R, D and the In-betweens rdandtheinbetweens

In this episode of R, D and the Inbetweens PGRs Belinda (Dan) Li and Irene Gomez talk to other PGRs about being a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant. This epsiode contains interviews with:
Lu Yang
Lisanne Moline
Umas Jin
Riadh Ghemmour
Chris Grosvenor
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
 
Transcript
 
Hello, and welcome to rd in the in betweens. I'm your host Kelly Preece. And every fortnight I talk to a different guest about researchers development, and everything in between.
 
Hello, and welcome to the latest episode rd and the in betweens. I'm your host, Kelly Preece. And for now on rd in the in betweens is going to be taking a slight change, of course, and the reason for this is that I have started a new job. I was in a researcher development team and my job was to support our postgraduate researchers with their training and development. But I've just moved to join our academic development team doesn't sound that different. And in reality, I suppose it isn't. But I'm working on the other side of things. Now I'm working to develop and deliver doctoral supervision training. So I'm helping our supervisors become even more excellent in the support of our postgraduate researchers. So as such, the content of R D and the in betweens might be a little bit different and might be a little bit more teaching focused, a little bit more supervision focused, but it will fundamentally still be about researchers, their development and everything in between. So for this first episode, I've actually got a guest episode from two PGRs, Belinda L, and Irene Gomez, and they ran a project in the summer, talking to our postgraduate teaching assistants about their experiences
 
Welcome to our PTA podcast, aiming to improve your experiences. We are a group of PTAs from a range of courses and backgrounds with various different experiences. We have been working on a project this summer to share inspirational PTA experiences and top tips. We hope this will help both incoming and current PTAs have the best experience possible.
 
Lu Yang is a second year PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, she teaches speaking seminars for intermediate Chinese. My first tip is don't be afraid of your students, because if you are afraid, they will find it. The second is pay more attention to those shy students and those that are not catching the lessons because they need more attention and need more help. My top tip is about to take your classmates (and) your student as your friends because we are most near the same age and we are all at the state of learning things. If we just take them as friends, it will release your stress and they will also feel relaxed to talk about your lesson and the content. My teaching style is more friendly and because my lesson is about the oral speaking. So, I think a friendly atmosphere will make them more encouraged to like practice and rather than worrying about any potential mistakes. My lesson is about the Chinese oral speaking. So to prepare my lesson and I usually split the whole lesson for like three parts. The first part is mainly designed by the textbook, questions on the textbook. And the second part usually combined events happened recently, or like holidays, Chinese holidays. I will design some key words about it. And the third part would be like open questions around the lesson they learned on the textbook. And I usually prepare for around an hour. But if I need to search some online videos about the lesson, it will take about two hours. I am a film student, so I tried to add some film cuts and some short videos in the class. And I always like to try to encourage them to talk more and don't worry about the mistakes. So, I think it will make a relaxed class.
 
Lisanne Moliné  is an American filmmaker and a PhD researcher. She trained at SUNY Purchase in New York an

This series of podcast episodes will focus on Decolonising Research, and feature talks from the Decolonising Research Festival held at the University of Exeter in June and July 2022.
The sixteenth epsiode of the series features University of Exeter PGR Olabisi Obamakin interviewing academic and Exeter graduate Dr. Victoria Omotoso.
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
 
Transcription
 
00:09
Hello, and welcome to rd in the in betweens. I'm your host Kelly Preece. And every fortnight I talk to a different guest, about researchers development, and everything in between.
 
00:31
Hello, and thank you for tuning in to this online resource. Today we are joined by our very own Dr. Victoria Omotoso, who just graduated with a PhD in theology from the University of Exeter. So
 
00:47
thanks for having me, I would say yeah, it's been a long road. COVID has been hard for everyone. But um, yeah, finally got back graduation. I've been doing about
 
01:02
a hard journey. Or you look beautiful the day one away? Yeah, tell us a little bit about yourself. And what your research questions that your research interests are?
 
