Hello and welcome to Pivot Points. This is the podcast about the pivotal moments that have shaped our academic, professional and personal lives.
I'm Sam Cooke, your head of communications at Wilson College. And I'm all about creating ways for you to share your stories like this podcast.
Okay. So I feel like I should preface this episode by saying that we were sitting in the piano room,
actually not the usual media room where these are recorded.
So it's a little bit of a makeshift setting. But thank you, Natasha, for coming on the podcast today.
Thank you so much for having me.
So I know you as somebody grunts and I have known you for very long, but we've got to know each other a little bit over the last few weeks or so.
And you're someone who, as many people in our community, has moved around a lot.
Country wise, you've also moved in and out of kind of private sector education and research.
So there's a certain kind of fluidity to your life. So I think it's a starting point.
How do you feel?
How do you feel that has been part of your life and what is your experience of fluidity and kind of moving in and out of these spaces?
Oh, that's a really good question. I mean, I think on a on a personal level, I feel like it's it's been hugely expensive.
I mean, I think the ability to be able to move to a different country, to not feel scared about, for example, moving to a different country,
to know how to hit the ground running takes away a lot of fear about the need to move
around or the need that the need to move for a relationship or for a job or whatever.
I think also being a young academic researcher, you're you're constantly on short term contracts.
You're constantly unsure whether you're going to have a job the next year.
Things feel very precarious. I mean, I think we call it this kind of academic moment.
But my understanding is that this academic moment has lasted quite a long time, and it's going to last for quite a long time.
I mean, these kind of fantastical, permanent jobs are, you know, always in the future.
And so in that sense, having that fluidity of being able to do academic work,
but then also to be able to do consultancy work or journalist work, journalism work.
It's a bit of a security net for me.
I think it means that if I don't get the next academic role or if the next academic role requires me to move somewhere where it isn't convenient,
for example, I'm not going to kind of fall off the edge.
And there are other options. And I find that to be hugely empowering, not to have all my eggs in one basket,
be that all my eggs in the basket of living in the UK or all my eggs in the basket of academia.
Yeah.
And do you think, do you think that's something that you have learnt to be comfortable with or is that something that has just been part of your DNA?
Because coming into your first pivot point, you moved to China when you were 18.
So how how much of that is part of your identity versus how much of have you learnt to embrace?
I think so. My mom is Indian and she was born in the Republic of Ireland and my dad is English and me
and my brother were born up and me and my brother were brought up in Northern Ireland.
So I think being a multicultural, mixed race, you know,
not necessarily fitting in or phenotypically looking like we fit in to the place where we grew up means that, I think.
There's an element in which it was kind of in my DNA that you're always a little bit one foot in, one foot out.
And certainly, I think coming from a family that really embraced.
Multiculturalism really embraced the idea of, you know, abolishing any kind of racial prejudice.
You know, my parents were very much involved in the peace process in Northern Ireland kind of inter-community work.
So there was certainly an idea that we should that it's desirable to constantly be stepping outside of our communities.
So, yes, as you said, when I was 18, I moved to China for a gap year which turned into maybe a little bit more of a gap year.
So I moved to Linfen in Shaanxi, which is a small city by Chinese standards, in the middle of China.
And I went there to work first for an NGO, an educational NGO, and then I was learning,
studying Mandarin and teaching English at the university there.
And that was really life changing.
I mean, I think as many 18 year olds find when they leave home for the first time, I think it really just.
Opened up this whole new possibility of what life could be.
I think growing up in rural Northern Ireland, there was a sense of you finish school, you go to university, you get married,
you have a job, you make babies, you know, and and you could kind of see your whole life just right in front of you.
Whereas moving to China and you think, gosh, there's so many different ways in which people live.
And as I said before, I think it really removed the fear of.
Of embracing those differences, of embracing and, you know,
of being able to move and hit the ground running and not feel like you have to live in the place that you were born.
Yeah. And how do you feel about the question of where are you from?
Yeah, this is this is really controversial. I mean, some people really dislike the question of where you from.
And some people find it, you know, considered to be a microaggression or even racist.
I actually love the question of where I'm from. It's it's often a very long answer.
Yeah. And I embrace that.
I think it's funny, actually, when I was younger, I had this huge angst about where I was from,
really, and where did I really belong and would I ever find a home.
And now I just maybe just being in my thirties, feeling a little bit more secure.
Just embrace the ambiguity. Yeah.
So when people ask, where am I from? I say, my mom is Indian and my dad is English.
