Permission from Wendy Wen.

15 July 2025

by Yi (Wendy) Wen, Higher Education Studies MA and Education Studies BA* alumna

*From the 2024/2025 academic year onwards, this degree has been renamed the Education, Society and Culture BA

From the beginning: Feminism and gender equality

As a Chinese international student, I began my academic journey, majoring in BA Education Studies at University College London (UCL). Before entering the UK environment, I never thought about feminism or gender – which seemed nearly apart from my life. I thought, ‘Feminism is a terrible thing, and everyone considers diversity and inclusion. Can paying too much attention to women and labelling us as a marginalised group really make society equal?’

In China, knowledge about feminism and gender is primarily acquired through social media and the internet, reflecting the digital age and the fourth wave of digital feminism. On Chinese social media, feminists from varying ideologies are usually stigmatised and called ‘fists’ or ‘fist-ism’. In Mandarin, the pronunciation of feminism and fist is the same –‘quán’. Ironically, we all knew it first served as an essential symbol in communist ideologies, and China is still under this type of ideology.

When I was young, I started to explore knowledge of gender and feminism, which can be considered sensitive content that ruins students in the Chinese academic environment. That is the reason why I, and other Chinese people, learn about feminism online. During my undergraduate study, I collaborated with three other Chinese feminists to write a blog designed for all Chinese students to understand the current situation toward female students.

After creating this blog, we four established a feminist WeChat group community called Chestnut. A chestnut is encased in a spiky, thorny burr. This outer shell symbolises the resilience and protective strength that is often necessary when navigating challenging conversations around gender and feminism, especially in contexts where these topics are deemed ‘sensitive.’ It represents our community as a safe and brave space, offering protection and solidarity, allowing us to explore and express ourselves without fear.

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A group protesting in a rally organised by the West Indian Student Centre, May 1970. Courtesy of Black Cultural Archives, ref no: PHOTOS/173, photographer unknown.

11 October 2023

By Uduma Ogenyi, PhD student at SOAS/IOE.

When considering what it means to build solidarities, particularly in the context of discussions around ‘decolonising’ universities today, there is much to learn from lessons of the past. My research is funded by a Bloomsbury Studentship and explores the day-to-day experiences of Black students on university campuses from 1956-1981, with a focus on SOAS, UCL and IOE (then a separate college of the University of London). In this period students in London were active in a range of anti-imperialist and anti-racist struggles, including the Anti-Apartheid Movement and the fight against the National Front. At the same time, however, Black students faced isolation, loneliness, racism, and discrimination on campus.

Why do Black students’ day-to-day experiences of discrimination so rarely inform our writing of student histories? And what can these experiences tell us about the struggles students face today, especially in the context of institutional co-option of radical demands? (more…)

The title page of the gamebook. Image permission: Wendy Wen, Yifan Chen, Yiwei Lu and Yiping Tang.

27 July 2023

By Wendy Wen, Yifan Chen, Yiwei Lu and Yiping Tang, Education Studies BA

*From the 2024/2025 academic year onwards, the Education Studies BA has been renamed the Education, Society and Culture BA.

As part of our assessment in one second-year Education Studies BA module (EDPS0253: Children in Society: Anthropological, Historical and Sociological Perspectives), we created a gamebook. We were given the opportunity to produce engaging materials to show children an underrepresented aspect of their lives.

In the module, we learnt to challenge assumptions about childhood based on our own historically-situated and culturally-constituted ideologies, and we truly got to see how childhoods are wrongly universalised – not from a bird’s eye view – but from a perspective that constructs childhood ‘from below’. Such spirit inspired us to make this gamebook, which explores underrepresented gendered aspects of children’s lives.

Have you ever noticed that girls are often restrictedly described as ‘quiet’ and ‘obedient’, or have you ever had a strange feeling when someone says, ‘girls are just like that’? Do you recall from childhood that your parents made decisions for you without consultation beforehand? Our gamebook about a girl’s experience may lead you to think about these questions and the essence of a girl’s decision.

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Image credit: Angelov via Adobe Stock.

5 May 2023

By Johnny Farrar-Bell, History PGCE, class of 2023.

There was an article in a well-known magazine last September that, just for a moment, made me panic. ‘Why I’ve quit teaching’ was the headline. Not great timing. I’d just resigned from my secure civil service job in the Department of Transport to start a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) in secondary level History at IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society. My thoughts raced. Have I made a serious blunder? What if I’m not cut out for this teaching gig after all? Will I end up an emotional wreck and go crawling back to Whitehall? (more…)

Film screening and debate at University College London, 15 December 2022

22 December 2022

By Sabina Barone, Social Science MPhil/PhD

‘This film is about ghosts. Ghosts of the past that even while they slumbered have continued to influence the present’ wrote Rob Lemkin, the director of the docu-drama ‘African Apocalypse’ screened at UCL on December 15th 2022. The ghosts are those of the victims of the 1899 French mission in what is now Niger, the uncountable men, women, and children brutally assassinated, whose obliteration broke the continuity with the ancestors and whose pain still troubles their descendants. But those ghosts are also the spectres of the perpetrators’ evil conscience, the ruthless inhumanity at the core of the so-called civilising mission of colonialism.

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