01:17
Yeah. So hi, everyone. Yeah, I'm Victoria. I was a PhD student in candidate at the University of Exeter. Prior to that I had done my degree in my undergrad in music and theology at Leeds, and then went on to do a master's in Biblical Studies at the king's King's College London. And it was there were really all the kind of first seedlings were sown, I guess, into me looking at theology, and media and Jesus films and relationships into that. And that then led me to be able to do kind of drop of appraisal, and yes, come to Exeter to do my research. So I was just born in London, Nigerian ancestry. But I grew up in South Africa. So a lot of my kind of cross cultural upbringing has really informed my research and the pathway and the trajectory that ended up taking. So my research was looking at audience reception. And that means like how audiences respond to a, you know, a film or a piece of art or any of those things. So, I was looking at cross cultural audience reception from audiences in the UK and in South Africa, because of my own kind of personal connections to those two geographical locations, and looking at how they respond to Jesus in film, and specifically, a black Jesus and a more westernized Jesus. And using those as parallels to compare and contrast how people responded to Jesus and film. And a lot of it actually, what came out of that was understanding really how our own worldviews our own contexts, and cultural locations really influence how we perceive Jesus and films and how we kind of construct our own perceptions in light of our own biases and assumptions of, of what we may or may not have known. So a lot of my research involves there a lot of my research involves, currently, my research interests involve a lot of kind of like decriminalisation work, postcolonial work looking at how, because a lot of my work was focused in the Global South, looking at how colonialism, even in film has made a massive impact in kind of a cultural subconsciousness of how people perceive a white Jesus. So yeah, that's kind of where my interests lie.
 
04:09
So your PhD thesis was entitled image in Jesus, ethnic identities and cultural dynamics in the luminaire project, the gospel of Mark and the Son of Man. So tell us a little bit more about that, like how you did your research and and what your findings were.
 
04:26
Yeah. So, a lot of it was like I said, based on audience reception and cultural ethnography studies. So, how it was set up was I had some main questions, you know, like how, to what extent you know, how do people respond to views and film, to what extent are a kind of use for themes so like, fidelity to the text for example, which aims to determine How closely related These

This series of podcast episodes will focus on Decolonising Research, and feature talks from the Decolonising Research Festival held at the University of Exeter in June and July 2022.
The fifteenth episode of this series features University of Exeter PGR Olabisi Obamakin interviewing Exeter academic Professor Louise Lawrence.
 
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
 
Transcription
 
00:09
Hello, and welcome to rd in the in betweens. I'm your host, Kelly Preece. And every fortnight I talk to a different guest, about researchers development, and everything in between. Hello,
 
00:33
and thank you for joining us on this online resource. My name is Bisi Obamakin, and I'm a theology PhD student at the University of Exeter. Today, we are joined by an amazing New Testament scholar, and author of many books, including her newest book, creating compassionate campuses, Professor Louise
 
00:50
Lawrence. Thank you for joining us, I really, really appreciate it like a really, really big
 
00:57
thanks for inviting me.
 
00:59
So yeah, a little bit about yourself what you do and what your research passions are.
 
01:03
Yeah, so my name is Louise Lawrence, as you as you said, I'm Professor of de testament interpretation here in Exeter. My research interests I work in New Testament studies. So particularly sort of cross cultural anthropology, with biblical texts, but latterly, for the last sort of decade, I've been really interested in the ways in which religion and sacred texts sort of sensor bodies and minds and particularly around disability studies, so yeah, so that's, that's my interests,
 
01:42
for the people that are watching that maybe they've just gotten a PhD or whatever they're doing, right at the beginning of their career, they're not socialized into any institution, what would you say to them? What would you employ to them? With regards to pedagogy and decolonization? And that kind of thing?
 
01:57
I think, I mean, well, you're a brilliant example of this. And you should probably say a bit about how you're, I'm picking, I'm picking New Testament studies. But, you know, I'll let you talk about you've got more important things to say on this, I think that you must be true to yourself, you know, and in a sense, if it matters to you, it matters. And if you identify in justice, even if other people haven't seemed to be able to have recognized or have sort of been made conscious of that, then call it out. And I think, I think as an early career, academic, you can, there's a very well known thing called imposter syndrome, I shouldn't be here. I don't look like I should be here. I don't sound like I should be here. I'm not clever enough. But everyone goes through those things. Everyone feels those things, it, it's a very natural part of it. And that says probably more about the in hospitality of academia, or the perceived sort of sense of academia than it does about you. And you just have to have the confidence to have that voice. I you say about your, your ways in which you're sort of challenging the Eurocentrism of Biblical Studies. Yeah, and finding a voice that's been lost or not even recognized. It's that that that no curriculum that you've kind of picked up?
 
03:26
Yeah, I guess it's just kind of coming into the field and not seeing myself and not really knowing where I fit. And thinking, obviously, recognizing that I was born in the UK, and I do have a Western education. But not really fully feeling like I fit into that box. And then, you know, thinking, oh, yeah, I'm African. That's what I am. And they're not fully fit in that box, either. So yeah, I think bringing a kind of Nigerian British kind of hybrid viewpoint, it's been interesting because it has highlighted things that I don't think anyone has really thought about. Things that I've experienced, and I've walked in my life that a

This series of podcast episodes will focus on Decolonising Research, and feature talks from the Decolonising Research Festival held at the University of Exeter in June and July 2022.
The fourteenth episode of the series features University of Exeter PGR Olabisi Obamakin interviewing researcher Jemima Kola-Abodunde.
 
