Professor Arif Ahmed recently claimed that “universities should be neutral to any matter on which there is controversy” (Ahmed, 2023). On the surface, this may appear to safeguard academic freedom. But through the lens of anti-racism, this notion of neutrality is not only flawed—it is dangerous.
As bell hooks reminds us, education is never neutral. Every classroom either reinforces the status quo or challenges it. For hooks, pedagogy must be the “practice of freedom”—a process that invites critical thinking, centres lived experience, and confronts systemic oppression (hooks, 1994). In contrast, Ahmed’s model assumes that controversial issues can be approached without taking a stand, as if power, identity, and experience can be bracketed out of the learning space.
This perspective is not only at odds with hooks, but also with the work of Dr Joy Buolamwini, whose Gender Shades project exposed how commercial facial recognition technologies disproportionately fail to identify Black women (Buolamwini and Gebru, 2018). Her research, which combines technical rigour with poetic activism, shows how data-driven systems inherit and amplify racial bias. For those of us in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), it is clear that technologies are not neutral—and neither is the way we teach them. A curriculum that ignores race, gender, and power produces designers who unknowingly reproduce discrimination.
In my own role as a researcher and lecturer in HCI, I increasingly see the need for what Asif Sadiq calls “localised, holistic training” (Sadiq, 2023). His critique of top-down, corporate-style EDI reflects the failure of decontextualised approaches that seek to check boxes rather than transform culture. Like hooks, Sadiq calls for approaches grounded in real-world contexts and diverse epistemologies—moving from abstract ideals to lived experiences.
Judith Butler’s work further strengthens this view. For Butler, freedom is not simply the ability to speak or think—it is shaped by the norms and structures that determine whose voices are heard (Butler, 2004). An anti-racist pedagogy, therefore, must go beyond free speech rhetoric and ask: Who is speaking? Who is silent? Who feels safe to be fully present in the learning space?
Taken together, these thinkers challenge the myth of neutrality in higher education. In HCI, and across disciplines, we must design and teach with intention. This means acknowledging bias, embracing controversy when it serves justice, and co-creating learning environments that affirm all students—not just those already centred by the system.
Anti-racist education is not about ideological conformity. It’s about courage, context, and care. As bell hooks would argue, it is our responsibility—not to flee from controversy, but to engage it ethically, critically, and humanely.
References:
Ahmed, A. (2023) Revealed: The charity turning UK universities woke [Online video]. Available at: https://youtu.be/FRM6vOPTjuU?t=260 (Accessed: 02/07/2025).
Buolamwini, J. and Gebru, T. (2018) ‘Gender shades: Intersectional accuracy disparities in commercial gender classification’, Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, 81, pp. 77–91.
Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.
Sadiq, A. (2023) Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Learning how to get it right [Video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HR4wz1b54hw (Accessed: 02/07/2025).