But I was born and brought up in in Northern Ireland and resent the facts.
Yeah, I'm married to a South African and so we kind of spend equal time between South Africa and the UK and yeah, lead into that, into the complexity.
Yeah, I think that's a good approach. And how do you feel being in the UK?
How does that feel to you? Does it feel like home? Yeah, it does.
I think one of the quirks about being born in Northern Ireland is that you're you have both an Irish and a British passport.
Hmm. When I was younger, I only had an Irish passport.
And then as an adult, I applied and got a British passport.
And it was the first time having a British passport meant and living in England.
It was the first time that I had lived in the country where I also held nationality.
Hmm. And it feels so great.
It's so nice having, you know, making it easy to set up a bank account and understanding how things work.
I mean I yeah, I feel very at home in the UK.
Yeah. And you mentioned before they're married to a South African me.
I met him at Oxford. Yeah. Same, same course, same car, same course.
Of course. Yes. So we both did a master's in comparative in international education here in the Department of Education.
And there was only 18 people in the class and there were only three boys.
And I got one of them. And yeah, we actually only started dating at the end of our master's.
And then he needed to go back to South Africa as a kind of terms and conditions of his scholarship.
And so I followed him. And I remember you once saying to me that you felt like moving to South Africa for a boy.
Kind of made you question what that means to you.
Yeah. I want to dig into that. So. Okay.
How how how does that feel? How does it shape that for you?
Well, like, what was the thought process in your head at this time? Yeah, it's interesting.
My husband's going to David and.
I felt quite you know, at the beginning of the relationship, I really felt like this was exactly who I was looking for in a life partner.
And so, yes, as I said, he needed to be in South Africa.
And so I decided to spend increasing amounts of time visiting him in South Africa.
So I would I would be there for three or four months at a time.
We had a shared supervisor in common who was very encouraging and supportive of our
relationship and who gave me some work that I was able to do while in South Africa.
And so he kind of really helped that helped my relationship with David develop.
But yeah, it was extremely hard. I mean, as it as I've said, I've moved to lots of different countries.
I'm not afraid of being an outsider, but somehow it was different being an outsider and a plus one to an insider.
And certainly I had never seen myself as this woman that just follows around a man.
And so to find myself actually, you know,
in quite a vulnerable position where my entire social circle was through my then partner's social circle and,
and, and not being particularly financially stable was a bit of a shock to the system and quite a shock to my self-identity, I can imagine.
And definitely, yeah, it tested us in in, you know, in really good ways, I think.
I mean, it was. It was. Really reassuring to see how how David supported me through that.
But also, I think it required me to grow up quite a lot and to.
To figure out who I am and what I want to be, so that I can so that I could hold my own in a space that was primarily his.
Yeah. And then, of course, I designed my PhD study so that I could specialise in South African education.
And that that that was actually quite a turning point in a sense of really becoming an expert.
In a aspect of South African society that gave me credibility on my own terms in that space.
Can you explain to us in somewhat layman's terms for people who are not experts in a subject area,
how like how much of a change was it from what you were originally researching to what you ended up researching?
Was there was there a big change, like, to make it adapt to where you were living and where you were?
It wasn't. I think prior to that, I was obviously I was working in education.
I had done a master's in education. I was interested in education in low income countries.
But previous to that, I had been working mostly on issues of teacher education.
And so although this wasn't a radical move, it it certainly did require a little bit of thought and it was quite conscious.
So my my work, what became the basis of my PhD and what I, you know,
the kind of topic that I've really fallen in love with and have developed through my post-doc is looking
at history education in societies that have experienced conflict or particularly racialized injustice.
So I was looking at how apartheid was taught in South African schools, in South African history, in South African history classrooms.
But in particular, I wasn't necessarily interested in the the quote unquote, historical facts of what we're taught in the classroom.
I was interested in how teachers and students connected the past and the present.
So did did teachers and students use the past to explain contemporary South African society?
And in what ways did they use the past?
So, for example, some teachers would explain contemporary society as being an entire consequence of the apartheid era,
so that the spatial, specialised nature of the city, the race relations, poverty, everything was a consequence of apartheid.
Whereas some teachers would really avoid that narrative and try to to persuade
students that nothing about contemporary society was a consequence of apartheid,
that apartheid had finished almost 30 years ago. And really there was nothing left of apartheid in contemporary South African society.
And so obviously the way in which you use the past to explain the present then
has quite pertinent implications for things such as land redistribution,
reparations, affirmative action, a lot of the hot political topics that are currently being debated in South African politics.