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
 
Transcription
 
Hello, and welcome to rd in the in betweens. I'm your host Kelly Preece. And every fortnight I talk to a different guest about researchers development and everything in between.
 
00:31
Hello, and thank you for tuning in to this online resource. My name is Bisi Obamakin and I'm a second year PhD student at the University of Exeter. Today we are joined in discussion by my really good friend Jemima Kola-Abondunde she has nearly 10 years of experience in the NHS. She's a physiotherapist by background and has worked across various settings as a clinician. She's me, MSc in public health, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. And she's also worked in South Africa. Currently, she works in digital transformation and primary care, exploring how patient outcomes can be improved using digital tools. So thank you so much for joining Jemima. I really appreciate it.
 
01:14
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
 
01:16
So yeah, tell us a little bit more about your work. Yeah. what your interests are.
 
01:21
Yeah, I think you've kind of summarize really well. I think ultimately, my interests are wide and all within health care. And I guess the main focus is about optimizing health care delivery on a global scale for patients and ensuring that those that are most vulnerable are not left behind.
 
01:46
So that sounds amazing. Yeah, thank you for joining this decolonial festival. So yeah, what does decolonization mean to you?
 
01:57
Yeah, so this is a really big question. I think when I was looking up what it meant in terms of its definition. You know, the internet said, it's a process by a kind of which colonies become independent of the colonizing country. But for me, personally, I think it's really just going back to one's original roots, and identity. So whilst you know the colonizer might be absent, physically, in some places, to me, decolonization refers to the kind of the mental, social, and cultural independence and sort of disentanglement from invaders and reestablishment to one's original identity. Thank you so much. So,
 
02:47
so you're working in the field of public health in the NHS. And so why is decolonization important specifically in your field?
 
02:58
So, I think, when we talk about decolonization in the NHS and in the public health, I think, for me, kind of a refers to a lot, it has a lot to do with health inequalities. And it refers to, you know, inclusion refers to diversity of voices, ensuring that everybody has the same level of care. And that's not happening at the moment, you know, if we think about kind of the workforce in itself, the kind of the beam brackets, I appreciate, not everybody likes that terminology, but about 22% of the NHS staff are within, you know, would kind of classify themselves as beam and that's quite significant. So, you know, their voices need to be heard, as well as they need to be treated fairly. But we've seen kind of in the past that that hasn't always been the case. If we take the case study of COVID. That, in itself, showed us glaringly the health inequalities amongst minority ethnic groups with higher rates of death amongst, you know, black Africans, Bangladeshis because of a lack of understanding, lack of trust from patients public side. So yeah, there was a lot of thing happening, lots of things happening there from a kind of a public health and NHS perspective that ties back to kind of colonial roots, you'd say.
 
04:40
Yeah, and you know, just thinking abou

This series of podcast episodes will focus on Decolonising Research, and feature talks from the Decolonising Research Festival held at the University of Exeter in June and July 2022.
The thirteenth episode of the series features University of Exeter PGR Olabisi Obamakin interviewing Dr. Anu Ranawana, Research Specialist at Christian Aid.
 
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
 
Transcription
 
00:09
Hello, and welcome to rd in the in betweens. I'm your host Kelly Preece. And every fortnight I talk to a different guest, about researchers development, and everything in between.
 
00:34
Hello, and thank you for joining this online resource. My name is Bisi Obamakin. I'm a theology PhD student at University of Exeter. Today, we are joined by Dr. Anu Ranawana, sorry, who is a theologian and political economist. And he's gonna be joining us to discuss the theory of the theory behind decolonization. So thank you for joining this discussion. I really appreciate your time. Yeah, a little bit about yourself, what you do and what your research specialisms are.
 
01:08
Thanks Bisi, I'm so excited to be here. I absolutely love anything to me, like so. So I'm really honored and excited and all of those sorts of things. So a little bit about me, um, you said, I'm a theologian and political economist, I also always like to say, I'm a postulant theologian, because I'm really kind of still still on my journey. As a theologian, a lot of my work and my background has been in international development as a researcher in international development, but also working in the terms of looking at aspects of global justice. So in a sense, I come I come to theology from sort of from the ground of global justice. So I'm very, very sort of rooted in all of that. So because of that, I wear about six different hats at the moment. I'm a research advisor for Christian Aid. I'm doing a project at the University of St. Andrews, where I'm looking at the importance of storytelling to anticolonial, feminist theology, in Asian culture. And I also teach a little bit at the Queens foundation on aspects of justice, and mission. So I juggle a few different things. And so that's yeah, that's me. Amazing.
 
