How Disabled Must You Be to Deserve Support?

 

Reform UK's £50 Billion Welfare Plan and the Return of the “Deserving” Disabled Person

There is a question sitting underneath Reform UK's proposed £50 billion reduction in welfare spending that deserves more attention than the headline figure itself.

How disabled must you be before society decides that you deserve support?

Reform UK has proposed one of the most radical restructurings of disability support in recent British politics. Under its proposals, Personal Independence Payment (PIP) for working-age adults would be abolished and replaced with a new Health Security Allowance, with support concentrated on those considered to have the most severe and enduring conditions. The health-related element of Universal Credit would also be abolished. Reporting on the proposals suggests that as many as 2.89 million people could see disability or sickness support removed or changed.

The proposals form part of a much larger attempt to reduce welfare expenditure by approximately £50 billion a year. Reform estimates that around £20 billion of those savings would come from changes affecting disabled and sick people, while another £21 billion would eventually come from restricting most welfare benefits for foreign nationals.

There are legitimate political questions about the sustainability, effectiveness and design of any welfare system. No benefit should be beyond scrutiny simply because its purpose is socially valuable. The government's own recent review of PIP has concluded that the system is not working as it should and requires reform.

But reforming a system is not the same thing as questioning the legitimacy of the people who depend upon it.

And this is where the language surrounding these proposals matters.

The distinction between those who are sufficiently disabled to qualify for continuing financial support and those whose conditions are judged less severe resurrects a very old way of thinking about welfare. It separates disabled people into categories of deservingness.

At one end sits the person whose impairment is severe, visible, permanent and sufficiently incapacitating. This person can be imagined as legitimately dependent. At the other end are millions of people living with chronic illness, fluctuating conditions, neurological conditions, mental distress, pain, fatigue, sensory impairments and other forms of disability whose lives cannot easily be divided into severely incapacitated and capable.

Many disabled people work. Many want to work. Many move between periods of greater and lesser capacity. A person may be able to participate in a meeting and be unable to cook afterwards. Someone may be able to work but unable to use public transport. Someone may walk for a short distance but require a wheelchair for longer journeys. Someone may appear entirely non-disabled during a few hours of public activity while paying for that participation with exhaustion afterwards.

Disability is not an on/off switch.

Yet welfare politics repeatedly attempts to make it one.

This becomes particularly important when disability benefits are discussed through the language of getting people “back to work”, because PIP is not an unemployment benefit. It exists to recognise some of the additional difficulties and costs associated with disability and long-term health conditions. It is not means-tested, and a person can work and receive it.

That distinction matters.

If disability support helps somebody pay for transport because they cannot use a bus, purchase equipment, obtain assistance, heat their home, access prepared food or meet other disability-related costs, removing that support does not automatically make employment more likely. It may make participation harder.

Scope's Disability Price Tag research estimates that disabled households need, on average, an additional £1,095 every month to achieve the same standard of living as comparable non-disabled households. PIP does not come close to eliminating that additional financial burden.

The disability payment, then, is not necessarily the thing keeping somebody outside society.

It may be part of the infrastructure keeping them inside it.

This is where decades of disability scholarship, and particularly the social model of disability, should make us suspicious of any policy that equates support with dependency. Disability cannot be understood simply by looking at what is happening inside an individual's body. People are also disabled by the environments through which they must move.

A person who cannot walk encounters a building with stairs differently from a building with a lift. Someone who cannot drive experiences a town with accessible public transport differently from somewhere in which the only viable alternative is an expensive taxi. A person with fluctuating energy may be able to remain employed because flexible working, technology and practical support make that employment possible.

The body has not necessarily changed. The conditions of participation have.

Money is part of those conditions.

A wheelchair can create mobility. A personal assistant can create independence. Accessible transport can create employment. Technology can create communication. Heating can make a home inhabitable. Practical assistance can enable somebody to conserve limited energy for paid employment, parenting, education or participation in community life.

None of these things removes impairment. They alter the conditions under which somebody lives with it.

This is why the assumption that reducing support necessarily reduces dependency contains such a profound contradiction.

Sometimes support is what makes independence possible.

Remove the infrastructure of participation and then instruct somebody to participate, and we should not be surprised when participation becomes harder.

But disability is only one boundary being redrawn in Reform's welfare proposals. Another concerns nationality.

The proposal has been described as preventing “foreign nationals” from accessing most welfare benefits. That phrase needs examining carefully, because it can easily conjure an image of someone who has recently arrived in Britain and immediately begun claiming benefits. That is not an adequate description of what is being proposed.

Many people living in Britain on temporary immigration routes are already subject to No Recourse to Public Funds and therefore cannot access most mainstream benefits. Reform's proposal goes considerably further. Reporting indicates that its restrictions would extend to people with permanent settlement rights and even EU citizens with settled status — people who may have lived, worked, paid taxes, raised children and built their lives in Britain for many years.

A person can therefore be permanently settled in Britain and still be classified, for the purposes of this proposal, as a “foreign national”.

That changes the nature of the argument.

The question is no longer simply whether newly arrived migrants should have immediate access to the welfare state. It becomes a question about whether nationality itself should determine access to collective protection even after the state has granted somebody permanent membership of British society.

And here disability and migration begin to illuminate something larger.

They are not identical experiences, and intersectional analysis should never pretend that they are. But both reveal the politics of deservingness.

The disabled person must demonstrate sufficient incapacity.

The migrant must demonstrate sufficient belonging.

The unemployed person must demonstrate sufficient willingness to work.

