The Cross-DTP EDI Conference and Networking Event took place on 18-19 February 2025
at The Core Technology Facility, University of Manchester, and brought together DTP (and
other) students from across the UK for a two-day event filled with discussions and
networking opportunities. It provided a platform for sharing ideas, collaborating, and
challenging our thinking on equality, diversity, and inclusion within academia.
The opening talk encouraged us to critically assess the concept of EDI as it currently
operates institutionally, while also acknowledging the risks of such critiques, particularly
in a global climate where EDI efforts are under threat. We were urged to look beyond
diversity and towards decolonisation, pushing for deeper, structural change that
addresses entrenched power dynamics.

Day 1

Caring responsibilities
Facilitated by Dr. Bridget Bradley from the University of St Andrews, this session focused
on the challenges of balancing caring responsibilities with work and study in higher
education. Drawing from her own experience as a carer, Dr. Bradley highlighted that carers
often face significant career limitations, financial penalties, and additional strain in the
performing arts sector, especially when they have to juggle work and family
responsibilities. According to her research, in higher education, carers often rely on
informal support, struggle with inadequate policies, and deal with mental and physical
health challenges, financial strain, and stigma, which often makes student carers feel
invisible.

We were then encouraged to identify the specific challenges faced by PhD student carers,
including campus facilities, rights and policies, time management, and access to support
networks. Dr. Bradley also prompted us to consider potential solutions to these
challenges, such as improving campus facilities, expanding access to rights and policies,
and offering support such as care bursaries and childcare. Moreover, it was also important
that student carers not only strengthen network-building to raise public awareness of
carers’ needs, but also ensure that they have practical measures to manage their time and
prevent burnout. The session provided valuable insights and resources for advocating
meaningful changes to better support carers in higher education.
Disability

The session ‘Disability in Academia’ was facilitated by Dr. Amy Kavanagh and Anna Landre,
who are both activists working to reduce ableism in society. There was so much to take
away from this session but one of the most striking points Amy and Anna made is that
ableism can affect absolutely everyone, including people who don’t live with disabilities,
quoting TL Lewis. This isn’t meant to take away from the disproportionate discrimination
that disabled people often face, but rather to highlight and draw attention to the structural
nature of ableism.

Amy and Anna also discussed various conceptual approaches to disability, including the
‘social model’ and the idea of ‘complex embodiment’, as well as disability legislation in the
UK. We were encouraged throughout the session to reflect on our own positionality and
completed a group exercise that involved considering how ableism manifests in different
ways for different people, which led to personal reflections being shared amongst the
group.

The session ended on a hopeful note with prompts for us to think about ways forward and
how we might achieve them, such as building community and how to approach activism
without experiencing burnout.

Neurodiversity
The neurodiversity session was facilitated by Dr. Louise Creechan, Wellcome Trust Early
Career Fellow and Lecturer in Literary Medical Humanities at Durham University. The
purpose of this session was to reflect widely on the diversity of skills and needs
neurodiverse students and academics have. Indeed, many students reported difficulty in
accessing reasonable adjustments that might help them out of fear of being labelled as
‘difficult’. A common occurrence was universities offering a blanket set of adjustments
without consulting the student/academic. While these might work for some people, some
of these adjustments actually make life harder for some neurodiverse students. An
example was given by a student who was provided a list of questions on a printout sheet
during a confirmation panel. The student explained this was unexpected and made it very
difficult for them to focus on the questions they were being asked one by one, as they kept
wanting to read the full list of questions that had been presented to them on the printout.
This highlights the fact that reasonable adjustments should always be discussed prior to
any formal assessments and should involve the student/academic.

Certainly, there was a need for students and Early Career Academics to feel supported by
more established academics. Dr Creechan has previously delivered a mentorship
programme for neurodiverse students and academics. You can learn more about this work
on the Neurodivergent Humanities website.