02:22
I also wanted to ask you, like, how did you get how'd you get involved with like, decolonial work? And that kind of thing? Like, how did you get involved in it?
 
02:31
In? Well, I mean, in the sense that I think, I've always been something that I've, I've thought about being someone from Sri Lanka, which was a former, and not only a British colony, but a Dutch colony, and a Portuguese colony. So you always think about who you are as a colonized subject. Because there's the kind of internalization of of, of the colony doesn't really go away, even, even even after independence. So in that sense, I think that's always a part of, of your conversations. And I think, in trying to understand what one's intellectual as well as sort of personal identity, I started reading, as we all do, I started reading people who had been writing on this issue, so people like Sylvia winter, or me, Suzanne, or fennel, who opened up these questions that, you know, you've always been trying to find out about yourself to find out about your country to find out about the global scape. And so, you know, in that sense, one of the things that, that these sort of writers do these thinkers do is that they push you to say, to push you beyond your kind of boundaries of, you know, what do you know, what, what don't you know, like, Are you sure of the ground you stand on? And that's kind of incredible. But I think what's really sort of affirmed me and forced me to be passionate about this kind of work has also been being involved in social movements. Because really, that is where that is where the theory of the world, especially in social movements, the creativit

This series of podcast episodes will focus on Decolonising Research, and feature talks from the Decolonising Research Festival held at the University of Exeter in June and July 2022.
The eleventh epsiode of the series will feature Dr Salmah Eva-Lina Lawrence from the International Women's Development Agency with her talk 'What does it mean to do decolonial research?'
 
Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
 
Transcription
 
00:09
Hello, and welcome to rd in the in betweens. I'm your host Kelly Preece. And every fortnight I talk to a different guest about researchers development, and everything in between.
 
00:32
Hello, and welcome to the final recording of talks in our decolonizing research series. For this final episode, I'm delighted to bring to you Dr. Salmah Eva-lina. Lawrence, with her talk, what does it mean to do decolonial research.
 
00:48
But first of all, I'd like to acknowledge that I am on the lands traditional lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation of New South Wales in Australia. This is where I normally live and work tonight I'm in Melbourne, I'm actually on the lands of the orangery, people of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to the elders past, present and emerging of the First Nations peoples of Australia. And I recognize that Australia was founded on the genocide and dispossession of First Nations peoples, and that the land was never ceded. It always was and always will be Aboriginal land. So I'm going to do a short introduction to myself and then head off into my presentation. I am currently the acting co CEO of the International Women's Development Agency in Melbourne, Australia, where I lead our decolonial work interrogating our practices and our approach to international development with the objective of decolonizing how we work when I'm not acting CEO, I'm the director of systemic change and partnerships, and I still have charged in the decolonial work that we do. I'm also an adjunct Fellow at Macquarie University. In my scholarly life, I research decolonial theory, ethics and epistemology. And I draw deeply on my own culture, which is a matrilineal culture in Papua New Guinea, the millbay province of Papa New Guinea, and I use my own culture to frame my decolonial practice. In fact, it's my matrilineal culture, a culture that's at the opposite end of the spectrum of the masculinizing patriarchy of coloniality. That shapes my decolonial practice and shaped my decolonial practice long before I became a scholar of the decolonial. So it's really exciting to see Exeter, uni and other academic institutions start to take the decolonization of research seriously. I started my PhD in 2013 and submitted in 2017. So really not that long ago. But my thesis was grounded in decolonial theory theory I was influenced into radio by any bulky handle, Walter Manolo Ramon, Grossberg well, and reproduce cell, or your NK or women in the mighty Nile cough. I hope these names are familiar to you, if you are decolonial researchers, and Linda Jr. By Smith, who is a Maori from the Pacific region. On the one hand, at the level of the institution where I did my PhD, it was a struggle to talk the decolonial and hold a decolonial space, because it was just so alien at that time. It was marginally easier within my discipline of gender and Cultural Studies, because both feminist and anthropological critical studies were an influence in this domain. And I was able to use this as a bridge into post colonial theories and then into decolonial theory. So where you sit discipline wise, I think will have a large influence on how you're able to negotiate using decolonial theory and being a decolonial researcher.
 
03:49
In the second year of my PhD, I attended a summer school in Barcelona on decolonizing knowledge and power, I met some of the scholars that I've just named, and where I connect