Different groups encounter different tests, but beneath them sits a remarkably similar question:

What must you prove before society accepts that you deserve its support?

For somebody who occupies more than one of these categories, a disabled migrant, for example, those boundaries do not remain neatly separate. A person can simultaneously confront questions about whether their disability is severe enough to deserve support and whether their nationality makes them sufficiently entitled to receive that support in the first place.

That is precisely why welfare policy requires an intersectional lens. Policies written as though “disabled people”, “migrants” and “workers” are entirely separate populations fail to recognise that real human beings inhabit several social positions at once.

Reform's proposal that some long-term benefit claimants deemed capable of employment should undertake around 20 hours of community activity each week or risk losing support raises another version of the same question. There is an important distinction between creating meaningful routes into employment and requiring somebody to perform visible social usefulness in exchange for the material conditions of survival.

The latter tells us something about how we have come to understand citizenship itself.

Perhaps one of the most revealing phrases in the debate is Robert Jenrick's criticism of what he calls “suicidal empathy”.

It is an extraordinary political formulation because it transforms compassion from a social virtue into a potential national danger.

Of course governments have finite resources. Of course welfare expenditure requires choices. And of course poorly designed systems should be changed.

But there is something troubling about a politics in which the danger is imagined to be that society has become too compassionate towards people who require support.

Human dependency is not an aberration. It is part of being human.

Children are dependent. People who become ill are dependent. Many older people become dependent. People recovering from accidents become dependent. Parents depend upon childcare. Workers depend upon transport systems, healthcare and public infrastructure. Businesses depend upon roads, educated employees, courts, policing and functioning financial systems.

None of us is entirely independent.

We have simply constructed some forms of dependency as ordinary and others as moral problems.

Disabled people have repeatedly been required to justify theirs.

There is a legitimate debate to be had about PIP. There is a legitimate debate about assessments, employment, welfare expenditure and how governments can support more disabled people who want to work.

But the starting point cannot be that disability must become catastrophic before its additional costs become legitimate.

That misunderstands disability.

It misunderstands work.

And, perhaps most importantly, it misunderstands independence.

A society committed to disability inclusion should not ask:

How little support can we provide before somebody falls?

It should ask:

What support allows this person to participate as fully as possible?

Those questions emerge from fundamentally different understandings of disability.

One treats support as evidence of dependency.

The other understands that appropriately designed support can create autonomy, participation and contribution.

And that is why the debate about Reform UK's welfare proposals cannot ultimately be reduced to £50 billion on a spreadsheet.

It is a debate about something much more fundamental.

Who do we believe deserves support?

And how disabled — or how British — must somebody become before we are willing to give it?

Jason Arday and the Human Cost of Academic Spectacle

I learned that Jason Arday had died at the age of 41 after spending several days watching the controversy surrounding him unfold with increasing discomfort. Throughout that time, I deliberately resisted joining the rush to pronounce him either guilty or innocent. I did not know the full facts, and investigations were under way. Serious allegations had been raised concerning plagiarism, alongside questions about aspects of his academic and professional record. Those allegations deserved to be examined properly, and academic integrity requires nothing less.

Yet, as the story developed, I became increasingly troubled by something else. It seemed to me that somewhere along the way, the investigation of allegations was becoming the public investigation of a human being. The questions multiplied. What began with questions about plagiarism expanded into questions about where Arday had worked, what he had claimed about his professional history, who had appointed him, who had believed him, what students thought about him, what his appointment said about Cambridge, and eventually what the entire affair supposedly revealed about diversity, DEI, merit and the political left. Each new detail seemed capable of generating another headline or another round of commentary. I found myself wondering, long before his death, at what point legitimate scrutiny becomes something else. At what point is enough, enough?

This matters to me because I did not first encounter Jason Arday as a newspaper headline. I knew him through his scholarship.

I have used his work on race, racism, higher education and mental health because aspects of what he described corresponded with experiences reported by Black participants in my own research. Some of it also resonated with experiences I recognised as a Black academic myself. That does not mean that everything he ever wrote must therefore be correct, nor does it mean that scholarship should be protected from scrutiny because its conclusions resonate with our experiences. Scholarship must withstand examination. But neither can I pretend that the phenomena Arday wrote about suddenly cease to exist because serious questions have subsequently been raised about the scholar.

One of his papers carries a title that is particularly difficult to encounter now: No one can see me cry: understanding mental health issues for Black and minority ethnic academic staff in higher education. Arday wrote about racism, marginalisation and isolation within universities, and about the difficulties minority ethnic academics can encounter in accessing mental-health support that adequately understands racialised experience.

I have heard some of these experiences articulated by research participants. They exist within a wider scholarly literature. I have also spent enough time within higher education to recognise some of these institutional dynamics myself. Whatever investigations may eventually establish about particular aspects of Arday’s scholarship or professional history, the experiences he and others documented cannot simply be erased with the collapse of his reputation. Ideas and social phenomena do not automatically become false because the person associated with articulating them becomes controversial.

None of this diminishes the importance of academic integrity. Plagiarism matters. Accuracy about qualifications and professional experience matters. Universities have an obligation to investigate credible allegations concerning both, regardless of the race, politics, reputation or institutional status of the person involved. If wrongdoing occurred, it should have been established through evidence and dealt with appropriately.

But accountability and humanity are not opposites.

There is a difference between investigating allegations and publicly dismantling a person. Over the course of this controversy, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the momentum surrounding Arday. Details that appeared increasingly distant from the original allegations became material for public consumption. His career, personality, students, previous institutions and the people involved in appointing him became part of an expanding story.

