By Rachel Elgy Over the Christmas break, I spent four days volunteering in Calais with the grassroots charity Help Refugees. Naturally, in the days since, people have been asking me, ‘How was Calais?’ It’s not an easy question to answer,
By Kate Hollinshead Two weeks ago I delivered a workshop on critical thinking with year 5 pupils in a primary school in East London. At the beginning of the workshop, we played a game where groups of young people had
By Kate Hollinshead Type the name Caster Semenya into Google and the first suggested search that comes up is ‘Caster Semenya man.’ Click on the trending topic ‘Caster Semenya’ on Twitter or Facebook and the comments that appear are: ‘Caster
“I don’t think that Halle Berry could have a disability, she’s really pretty and I’ve seen her in films and she’s not in a wheelchair or anything, she can do stuff” “James Cracknell looks normal, so he can’t be disabled”
The phrase ‘check your privilege’ can sometimes cause a great deal of anger and has led commentators such as Louise Mensch and Dan Hodges to scornfully decry it as nonsense. However, the phrase was never designed to be an insult
Terminology around issues of equality and diversity is a sticking point for many people. People face a great many barriers in understanding the power of language and the reasons why getting it right is so important, which frequently inhibit their
It is without doubt that we all grow up in a society which, either consciously through our birth certificate or passport documentation, or subconsciously through the marketing of gender-specific toys and clothes, coerces us into identifying strictly as a female
On Wednesday, The Independent newspaper ran with the cover story that ChildLine has seen a 69% increase in young people contacting them because of racial bullying. The statistic comes from ChildLine’s report “Can I tell you something?” which provides a
Ever since I was a small child, I was passionate about fighting racism and injustice. Amongst other things, this led to tears of frustration as an 8 year-old when a relative found it funny to be deliberately racist; a bloody
A couple of weeks ago I attended a conference on race equality in higher education, organised by the University of Hertfordshire. It was an opportunity for university lecturers, students, HR officers, trade unionists, and equality and diversity practitioners to get
The past couple of weeks have seen much of the media across Europe and the world lead with the story of “the Blonde Angel”, a child who was being raised in a Roma community in Greece, by a Roma couple
The last week has seen the subject of workplace diversity hit the headlines again. Sunday Morning Live ran a debate entitled “Should recruitment be based on diversity, rather than ability?” and Lady Justice Hale, the only woman in the supreme