So I was interested in how teachers use that. So yeah, it was it was an excellent move.
It was an excellent translation. This is certainly a field where perhaps also coming from Northern Ireland.
I really resonate with that. But it was very much designed.
My PhD project was very much designed in order that I could spend more time in South Africa.
And then I'm also kind of wondering then, were there any particular biases that you had to consider?
So thinking about the fact that your, you know, your personal choices are then impacting your academic research,
what do you need to consider to make sure it is true research?
Yeah, that's interesting. In some ways, I would say that my my research is mostly ethnographic.
My background is in anthropology. So we think about and are very explicit about our position abilities when it comes to research anyway.
Yes, in some ways the fact that I was married to South African was very beneficial for my research.
I think being mixed race, Indian and and Caucasian, but not being South African kind of allowed me to step outside of the situation.
And I think teachers felt quite comfortable. Teachers and students felt quite comfortable to explain things to me as though I was an outsider.
And that's obviously that's really gold for a researcher because you want people to kind of explain things from first principles
and also not not be necessarily classified as as white or not white was very helpful in terms of managing again that ambiguity.
But then being married to a South African connected me to the country and teachers and students could see that
I was invested in this country and that I wasn't just somebody who had flown in for a year of fieldwork.
But this was a place where, you know, where I was going to be spending significant parts of my life and I gave you more time.
It gave me more time. And I think I think it also I think both for my participants and for me, kind of made the research feel a lot more personal.
And also, yeah, just invested, I think. And now as far as I understand, your kind of back and forth between here in South Africa.
Yes. So what does that look like on a personal level and on a kind of academic, professional level?
So my research has kind of developed somewhat to not only looking at how teachers and students think about how apartheid.
I just told in South Africa, but also about how teachers and students think about how British colonialism is taught in England.
And so it's a really nice comparative study.
In some ways, I think South Africa has been much more honest about its difficult past and has tried with more or less success to confront it head on,
particularly within the education system. Whereas England, as I'm sure you know,
is kind of coming a little bit late to the game of acknowledging colonial violence and and how that has shaped both this country and the world.
So in terms practically, it just it simply means that I'm often doing fieldwork in both contexts.
And so I'm often travelling between the two contexts, or at the very least, I'm in correspondence with teachers and students in both contexts.
What I'm really excited about is trying to bridge that gap so that teachers are in South Africa, are speaking to teachers in England.
I think both have a lot to offer. The other I mean, I think English teachers obviously have.
And many more resources and many more opportunities for continued professional development and training.
Whereas I said before, as I said before, I think South African teachers are really becoming experts in how to deal with the difficult past and have a
lot of experience in learning how to manage those controversial questions that arise when you're teaching.
Mixed race classrooms or teaching students who whose personal lives are very implicated in the history.
Yeah, and on a personal level, is it fun travelling back and forth?
Is it exhausting and what you want to be doing? It's a good question.
I. I did really love the COVID period where we could be in one place.
Yeah. And really good thing, I think. Yeah.
The whole experience exactly like plants and vegetables get to know our neighbours and evaluate as many as possible.
Exactly. And I mean, we've been living in Oxford.
We've been living in Oxford during, during, for, for most of the pandemic and subsequently, um, it's, it's been fine.
I mean, it, it is, I think both places feel very much like home.
So it's not like moving from a place that you don't know to a place that you don't.
Yes. You know, you land and you feel like, oh, yeah, this is my other home.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
I think that's a very interesting topic,
especially in this community because we have so many people who are literally just on the brink of making choices between,
you know, do I do I move here for this professional academic reasons why I move here?
Because this is someone I want to include in my life. Like, yeah, those are such pivotal decisions.
And like, they're impossible to untangle from each other. Yes.
Yeah, absolutely. I think I've been very fortunate in in making it work, but.
One of the things that my husband and I would always say to each other when we were,
you know, at the beginning wondering, Calvin, you're both academics. Yes, exactly.
You know, can can we make this work? Is this, you know, will one of us need to make this massive sacrifice in order to be together?
You know, right at the beginning is this relationship challenge. And where is it now?
You know, and I guess what we kind of felt is that if we can't make it work, then nobody can make it.
You know, Oxford's, you know, it does have an elite reputation.
It does open doors. You know that there are you know, there are kind of opportunities that that have sprung up when we've looked for them.
And so I think I think we've been we've been very lucky. We're both, you know, touchwood in good health.
We have family that's in good health. And any of these things could change in a moment.