Most troubling to me was the way his individual case began to be absorbed into a much larger ideological argument about diversity. The discussion was no longer confined to whether Jason Arday had committed particular acts of misconduct. His story became material for arguments about DEI, supposedly lowered academic standards, “woke” universities and the legitimacy of diversity initiatives themselves.

That transition matters.

When somebody from a minoritised group succeeds, we are often told that identity should be irrelevant and that individuals should be judged on their own merits. Yet when one of those individuals is accused of wrongdoing, there is a disturbing tendency for the individual suddenly to become representative. A white professor accused of misconduct does not ordinarily provoke a national conversation about whether universities have employed too many white academics. The individual’s alleged behaviour remains, largely, the individual’s alleged behaviour.

One Black professor should not become a referendum on the legitimacy of Black academics.

This controversy therefore raises another question that extends far beyond Jason Arday: what does an institution owe a person while it investigates them?

I do not mean protection from legitimate scrutiny. Nor do I mean immunity from consequences, interference with independent journalism, or institutional declarations of innocence before evidence has been examined. I mean something much more basic: a duty to remember that the person being investigated remains a human being.

Universities have sophisticated mechanisms for dealing with allegations of misconduct. They have committees, regulations, human-resources departments, communications teams, legal advisers and governance structures. Yet I wonder whether our procedures for protecting academic integrity are always accompanied by equally serious thinking about what happens to the person standing at the centre of them.

Who asks whether that person is sleeping? Who asks whether they are eating? Who asks what it is like to wake each morning knowing that another headline, another allegation, another recollection or another social-media discussion may be waiting? Who makes sure that investigation remains investigation rather than becoming social punishment before findings have been reached?

I do not know what support Jason Arday received privately, and it would be wrong for me to claim otherwise. His friends, family, colleagues or university may have provided support about which the public knows nothing. But the broader institutional question remains important. When Arday resigned from Cambridge, he spoke publicly about the profound emotional toll that the accusations, speculation and commentary had taken on him and those close to him. Whatever else we think about the allegations, those words should matter. Behind the controversy was a person experiencing its consequences.

At the time I am writing this, Jason Arday’s cause of death has not been established. Police have described his death as unexpected but not suspicious, and the matter will be referred to the coroner. We therefore should not manufacture an explanation for his death simply because the timing invites us to do so.

I will not do to him in death what troubled me while he was alive: fill gaps in evidence with certainty.

But refusing to speculate about the cause of his death does not require us to stop asking questions about what preceded it. A man publicly described the profound emotional toll that relentless accusations, speculation and commentary were taking on him. Shortly afterwards, at the age of 41, he died. Whatever the eventual findings concerning the cause of his death, surely that chronology should make us pause—not to speculate, but to think seriously about the human cost of the way academic controversies are conducted in public.

There will presumably still be investigations and findings. Questions may eventually be answered about his thesis, his publications, his professional claims and the institutional processes surrounding his appointments. Some allegations may ultimately be substantiated; others may not. We should allow evidence to determine that.

But Jason Arday will never read those final findings. He will never have the opportunity to respond to whatever conclusions are reached. If some allegations are rejected, he will not be here to rebuild the corresponding parts of his reputation. If others are substantiated, he will not be here to account for them.

That leaves higher education with a question considerably larger than one professor: what kind of accountability are we creating?

Due process exists because an allegation is not a finding. Investigation exists because evidence must be examined rather than assumed. And human dignity should not become something temporarily suspended while that process occurs. Even a person eventually found responsible for wrongdoing remains a human being. Someone whose case has not yet been determined certainly does.

I cannot pretend that I experience this story only as a detached observer. I am a Black academic. I write about race, inequality and institutional life. Watching questions about the conduct of one Black scholar expand into commentary about diversity and the legitimacy of Black advancement within universities has been deeply unsettling.

It carries an implication that many Black academics will recognise. If one of us is accused of failing, will our individual conduct be examined, or will our presence itself be put on trial? Will the question be what this particular individual did, or whether people like us should ever have occupied these spaces in the first place?

Those are profoundly different questions.

Jason Arday should have been accountable for Jason Arday. If he had committed academic misconduct, the evidence should have established it and the appropriate processes should have followed. But he should never have been required to carry the legitimacy of Black scholarship, Black professors or diversity in higher education on his shoulders. Neither should any of us.

There is, however, another consequence that will remain after the immediate controversy has subsided. The integrity of other Black academics has been dragged, unnecessarily, into a case that was supposed to concern the conduct of one man. Once commentary begins speaking of “Black mediocrity” in academia, diversity appointments, lowered standards or institutions supposedly privileging race over merit, the accusation is no longer directed solely at Jason Arday. It casts suspicion over Black academics more generally.

That is what I find particularly damaging.

There are Black academics across British universities who obtained their doctorates legitimately, passed examinations, survived vivas, published through peer review, competed for fellowships and jobs, taught students, secured grants, wrote books and built their careers through years of intellectual labour. They should not now find themselves silently required to prove that they are not another Jason Arday. Nor should a Black professor entering a lecture theatre have to wonder whether colleagues or students are looking at them and asking whether they are genuinely qualified or merely the beneficiary of diversity.

This is the damage produced when allegations concerning an individual are transformed into an argument about a group.

And who repairs that damage?

