Porcelain used as ‘critique of white supremacy’ in taxpayer-funded study
Porcelain can be used as a “critique of white supremacy,” according to a taxpayer-funded academic study.
Sculptor and mixed media artist Victoria Burgher has been awarded a doctoral scholarship in “Crafting counter-hegemony: using porcelain to interrogate constructed ideologies of whiteness and empire” at the University of Westminster’s Centre for Social Justice Research.
She is being funded by Techne/AHRC, which is a consortium of nine universities in London and the South East, which awards 57 doctoral studentships annually.
It is sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), a subsidiary of the taxpayer-funded UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
Ms Burgher was awarded £17,000 annually during 2021, the first year of her PhD with studies lasting at least three years; the final figure is likely to be upwards of £51,000.
On X, formerly Twitter, she describes herself as a “doctoral researcher using porcelain to interrogate whiteness as an antiracist practice” next to the words “Free Palestine”.
She recently retweeted a post calling for a “Global Strike for Rafah”, where participants “Do not work”.
Conservative MP Nick Fletcher said: “Nobody benefits from these studies, least of all their participants who simply reflect back their own predictable, simplistic, and unevidenced ideologies without actually learning anything.
“They would be better off doing some real work that was outward looking and helped others. And we could cut funding, taxes, and benefit others that way too.”
An Instagram post of Burgher’s, with the University of Westminster tagged, shows her photographed in black and white, next to what looks like broken remnants of a white vase, which she appears to have thrown onto the floor. It is titled “A Provocation in Porcelain: Shattering Whiteness 2022”.
‘Patriarchal and anthropocentric hegemony’
Other Techne grants have gone to students researching the “garden as a site to cultivate queer anti-racist communities”, “spiritual activism” and “poetic responses to climate grief under patriarchal and anthropocentric hegemony”.
Westminster’s Centre for Social Justice Centre has produced research such as “Non-Binary in Higher Education: Lived Experiences Imagined Futures”, which recommended academics don’t call students “ladies and gentlemen”, as well as a project on “decolonising gender-based violence” in Higher Education. The latter has received almost £1 million in funding from UKRI.
UKRI said: “UKRI invests in a diverse research and innovation portfolio. This includes awarding block grants to Higher Education Institutions to support PhD studentships. The institutions make decisions and allocate the funding to specific studentship proposals, following an application process.”
The University of Westminster and Ms Burgher were approached for comment.