And then the life plan would need to readjust. Yes, but but for the most part, yes, we have been able to make it work quite successfully.
Good. Moving on to your third pivot point. The first time you were paid to write.
Yeah. What was that? What do they pay you to write?
Writing recently. Because that's exciting.
That's like the dream, right? Getting paid. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, of course, in some ways you could say that.
Well, all academics are paid to write because, you know, we have a contract and that contract requires us to publish.
Well, when you send me this pivot point, I was imagining, like, you're very, very, very first.
I don't know, a piece of academic work or something that, you know, is a direct payment or no.
So it was it was actually quite recently, was it within the last year and it was for Quartz Africa.
Okay. But but subsequently have done more kind of paid journalism or paid writing work.
And the the piece was on some research that we had been doing about African students in China.
And it seemed like something that had a lot of contemporary value or contemporary relevance.
And so I pitched it and they accepted it and that what they paid was, you know,
it was not not a huge amount, certainly not enough to live on, but it was really it was really empowering.
And I was, you know, I was surprised how.
Yeah. Just how it how, how valued it made me feel.
And I think it made me reflect a lot on my academic work that, you know, on the one hand,
everybody kind of at this college is at Oxford and is very elite and whatnot.
But at the same time, as I said, academic jobs are very precarious.
And so you're often kind of fighting and grasping to try to to get a publication or to get a contract or whatever.
Yeah. Super competitive. And very competitive. And and.
It sometimes can make you feel quite undervalued. You know,
you feel like you have all of this experience and it shouldn't be this hard to to get it out into the world or this research or this data or whatever.
And so having having somebody versus Quartz Africa, then Chalkbeat Tennessee,
which is an educational magazine in the US, they actually approached me to ask me if I would write something for them.
And that was another I know that was another level of what made me happy.
Having somebody who thinks that what you're doing is, you know, is interesting enough to really seek it out.
Yeah, I think it's a huge compliment. Yeah, exactly.
And and as I say, I mean, I absolutely love academia. It's it's such a privilege to be here.
And I really, really enjoy my work. But it is very insecure, very precarious.
And and that does sometimes start to.
Feed into your self-identity, you know, as somebody that maybe doesn't have anything to say or maybe isn't doing work that's valuable.
Yeah. Well, on that note, it was like job security then.
So you did used to work in private sector, right? Yes.
Well, so I previously have been have done consultancy for Oxford Policy Management.
Oh, okay. And so that again, was educational consultancy.
I actually worked for a range of organisations. The main organisation I've worked for is Oxford Policy Management.
And so they, they are a for profit company that often work with non-profit organisations.
So for example, a lot of the clients would be UNICEF or UNESCO's or the World Bank or, you know,
these kind of large education development agencies that that need a specific piece of research and how,
I guess, you were doing that independent of academic work. Yes.
So then how did you find that shift coming back in? Was it did you notice the kind of scarcity and precariousness of that move immediately,
or were you kind of taken away by like a romantic academia idea?
That's an interesting question. I mean, academia is wonderful because you can pursue questions that aren't immediately relevant.
Yeah. And it's such a freeing thing to. Yes.
And there's a lot of creativity, which I really love. The Department of Education here is just wonderful.
I mean, it's it's very collaborative and collegial and it's really like the best feeling in the world to be able to bounce around ideas, you know?
And the college system in Oxford makes that possible. Yeah, but, you know, the salaries aren't amazing.
And, you know, next year I might not have a job, so. So there's things around that.
Whereas I think when you're doing consultancy work,
it's exciting to be working with people who are really making decisions, you know, working very closely with government.
It's exciting to be paid so much more that but there's not a huge amount of creativity in it.
You know, often the client knows what they want and you were there to to deliver the best version of the art.
But you don't get to set the terms. It's not it's never your project.
Yes. Somebody else has a vision. Yes. So, you know, having having kind of two strings to my budget is is is nice.
I mean, if I if I only had to pick one, it would definitely be academia.
I mean, I love I love the kind of the time and the space to think and to write.
What advice would you give to anyone who's on the brink of that decision? Like, do I continue with academia or do I go into industry?
Hmm. First, see if you can do both. Hmm. I mean, it's.
It's often, you know, often these consultancy firms hire academics and and that's very if you're academic contract allows that, that's very possible.
And that that really is the dream. Yeah. I think.
I think it obviously depends on your kind of material circumstances,
like how much and I think your emotional circumstances like how much uncertainty and precarity can you take.