If the investigations ultimately substantiate serious misconduct by Arday, that will establish something about Jason Arday. It will not establish that Black academics are mediocre, that diversity and excellence are incompatible, or that Black scholars have somehow entered universities without meeting academic standards. If some of the allegations are ultimately rejected, the same question of repair becomes even more urgent, because the insinuations about Black academic legitimacy will already have travelled considerably further than any subsequent correction is likely to travel.

There is an asymmetry here that should trouble us. Black academics can spend decades establishing their individual credibility, yet the alleged wrongdoing of one Black academic can suddenly be mobilised as evidence against the collective. We are made individual when we succeed and representative when we fail.

Who, then, takes responsibility for restoring what has been damaged? Who tells the doctoral student, early-career researcher, lecturer or professor who has watched this unfold that their presence in the academy is not now presumptively questionable? Who corrects the suggestion that Black scholarship itself should be approached with greater suspicion? Who repairs the damage when the language of individual accountability has already become the language of racial judgement?

Black academics should not have to perform that repair ourselves. We did not create this collective accusation.

Academic integrity must be defended vigorously. But so must the integrity of academics who have done nothing wrong. If we genuinely believe in individual responsibility, then we must practise it consistently. Jason Arday’s conduct should be judged on the evidence concerning Jason Arday. The scholarly legitimacy of thousands of other Black academics was never on trial.

And so I return to the title of that paper: No one can see me cry.

There is something painfully difficult about those words now. Jason Arday wrote about mental health, racism, marginalisation and isolation within higher education. Today, he is gone.

I do not know what caused his death. I do not know everything that happened privately during these final weeks of his life. I do not know what the investigations would ultimately have concluded. Precisely because I do not know, I refuse to manufacture certainty now.

What I do know is that academic integrity matters. Due process matters. Racism matters. Mental health matters. Human dignity matters. We should be intellectually and morally capable of holding all of those truths at the same time.

Perhaps that is what troubles me most about everything I have watched unfold. Somewhere within the allegations, investigations, headlines, political arguments and social-media commentary, it became remarkably easy to lose sight of the person at their centre.

Jason Arday was not an allegation. He was not a diversity initiative. He was not an argument about DEI. He was not a newspaper spectacle.

He was a human being.

Whatever those investigations would ultimately have concluded, he was entitled to remain a human being while they took place.

May he rest in peace.

The Right to Fail as an Individual: Race, Academic Misconduct and the Jason Arday Controversy

 

There are two Cambridge academics whose cases are worth considering together: William O’Reilly, a historian at the University of Cambridge, and Jason Arday, until recently Professor of Sociology of Education at the same institution. Their circumstances are not identical, and I do not suggest that they are. What interests me is something different: the strikingly different meanings that can become attached to academic misconduct, or allegations of misconduct, when the academic concerned is Black.

The controversy surrounding Arday has moved far beyond questions about one scholar's work, biography or appointment. It has become entangled with arguments about diversity, equality and inclusion, the standards applied by elite universities and, most troublingly, the intellectual legitimacy of Black academics more generally. John McWhorter, for example, has characterised the affair as symptomatic of academia's willingness to tolerate intellectual “mediocrity” from Black scholars in its pursuit of institutional virtue.

It is the movement from Jason Arday to Black scholars that concerns me. Whatever is ultimately established about Arday cannot, by itself, sustain a claim about the intellectual quality of Black academics as a group. Yet this controversy has already been recruited into a much older argument: that racial inclusion necessarily requires the lowering of standards, and that the presence of Black people in prestigious institutions should therefore be viewed with suspicion.

The case of William O’Reilly provides an uncomfortable comparison.

In 2023, Varsity reported the outcome of a Cambridge investigation concerning O’Reilly's use of work written by one of his undergraduate students. According to the newspaper, more than twelve pages of an academic article published under O’Reilly's name contained material taken almost word-for-word from two essays written by the student, whom O’Reilly had supervised. The student had complained to Cambridge in 2021, and after an investigation lasting approximately two years, the university tribunal upheld the plagiarism complaint. Cambridge concluded, however, that the plagiarism resulted from negligent rather than deliberate acts. O’Reilly explained that he had inadvertently incorporated the material while experiencing severe personal difficulties and that he had intended it to serve temporarily as an aide-mémoire while developing his article. The article was withdrawn, a penalty was imposed, and O’Reilly returned to work.

I am not revisiting this case because I believe O’Reilly should have been publicly humiliated, dismissed or pursued indefinitely. Nor am I arguing that his case and Arday's should have identical outcomes. The comparison raises a much more fundamental question: why did O’Reilly's case remain, essentially, the case of William O’Reilly?

His conduct did not become evidence of white intellectual mediocrity. It did not generate a serious public debate about whether British universities had become too willing to tolerate mediocre white academics. White professors elsewhere were not implicitly required to demonstrate that they had genuinely earned their positions. Nobody reasonably suggested that O’Reilly's case told us anything about the intellectual competence of white engineers, historians, scientists, philosophers or medical researchers.

That would, of course, have been absurd. William O’Reilly's conduct could tell us something about William O’Reilly and perhaps something about Cambridge's institutional procedures. It could not tell us whether white academics are intellectually mediocre.

Why, then, can allegations concerning Jason Arday so readily acquire an entirely different racial significance?

This question becomes more important because we do not yet know the final outcome of the processes surrounding Arday. Serious allegations have been made concerning plagiarism, aspects of his academic work and elements of his biography. Cambridge has announced an independent inquiry into his appointment. Those matters should be investigated properly. If misconduct is established, there should be accountability. If allegations are not established, that too should be stated clearly.

