Articulating Inequalities: a linguistic ethnographic account of race and class in an undergraduate architecture studio in England

In a political climate that has seen increasingly urgent and often separately articulated claims for social justice on the grounds of racial and class-based inequalities, Higher Education as a whole, and Architectural Education in particular, have consistently reported stark and persistent inequalities based on measures relating to class and ethnicity. Policy responses aiming to address these inequalities have been criticised for employing fixed and separate identity categories and for positioning students of colour as the deficient embodiment of social problems. More recently, these measures have been employed in government-commissioned reports and subsequent policy as justification for the denial of structural and institutional racism. In Higher Education, policy discourse around racial inequality has been displaced by a discourse of individual choice and agency.

Addressing these issues, this thesis presents the findings of a linguistic ethnographic study into race and class in an undergraduate architecture studio. It employs a critical sociolinguistic approach that sees social structures and the categories of inequality they produce as reproduced and resisted in everyday social interaction (Silverstein, 2003; Bucholtz & Hall, 2005). Drawing on anti-essentialist study of race and class in Britain, the study engages Stuart Hall’s notion of articulation, to treat the discursive construction of race and class as co-constituted articulations in material conditions of inequality produced by specific histories (Hall, 2021 [1980]). Accordingly, the study is situated in specific histories of race and class in England (Shilliam, 2018; Virdee, 2014; Kundnani, 2021). The thesis finds the discursive and ideological conditions navigated in the architecture studio to be characterised by three interrelated centres of authority: racially hegemonic whiteness, self-responsible deservedness, and conviviality. In showing how Higher Education is hegemonically white, the findings suggest the importance of avoiding neoliberal meritocratic framings of choice and agency and of fostering the potential of convivial relations amidst racism.