Page 61 - Mansfield 2019/20

Professor Michèle Mendelssohn
Tutorial Fellow in English
In April 2020, ‘Making History: Christian Cole, Alain Locke and Oscar Wilde at Oxford’, an exhibition and series of events co-curated by Michèle, was shortlisted for a Vice Chancellor’s Diversity Award. These
awards aim to highlight and celebrate projects and individuals who have demonstrated a commitment to equality and diversity across the University.
While the ‘Making History’ exhibition at Magdalen College closed on 21 October 2019, Michèle and her ‘Making History’ colleagues have now created and launched a brand new digital resource to help people to continue to explore the lives of trailblazers Christian Cole, Alain Locke, and Oscar Wilde online: https://makinghistory. magd.ox.ac.uk.
Helen Mountfield QC
Principal
In 2019/20, Helen chaired a series of meetings of an Equality Task Force for the Institute for the Future of Work (of which she is a Trustee). In November, the ETF’s report,
‘Mind the Gap: Accountability for Algorithms’, was published. Its main proposal for an Accountability for Algorithms Act, is described in this article in Prospect magazine: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ author/helen-mountfield-and-josh-simons.
Helen also participated in this year’s Oxford Putney Debates on the Sovereignty of Parliament (https://www.oxfordputneydebates. com/); her contribution will become a chapter in a collection of essays on this subject, edited by Professor Denis Galligan.
In April, Helen was sworn in (online) as a Judge of the Jersey Court of Appeal. She has been profiled in a number of articles in national media this year, including the Guardian (https://www.theguardian. com/education/2020/mar/24/one-oxford-college-has-96-of- students-from-state-schools-how-did-they-do-it ) and The Times (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/state-pupils-flock- to-oxford-college-and-degree-results-soar-q96p7bxj0), about Mansfield’s groundbreaking work to broaden access to Oxford.
During the summer Helen was featured by Counsel magazine discussing her role at Mansfield, and her work as a barrister at Matrix Chambers: https://www.counselmagazine.co.uk/articles/ legal-heads. In Michaelmas term, she took over as Chair of the University’s Equality and Diversity Forum and has chaired the Conference of Colleges’ Disability Sub-Group.
In 2020, Helen also presented an intervention for the Equality & Human Rights Commission in the Supreme Court in a
case concerning the implications of international law for the interpretation of the Human Rights Act regarding the ‘two child rule’, a discriminatory cap on Child Tax Credit.
Dr Amber Murrey
Tutorial Fellow in Geography
Amber’s research on community responses to natural resource extraction in Cameroon was recognised by an Oxford Inspiration Award. She is the recipient of a 2020 British Academy Writing Workshop Grant
which will fund two collaborative projects in support of Early Career Researchers working on critical political economy in Cameroon and Ethiopia.
Amber was also awarded an Oxford Teaching Development
and Enhancement Project Award for the development of a collaborative digital postgraduate course, Decolonising Research Methods in the Social Sciences, which brings together students and staff at the University of Oxford and three universities in Africa. The interdisciplinary digital course will be co-taught
with Dr Steve Puttick (Education, Oxford) and Dr Nokuthula Hlabangane (Anthropology, University of South Africa). The course builds from a webinar hosted by Amber and Steve in Trinity term 2020, Digitising Critical Pedagogies in Higher Education Amidst Covid-19, which facilitated debate among pedagogists in Bhutan, China, India, the US and the UK.
Recent publications:
‘Confronting the deafening silence on race in geography education in England: learning from anti-racist, decolonial and Black geographies’, A Murrey and S Puttick in Geography. Issue 105, Vol 3, 162-164.
‘A decolonial critique of the racialized “localwashing” of extraction in Central Africa’, A Murrey and N Jackson in Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Issue 3, Vol 110, 917-940.
‘Colonialism’ in The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology, ed A Kobayashi (Elsevier, 2020), 315-326. 2nd ed. ISBN 9780081022955.
‘“When spider webs unite they can tie up a lion”: Anti-racism, decolonial options and theories from the South’ in Routledge Handbook of South-South Relations, ed E Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and P Daley (Routledge, 2020), 59-75. ISBN 9781138652002.
‘Thomas Sankara and a political economy of happiness’ in The Palgrave Handbook of African Political Economy, ed T Falola and S Oloruntoba (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 193-208.
‘Between assassination and appropriation: Pedagogical disobedience in an era of unfinished decolonisation’ in International Journal of Social Economics. Issue 46, Vol 11, 1319-1334.
‘Race, decolonial ethics, and women researching in Africa’ in Women Researching Africa, ed R Jackson and M Kelly (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 171-192. ISBN 9783319945019.
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