I have no interest in declaring Arday innocent simply because he is Black. Racial solidarity cannot require the abandonment of evidence or academic standards. But neither should allegations appearing repeatedly in newspapers substitute for an adjudicative process. There is a considerable distance between taking allegations seriously and deciding that they have already been proved.

The difficulty is that, while the institutional processes continue, a broader racial judgement appears already to have been made in parts of the public conversation. Arday has become connected to DEI, and DEI has become connected to supposedly lowered academic standards. From there, the argument travels remarkably quickly towards the suggestion that universities have been accepting “Black mediocrity”.

This is where the language ceases to concern one professor and begins to implicate the rest of us.

If somebody believes that Jason Arday's scholarship is intellectually mediocre, there is an established scholarly method for demonstrating that. Read his work. Examine his methodology. Test his evidence. Interrogate his arguments. Consider his contribution in relation to the relevant literature. Academic work is open to criticism, and no scholar should be protected from rigorous assessment because of race.

But “academia accepts Black mediocrity” is not a criticism of an individual scholar's work. It is an empirical claim about Black academics as a group. Such a claim would require evidence commensurate with its scale. We would need to know how Black academics were selected, how their qualifications and research records compared with those of other academics, whether appointment and promotion standards differed, and whether there was evidence that mediocre Black candidates were systematically preferred over stronger candidates of other racial backgrounds. We would also need an intellectually defensible definition of “mediocrity” and an appropriate comparison group.

One controversial Black professor cannot provide that evidence. One Black man cannot constitute a dataset from which conclusions about Black intellectual life may legitimately be drawn.

The comparison with O’Reilly therefore matters not because his case went completely unreported; it did not. It matters because his whiteness did not become the explanatory framework through which his conduct was interpreted. He remained an individual. His case did not place white academics collectively in the dock.

That capacity to remain an individual is itself a form of privilege that deserves greater attention.

Black academics frequently encounter a different problem because their presence within predominantly white institutions can acquire symbolic significance whether they want it to or not. An academic can be exceptionally qualified, possess an impressive publication record and deserve an appointment entirely on merit, while simultaneously being presented by an institution as evidence of its commitment to diversity. Those things are not mutually exclusive.

This is one reason I am uncomfortable with the way universities sometimes publicise minority appointments. The Black academic may simply want to be recognised as a historian, engineer, sociologist or scientist, while the institution sees an opportunity to demonstrate progress. The media may see an inspirational story, and opponents of diversity policies may see what they dismissively call a “diversity hire”. The same individual can therefore be transformed into a symbol by people pursuing completely different agendas.

The danger becomes apparent when something goes wrong. The racial symbolism that once made an appointment useful as evidence of institutional progress can suddenly be reversed. The person who once represented inclusion becomes evidence, for critics, that inclusion itself has failed. An appointment celebrated partly because of what it appeared to represent can be reinterpreted as proof that standards were sacrificed in pursuit of diversity.

That is deeply unfair to the individual concerned, but it is also unfair to every other Black scholar who becomes caught in the resulting suspicion.

Indeed, Cambridge itself appears to understand this danger. In responding to the Arday controversy, Vice-Chancellor Deborah Prentice has reportedly stressed that the case should not undermine the legitimacy or contributions of other scholars of colour. That reassurance is welcome, but its very necessity is revealing. Why should allegations concerning one professor have any bearing whatsoever on the legitimacy of another Black academic? Other scholars of colour did not appoint Arday. They did not write his doctorate, his publications or his biography. Whatever an investigation ultimately establishes belongs to the individuals and institutions involved.

Yet Cambridge apparently recognises that the reputational consequences have travelled further. That is precisely the problem.

There is a racial multiplier at work. A controversy begins with allegations concerning Jason Arday. Legitimate questions then arise about Cambridge's appointment procedures. But from there, the categories expand. Arday becomes a discussion about Cambridge's diversity agenda; diversity becomes DEI; DEI becomes synonymous with lowered standards; lowered standards become associated with Black appointments; and eventually one man's controversy becomes evidence of “Black mediocrity”.

At each stage, the individual becomes less visible and race becomes more important.

There is also a painful asymmetry in the way Black excellence and Black failure can be treated. Black intellectual achievement stretches across centuries and encompasses science, medicine, engineering, mathematics, literature, philosophy, political thought and countless other fields. Yet that history never seems capable of permanently settling the question of Black intellectual legitimacy. Each Black scholar may still be required to demonstrate that they personally deserve to be where they are.

Black failure, however, can acquire extraordinary representative power. One Black person's alleged misconduct can suddenly reopen questions about whether Black academics generally are “good enough”.

Centuries of achievement apparently cannot establish collective excellence, but one scandal can be invoked as evidence of collective mediocrity.

There is something intellectually indefensible about that asymmetry.

Academic misconduct is not a racial characteristic. Plagiarism did not begin with DEI, nor did poor scholarship begin when universities started paying greater attention to racial representation. Academics of every racial and ethnic background are capable of brilliance, dishonesty, negligence, originality, mediocrity and everything in between. If we genuinely want to know whether academic standards are declining, we should investigate academic standards systematically. If we want to know whether diversity initiatives have altered appointment thresholds, then that too should be studied empirically rather than inferred from the biography of a single Black professor.

I therefore refuse the false choice between defending Jason Arday unconditionally and joining those who have already convicted him. My argument requires neither position. Perhaps the investigations will substantially vindicate him; perhaps serious wrongdoing will ultimately be established. I do not know, and I am prepared to wait for evidence.

