your body from your mind even when you are on the ‘anxiety-riddled road’ that is academia. (Julietta Singh, No Archive Will Restore You, 2018. 22)

I sought refuge in black feminist methodology, in literature, strolls and cycling. I found support in my tutors, most notably Dr Tania Sengupta, Prof Eva Branscome and Dr Sabina Andron, who were generous with their time and encouragement. I was lucky that my time at the institution coincided with Huda Tayob, who was undertaking her PhD and teaching there. The conversations I had with her were fleeting but reassuring, her presence and her work had a deep impact on me.

Those years, in my mind, form the image of a murky quagmire. There were positives: I made friends, and my knowledge of and perceptions on architecture grew, providing me with a solid foundation to develop my research practice. But that came almost at the expense of my mental and physical health. Looking back, I realise that my experience was not unique and that it reflects a broader issue: many of us come to a startling realisation at some point in our careers that we are navigating a system that was not built for us, a system that mainstream state schools could never prepare us for.

I was raised under new labour and its false promise of meritocracy. I attended a summer school at Imperial College, went on day trips to Oxford University and workshops with University of the Arts London, all through various widening participation programs. These were valuable experiences for a second-generation immigrant coming from a low-income single parent household. The workshops UAL provided taught me how to put together a portfolio and how to think like a designer. But it wasn’t enough, it could not prepare me for being the only black woman in the room, for the sharp shift in teaching style, for the setbacks and the struggle of balancing paid work and studies.

I'm now sitting on the other side of the fence. I started teaching just before the pandemic, in the autumn of 2019, while studying. I mostly worked as an hourly paid lecturer at various institutions and have only just started teaching full-time at the University of Westminster. This institution is remarkably different to where I studied and have taught before. I am no longer the only working-class Londoner or black woman in the room, my students look like me and come from backgrounds similar to mine. They are foundation students — right at the beginning of this long journey through architecture school and I see the challenges heading their way. I feel a great amount of pressure to do my best for them. How can I prepare them for what will come next? How can I build not only their skills but their confidence? How do I empower them to shake off the plague of imposter syndrome?

I don’t have perfect answers to these questions. As I teach my students, I am also learning to teach. I am constantly reassessing and revaluating my methods and content. I've also begun to rethink the role of education and the role of the educator. Education in the Freirean sense is meant to be transformative, a means to liberation. It is a collaborative process in which we all partake.

'The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is [her]self taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach.' (Freire, Paulo. 2017. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Penguin Modern Classics. London, England: Penguin Classics. 53)

I tell my students to be compassionate to themselves, to take breaks and develop healthy work patterns, although these are things that I have yet to master. I want them all to know that they are worth more than the grades they receive, and that no degree is worth their health. I want them to know that we are all worth more than what we produce. That our bodies are more than just vessels and should be treated with tenderness. I hope to learn with and from them during this process.

It is interesting, that it is the body that I mistreated and neglected has become the focus of my research. I am primarily interested in the lived experiences of working-class Muslim minorities, the spaces they adapt and occupy in the margins of the city and the spaces imposed upon them. At the centre of my reflections and research are the highly contested bodies of Muslim women. Perhaps considering I grew up under the war of terror, this was inevitable. The method I adopt is mostly autoethnographic, but I am slowly, cautiously hoping to include ethnographic research as well.

The impact of my research on my teaching is indirect and generally quite subtle. I rarely lecture on my own research. Instead, the content I draw upon and the issues I raise are linked to broader topics that are pertinent to our current times and have far reaching effects: community, social housing, the power of narratives and spatial justice.

----

A full-time academic job has done wonders for my overall wellbeing, I no longer fear poverty, but it is not a ticket out of cozzie livs or my mum's flat. I still live at home in an overcrowded flat, managed by a negligent housing association, in an beyond gentrified part of London. I still remember what it was like earning 16k a year and the grappling anxiety of having too little money and time to dedicate to my work. I see the mass redundancies being issued to academics across the UK, and I am wondering if this full-time contract will be short-lived. I still fear failure and see deficiencies in everything I do. But I am in a much more supportive and inclusive environment, I think I can work through this.

Given the rise of redundancy across the sector and the innate pressures of the role I acknowledge I am in a position of immense privilege. I may have grown up in a low economy household, but I lived in a part of London that afforded me access to services, resources and crucially a built environment saturated with history. (‘The % of FSM state-funded pupils’ progressing to higher education (HE) by age 19 in 2021- 22 from London is more than double that of 5 regions and nearly 20% higher than the next highest region.’ See, Graeme Atherton. ‘Universities not for everyone: levelling up and who is missing out on higher education in England’ report. 7 April 2024) I understand that I got to this position because of the support I received along the way. I managed to finish my MA with the assistance of the National Zakat Foundation, which paid for the last third of the fees. I am now teaching full-time because my former tutor, Shibboleth Shechter, invited me back to teach, giving me my first job in academia. I am now writing because of the New Architectural Writers programme. The question now is, what do I do with the privilege? How do I ensure I don't end up becoming a sell-out? The recent words of Professor Ruha Benjamin at the Spelman Convocation 2024 have been playing on my mind:

'Black faces in high places are not going to save us, just look at the Black women's hand, Ambassador at the UN, voting against a ceasefire in Gaza. That is, our Blackness and our womaness are not in themselves trustworthy, if we allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo'

My identity in itself is not enough. Being from and part of a marginal group does not preclude you from becoming part of the establishment and part of the problem itself; just look at the Tory party. It is not enough to jump over the fence or sneak past the gatekeepers. The fence needs to be dismantled. Bulldozed over, and the fenced-off assets made accessible to all.

What I seek most right now is a blueprint, guidance, or a helpful signpost to where I can get the tools to tear down the fence. I seek the mentorship and company of other women of colour within academia. Can you tell me, how do we ensure that we propel our students to where they need to be, with their conscience and critical thinking intact? How do we prepare them for a world that is increasingly becoming more unequal? A world obsessed with building fences to exclude and punish those most vulnerable. How do we ensure that our classrooms become and remain safe spaces for the practice of liberation.