Day 2

Academia and class
The class session was facilitated by Dr. Michelle Deininger, Cardiff University. During the
session, the group was heavily invested in sharing their personal experiences. A theme that
kept coming back was the feeling of not belonging to any group (working class or
academia). By this, we mean the difficulty of working-class students feeling alienated from
academia due to not having access to as many opportunities in their earlier life compared
to students from more economically-secure backgrounds. Yet these students also
reported difficulty with continuing to use the ‘working-class’ (or another description) to
describe their identity. This creates ample opportunity to experience imposter syndrome.
Another major theme during this session was the concept of rest. For many people with a
working-class background, the idea of rest is strongly linked to ‘laziness’: rest is
understood as time you could be spent making money, not as leisure. Many students and
academics know that ideas often come in unexpected moments, and time away from the
desk is valuable. However, many students reported feeling a sense of guilt if they took time
away from work to simply think about their project, as they felt if they were not working on
their research, they should be working for money, in whatever form that might be. The
inability to truly experience rest has negative impacts in all aspects of a person’s life. It is
therefore vital that supervisors and managers listen to concerns and appreciate that just
because someone has said they have taken time off it does not mean that they have truly
‘rested’.

LGBTQ+
One of the unique and useful features of this conference compared to others that we’ve
attended was that they held a plenary at the end of each day for each group to report back
to the wider group what they discussed in their parallel session. This meant that even
though none of us were able to attend the session for LGBTIQ+ PhD students due to
attending other sessions, we were still able to learn from those who attended this
workshop and through shared resources.

This session was entitled ‘Who’s Here? Who’s Queer? Support, Ideas and Advice for
Making Space for Yourself and Finding Your People as Queer/LGBTIQ+ PhD students’ and
was led by Dr. Harvey Humphrey. The session focused on sharing experiences and
generating ideas for building community within academic spaces as an LGBTIQ+ student
both during and beyond the PhD. The session also created opportunities for students to
imagine their ideal queer futures/spaces beyond the structural barriers of academia, using
creative and unconventional methods. This was followed by discussions on how to create
these kinds of futures/spaces, with suggestions such as collaboration, co-opting
favourable institutional concepts such as ‘networking’ as opportunities to build
community, and organising queer events.

Race and conciousness raising
In this session facilitated by Dr. Udeni Wijayasiri, we were invited to reflect on our
academic identities, anti-racist research practices in higher education, and the imposter
syndrome. After a brief icebreaker, we were asked to think about our role models and map
out our academic identity through the lenses of performance, recognition, and
competence. However, Dr. Wijayasiri also highlighted how people of colour often face
barriers in higher education, including the dominance of whiteness, narrow definitions of
academic excellence, lack of representation, microaggressions, and the failure to enforce
anti-racism in research environments. Additionally, there is often an expectation for
people of color to take on the responsibility of addressing racism. Despite these
challenges, Dr. Wijayasiri encouraged us to focus on ways to survive and thrive. She
suggested seeking concrete career opportunities and support from white supervisors, as
well as finding peer support and raising awareness through existing networks and
academic societies.

The session then shifted to discussing the imposter syndrome by exploring our inner
critics. We were encouraged to identify the comments our inner critics make and reflect on
when they appear. Dr. Wijayasiri emphasised the value of understanding our vulnerabilities
and building supportive, loving, and productive connections with others.

Concluding remarks
In the closing plenary, we were given the opportunity to contribute to ideas for future plans
and how to continue the work initiated at the conference. Ideas included ways to share
resources collectively, explore potential mentorship opportunities, and create future
avenues for connection among attendees. However, the limitations of the conference were
also acknowledged, particularly the challenges faced by those unable to attend in person.
Not everyone who expressed interest could join, and some participants were hindered by
logistical or financial barriers. There was a recognition that these constraints limited the
inclusivity of the event, and feedback was welcomed to help improve future events. This
discussion underscored the need for more accessible and far-reaching ways to engage
with these important issues, ensuring the conversation around EDI continues to grow and
involve a wider range of voices.

Charlotte Curle (Sociology, Lancaster University)
Lucy Hulton (Creative Writing, University of Salford)
Nan Song (English Literature, Lancaster University)

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