What I do know is that neither outcome can establish the intellectual quality of Black academia.

If misconduct is established, it belongs to Jason Arday. If Cambridge's appointment procedures failed, that failure belongs to Cambridge. If institutional enthusiasm for an inspirational narrative displaced necessary scrutiny, then universities should learn from it. None of those possibilities transforms a Black physicist, historian, engineer, medical researcher or doctoral student into a suspect academic.

And this returns us to William O’Reilly.

His case did not require us to interrogate white intellectual competence. It did not make whiteness responsible for what happened. Whatever criticisms could properly be made remained attached to the academic concerned and to the institution responsible for dealing with the matter.

That is not special treatment. It is precisely how individual accountability ought to work.

I do not want William O’Reilly's case racialised in retaliation for the racialisation of Jason Arday. I want the opposite. I want Arday to receive the individuality that O’Reilly retained.

Investigate Arday. Investigate Cambridge. Ask difficult questions about academic appointments, institutional due diligence, celebrity, compelling personal narratives and the sometimes uncomfortable relationship between universities and their diversity ambitions. Ask why O’Reilly remained in post after Cambridge upheld the complaint against him. Ask whether comparable cases receive comparable institutional treatment.

But do not turn one man's skin colour into evidence against millions of other people.

Whatever the final findings concerning Jason Arday, he is not Black academia. William O’Reilly is not white academia. Neither man should possess the extraordinary power to determine the intellectual legitimacy of everybody who happens to share his race.

Perhaps that is one of the most basic forms of equality academia has yet to achieve: not merely the right to enter its institutions, but the right to succeed, to struggle and even to fail without becoming a referendum on one's race.

White academics have long possessed that individuality.

Black academics deserve it too.

When Femicide Becomes a Headline, We Have Already Arrived Too Late

The recent death of a Zimbabwean woman in the United Kingdom has left many people shocked and heartbroken, particularly within the Zimbabwean community. As legal proceedings continue, it is important to respect the judicial process and allow the courts to determine the facts. My thoughts are with her family, friends, and everyone whose lives have been touched by this tragedy.

Like many others, I have followed the conversations that have emerged in the days since her death. They are conversations marked by grief, disbelief, anger and an overwhelming sense of loss.

They are also filled with familiar questions.

How could this happen?

Could it have been prevented?

Were there warning signs?

These are important questions.

But as someone who researches violence against women, I find myself asking a different one.

Why do we only begin paying attention when a woman's death becomes a headline?

We often think of femicide as the final act of violence.

It is not.

By the time a woman is killed, the violence has often travelled through months—or even years—of coercive control, intimidation, isolation, emotional abuse, financial control, surveillance, threats and fear.

The murder is the final act.

It is rarely the beginning of the story.

This matters because if we only begin asking questions after a woman has died, our opportunity to prevent that death has already passed.

Prevention does not begin with homicide investigations.

It begins much earlier.

It begins when women first report abuse.

It begins when coercive control is recognised for what it is.

It begins when professionals understand that domestic abuse is rarely a single incident but an escalating pattern of behaviour.

Individual perpetrators must always be held responsible for their actions.

Nothing in this argument changes that.

But if our analysis ends with the perpetrator, we risk overlooking the wider systems that shape whether violence is recognised, interrupted or allowed to escalate.

Every woman lives within a network of institutions.

Police.

Healthcare.

Social services.

Family courts.

Housing providers.

Employers.

Schools.

Immigration systems.

Domestic abuse organisations.

These institutions make decisions every day that influence whether women receive protection, whether disclosures are taken seriously, whether risks are identified, and whether intervention happens before violence becomes fatal.

This is why preventing femicide is not solely a criminal justice issue.

It is also an institutional one.

In my recent article, Femicide as Infrastructure: A Comparative Feminist Analysis of the United Kingdom and South Africa, I deliberately use the word infrastructure because I believe it changes how we think about violence.

When we hear the word infrastructure, we usually think of roads, railways, bridges or hospitals.

But societies are also held together by institutional infrastructure.

The organisations responsible for safeguarding women are themselves part of the structures that shape everyday life.

When those systems communicate effectively, recognise patterns of abuse, and respond consistently, they can save lives.

When they fail to recognise escalating danger, minimise coercive control, or leave women navigating fragmented services, those institutional weaknesses become part of the environment in which violence continues.

That is what I mean by femicide as infrastructure.

It is not an argument that institutions commit murder.

It is an argument that institutions influence whether opportunities to prevent violence are recognised or missed.

The question therefore becomes not only:

Who committed the crime?

But also:

What surrounded this woman before her death?

The purpose of asking these questions is not to comment on one particular case.

Every case must be determined by the courts on its own evidence.

Rather, it is to recognise that every tragedy invites us to reflect on broader patterns that extend far beyond one individual life.

Violence against women does not occur in isolation.

Neither should our understanding of it.

If prevention is our goal, we must become better at recognising danger before it reaches its most devastating conclusion.

That means listening when women say they are afraid.

Recognising coercive control as a serious form of abuse.

Understanding that leaving an abusive relationship is often one of the most dangerous moments in a woman's life.

And ensuring that institutions communicate, assess risk consistently and respond before violence escalates.

Why I Compare the United Kingdom and South Africa

My research compares the United Kingdom and South Africa because, despite their different political histories and legal systems, both countries continue to face profound challenges in addressing violence against women.