And, you know, I think some people just have a much greater appetite for precarity and they really don't mind moving cities every year,
and they really don't mind not knowing whether they will have a paycheque next year.
And and if that is for you, then then you can overcome the first five or six years of early academic employment.
Then I think that's great. And whereas I think if are if you're much more interested in.
If you're less interested in ideas but more interested in how decisions get made,
then I do think consultancy or industry is, is a really good place to be.
Yeah. And, and they are actually quite transferable, you know, they're not.
I think there is a myth that if you go down an academic kind of track,
then you're so in the weeds that nobody's ever actually that interested in what you've got to say outside and way,
way, way into the weeds, that nobody outside is actually that interested.
And that's absolutely not true. You know, it's reassuring.
It's yeah, it was reassuring for me also that like people are interested in your PhD,
even if they're not even if they're not about to use the skills that you're you need developed.
Yeah. And do you think you'll continue with this balance of journalism and teaching?
So yes, at the moment I'm just doing as a postdoc, I'm just doing research.
You know, I'm not teaching this year. No, I was teaching last year. Yeah, I hope so.
I mean, I really hope that they can feed into each other.
And I mean, the journalism is really at such a baby stage where I'm still learning, I think, how to write for non-academic audiences.
I'm still really seeking out mentorship in that regard.
And and certainly what I write about for public audiences is entirely informed by the research that I'm doing.
And so, you know, I think as an anthropologist, you're just constantly meeting and interviewing really interesting people who are often overlooked,
for example, history teachers or, for example, African students who are doing PhDs in China and.
And so being able to bring their stories to a wider audience and being able to kind of help to nuance.
Debate with those with those kind of quite intimate stories is something that I really, really excites me.
But the two are absolutely linked. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't. I everything that I'm writing about is coming from the academic data.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And what do you feel is next for you in life, really?
Well, my contract ends in March, which is maybe why I'm speaking so much about maybe why it's on the top of my mind right now.
Yes. And and yeah, I'm applying for I'm applying for a range of things.
It's nice, as I said before, to have consultancy experience because I know, you know,
if if this if these academic applications don't work out, there is a job for me.
Yeah. Elsewhere. Yeah. And that. Do you think that also, like, frees up your mind in a way, too,
to explore the things you exploring in academia if you know you have a little bit of security elsewhere?
That's a really good point. I think probably, yes. I mean, I'm thinking like imaginatively and I think what does it do to your imagination?
So actually, it's interesting you say imagination. What I was more thinking about is in terms of impact projects.
So for example, I'm assessed, you know, largely on my publications and the book coming out and, you know, journal articles and things like this.
But.
But the work that I do, working with teachers, working with students obviously has a big kind of community impact on the history teaching community.
If I if I wanted to turn it into that kind of impact. So one of the things that I've been spending a lot of time doing this year, for example,
are creating podcasts and learning resources for teachers, helping them to think about how to teach controversial history.
I'm developing a walking tour of the anti-apartheid movement in London,
which would be used as a learning tool for teachers who want to teach about histories of anti-racism.
For example, developing workshops for teacher trainees,
pgce history teachers again on how to teach about the legacies of empire and how to manage those difficult conversations in the classroom.
And none of these are traditional academic outputs, but I get a lot of meaning from them.
And I think I think, you know, a deep down, I just think that's where academia works best.
You know, like the research that I produce, the data they produce, the insights that I produce should be turned into things that teachers can use.
I do really passionate about that.
And if I was desperately worried about getting the next academic job, I don't think that would be something that I would be focussing on.
Yes. And so in that sense, it's freeing and it's it's creative because, as you know, developing podcasts are creative.
You know, developing learning. Learning resources are creative.
But what's next? Yeah, as I say, I've applied for several things teaching positions, fellowships.
I've even applied to actually teach history at a secondary school as well, which I think in Oxford.
Over in Johannesburg. Oh, cool. Yeah. Mm hmm. And so.
Again, I'm kind of casting the net quite wide and.
Sometimes I go through periods of existential angst, but today you've got me on quite a hopeful, exciting day.
I think maybe we should do it again on another day.
Are you? Maybe not. Well, I'm sure that's probably a very relatable feeling to a lot of people.
I'm sure it is. We all go through periods of, yeah, everything's great on track versus, you know,
leaning into the insecurity versus I just want to hammer home where it was a perfect noise went on and on that nice positive note of yes,
yes, we can we can do the things that we're trying to do. Great.
Thank you, Natasha, for coming on. Oh, thank you so much.