The comparison is not intended to suggest that these contexts are identical.

Rather, it highlights that institutional questions transcend national borders.

How do we recognise risk?

Who is believed?

Who falls through the gaps?

What forms of institutional response reduce harm and what forms unintentionally reproduce it?

These are questions every society should be asking.

Academic research should not remain hidden behind journal paywalls or confined to university seminars.

Its purpose is not only to describe the world but also to help us understand it differently.

Research cannot erase grief.

It cannot undo violence.

Nor can it bring back the women whose lives have already been lost.

What it can do is help us recognise patterns that individual cases alone cannot reveal.

It can challenge assumptions.

It can ask uncomfortable questions.

And sometimes, it can change the way we think about prevention.

That, ultimately, is why I wrote Femicide as Infrastructure.

Every time a woman is killed, we ask what happened.

We should.

But perhaps we should also ask another question.

What happened before anyone was paying attention?

Because femicide does not begin with murder.

It begins when fear is minimised.

When coercive control is misunderstood.

When warning signs are dismissed.

When institutions fail to communicate.

When opportunities to intervene are lost.

If our conversations begin only after a woman has died, we will continue arriving too late.

And that is precisely why we must start them much earlier.

Further Reading

Muchecheti, A. (2026). Femicide as Infrastructure: A Comparative Feminist Analysis of the United Kingdom and South Africa. Feminist Theory.

Read the full article:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14647001261453912

You can also read more of my public writing on race, disability, gender, higher education and institutional justice on Substack:

https://drabbiemuchecheti.substack.com

South Africa's Anger Will Not End Well

 

There are moments when a country's frustration reaches such a level that people begin to believe almost any solution is better than no solution. Looking at South Africa today, I fear it is approaching that point.

I do not write this to dismiss the frustrations of ordinary South Africans. On the contrary, I believe they have every right to demand better from their government. Decades after apartheid, too many people still live without secure employment, decent housing, reliable public services or confidence that tomorrow will be better than today.

Political freedom is precious. The end of apartheid transformed South Africa and inspired the world. But political liberation and economic justice are not the same thing. One does not automatically produce the other.

That, I believe, is one of South Africa's deepest challenges.

Today, however, much of the anger is being directed towards African migrants. Foreigners are accused of taking jobs, committing crime, overwhelming communities and preventing South Africans from prospering. These claims have become central to a growing political narrative.

Yet I find myself asking a different question.

If every foreigner left South Africa tomorrow, would corruption disappear? Would unemployment disappear? Would organised crime disappear? Would the electricity crisis end? Would inequality suddenly vanish?

I doubt it.

South Africa's problems are far older and far deeper than immigration alone.

For years, the country has struggled with corruption, uneven economic development, weak public services and declining public trust. Successive governments have faced serious criticism over governance, while allegations and findings of corruption involving senior political figures have further undermined confidence in public institutions.

These are structural problems.

They cannot be solved simply by removing migrants.

Migration has also been part of South Africa's development. Across Southern Africa, professionals have moved where opportunities existed. Zimbabwean teachers, academics, mechanics, nurses and engineers, among others, helped fill shortages because they possessed skills that employers needed. The same is true of professionals from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and elsewhere on the continent.

This is not to say that immigration should be unmanaged. Every sovereign country has the right to regulate its borders and determine who may live and work within them. Immigration policy matters.

But immigration policy belongs to government.

It should not be enforced through intimidation, threats or violence.

When citizens begin deciding who belongs and who does not, based on language, nationality or appearance, the rule of law is weakened rather than strengthened.

What troubles me most is that South Africa risks harming itself.

Businesses close.

Investors become nervous.

Tourists reconsider their plans.

Communities become divided.

Infrastructure is damaged and must be repaired using public money that could otherwise have been invested in schools, hospitals or economic development.

No country becomes stronger by destroying itself.

There is another historical irony that should not be forgotten.

During the struggle against apartheid, many African countries welcomed South African exiles, students and liberation activists. They offered refuge, education and solidarity at enormous cost to themselves. That shared history makes today's hostility towards fellow Africans particularly painful for many across the continent.

None of this means South Africans should remain silent about unemployment or crime.

They should demand action.

They should insist upon competent government.

They should expect effective policing, fair immigration systems and meaningful economic opportunities.

But they should also be careful not to mistake symptoms for causes.

Throughout history, societies experiencing hardship have often found it easier to blame those who are most visible than those who hold the greatest power. Foreigners become convenient explanations for failures whose origins lie much deeper.

South Africa deserves better than that.

It remains one of Africa's most important countries, with extraordinary human talent, natural resources and democratic institutions. It has the capacity to lead the continent economically as well as politically.

That future is still possible.

But it will not be achieved by turning neighbours into enemies.

The real challenge facing South Africa is not simply who crosses its borders.

It is whether its political leadership can build an economy that gives its own citizens hope while upholding the rule of law and the dignity of everyone who lives within it.

Anger is understandable.

Scapegoating is not a development strategy.

I sincerely hope South Africa finds a path that confronts its real problems rather than merely their most visible targets. The country has too much potential to allow frustration to consume the very future so many fought to achieve.

When the Experts Arrived: Grassroots Knowledge and the Politics of Disappearance

There was a period in my life when female genital mutilation (FGM) occupied a significant part of my thinking, my writing, and my time.

This was not my job. I was not employed by a charity. I was not attached to a university research centre. I did not receive funding, consultancy fees, or project grants. What I had was a conviction that the issue deserved attention and a growing awareness that very few people around me seemed willing to discuss it.

Between roughly 2012 and 2016, I wrote extensively about FGM. I maintained a blog, participated in public discussions, spoke at events, and published a book titled A Lost Youth. I donated copies of that book freely because I wanted people to learn. I advised families concerned about the safety of their daughters. I supported individuals navigating immigration and deportation cases where fears of FGM formed part of the wider context. I attended court proceedings when asked to provide guidance or information. I answered emails. I had conversations. I listened.

Most of this work was unpaid.

I never expected otherwise.

At the time, my concern was not professional advancement. My concern was the issue itself.

Looking back now, what strikes me most is how little of that labour exists in any formal record. There are no annual reports documenting the hours. No organisational histories tracing those conversations. No institutional archive recording the countless small acts of advocacy that occupied evenings, weekends, and spare moments between other responsibilities.

Like much grassroots work, it existed largely through relationships.

A conversation here.

A meeting there.

A blog post.

A phone call.

A request for help.

An invitation to speak.

A parent seeking advice.

A professional looking for information.

A woman trying to understand her rights.

The work moved through communities rather than institutions.

At the same time, I was deeply conscious of the limits of my own knowledge. As a Zimbabwean woman, I understood that Africa was not a single story. The continent contains fifty-four countries, diverse histories, languages, cultures, and social realities. I was always cautious about claiming expertise beyond what I knew.

This caution often placed me at odds with the way expertise is frequently performed in public spaces.

The more I learned about FGM, the more aware I became of complexity. The more stories I encountered, the more difficult it became to make sweeping claims. I attended conferences and educational events not because I doubted the importance of my contribution but because I believed that advocacy carried an ethical obligation to keep learning.

I spoke at events in London and Slough, while simultaneously attending other events as a participant. I listened to survivors, practitioners, healthcare professionals, and campaigners. I sought knowledge wherever I could find it because I understood that responsible advocacy required humility.

Yet the challenge was never simply learning about FGM.

The challenge was trying to make people care about it in places where it was not yet considered important.

Today, FGM occupies a recognised place within safeguarding frameworks, educational policies, healthcare guidance, and public awareness campaigns. Schools receive training. Organisations employ specialists. Charities secure funding. Conferences attract professional audiences.

It is easy to forget how different the landscape looked a decade ago.

In Oxfordshire, conversations about FGM were often difficult to initiate. The subject generated discomfort. Some people viewed it as too sensitive to discuss. Others regarded it as distant from local concerns. Raising the issue could feel like introducing tension into spaces that preferred silence.

The work was therefore not simply educational.

It was political.

Not political in the party-political sense, but in the deeper sense of challenging what a community considered worthy of attention.

Again and again, the task involved persuading people that the issue mattered.

Again and again, it involved explaining why silence was itself a problem.

Again and again, it required continuing the conversation when others wanted it to end.

For many years, I believed that visibility was the goal.

If more organisations became interested, that was positive.

If policymakers listened, that was positive.

If schools developed safeguarding procedures, that was positive.

If charities emerged to address the issue, that was positive.

And in many respects, all of those developments were positive.

Yet what I did not anticipate was how easily the history of grassroots labour could disappear once institutions entered the conversation.

Over time, organisations grew around the issue. Funding became available. Professional expertise emerged. Training programmes developed. Conferences expanded. New voices entered the field.

As the issue gained legitimacy, something else happened.

The people who had been carrying the conversation before institutional recognition often became less visible.

This is not a criticism of any one individual or organisation. Rather, it reflects a broader pattern that I have since observed across race equality work, disability advocacy, mental health campaigns, and community organising more generally.

Institutions have a remarkable ability to absorb knowledge that originates elsewhere.

They professionalise it.

Standardise it.

Package it.

Fund it.

Measure it.

Report on it.

In doing so, they often create the impression that expertise begins at the moment of institutional recognition.

What becomes obscured is the labour that existed beforehand.

The unpaid labour.

The relational labour.

The emotional labour.

The labour performed by people who had no organisational backing, no funding streams, and no professional incentives beyond the belief that something needed to change.

The issue, then, is not ownership.

No individual owns a social cause.

The issue is memory.

Who gets remembered once a movement becomes successful?

Who is recognised as having contributed to its development?

Whose knowledge becomes institutionalised?

Whose expertise becomes legitimate?

And whose labour quietly disappears into the background?

These questions have become increasingly important to me in my later work on race, disability, leadership, and institutional power. The more I study organisations, the more I recognise how frequently they rely upon knowledge generated by communities while simultaneously distancing themselves from the people who produced it.

What is often presented as institutional expertise frequently has much older roots.

Behind every recognised field of practice are years of conversations, acts of care, informal advocacy, and unpaid labour that rarely make it into official histories.

In 2025, I received an invitation to attend an FGM event.

For a moment, I wondered whether somebody had remembered that earlier history.

Instead, I discovered that I had been invited to buy a ticket and listen.

I was not offended.

I was not angry.

If anything, the invitation clarified something I had been struggling to articulate for years.

The issue was never simply FGM.

The issue was how knowledge moves.

How communities generate it.

How institutions acquire it.

And how the people who help build a conversation can become almost invisible once that conversation acquires value.

Long before the experts arrived, there were ordinary people doing extraordinary amounts of work.

Most of them will never appear in organisational histories.

Many will never be cited.

Some, like me, will eventually move on to other forms of advocacy.

Yet without their labour, many of the conversations we now take for granted would never have existed at all.