An Arts-Based Exploration of Belonging and Transformation for Racially Minoritised Students at a UK Business School

In 2018, the UK government set a target for all UK universities to eliminate the ‘unexplained’ awarding gap between White and Black students by 2025 (OfS, 2018). Despite gains during the Covid ‘no detriment’ policy era, that has not been achieved. One of the largest ethnicity degree-awarding gaps in the UK prevails in the discipline of business administration (AdvanceHE, 2020: 129), but little is known about how to reduce this race inequity within business higher education contexts specifically. Academic success has been linked to students having a sense of belonging based on respect, recognition, vulnerability, and connection (Ajjawi et al., 2025: 9). Students with a weaker sense of fitting in socially and academically, due to experiencing racialised exclusion on a regular basis, have lower predicted degree and employment outcomes (Murphy et al., 2020). Seeking a remedy for this situation, I explored the lived experiences of 11 Black, Asian, and minority ethnic undergraduates at Londonshire (pseudonym), a modern business school in the southeast of England, to understand how, where, and when racially minoritised business students experience belonging, and how this impacts on their sense of transformation at university. Employing a method of critical arts-based inquiry informed by decolonising methodologies, I selected two visual methods – photo-voice and group non-stick collage – to depict a ‘truth’ which written and purely verbal forms could not have conveyed so richly (Butler-Kisber, 2018: 117; Allen, 2020: 249; Leigh and Brown, 2021: 12). This multimodal approach enabled progressive individual reflection through 1:1 interviews and group discussion, processes that were represented both photographically and metaphorically. Reflexivity was key to the ethical design of this study, giving participants control over their own narrative via ‘enhanced’ discussions (Kara, 2015: 83) of ‘visual reconstructions’ (Culshaw, 2019: 271). Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2022) generated themes which I discuss using concepts from Critical Race Theory, decolonial theory, and relational and emancipatory pedagogies. This study offers a rich picture of student life at a UK business school, viewed through a racialised lens. The findings build on theories of belonging and mattering in higher education and highlight the links between these and experiences of transforming at university. From the data, I developed a model showing three forms of belonging evidenced in the students’ stories: Relational Belonging, achieved via relationships with peers, staff, and others; Structural Belonging, an alignment with organisational values, expectations, and processes; and Contributory Belonging, whereby students added value to the learning community, resulting in their gaining a more consistent sense of mattering to the institution. Race impacted all three domains, causing belonging uncertainty and peripheral engagement at times. However, this was mitigated by strong relationships and campus environments which conveyed the message that the university cared about Black, Asian, and minority ethnic students’ experiences, demonstrating that they mattered within the institution (Flett, 2018; Gravett, 2023; Felton, 2023). Transformation was identified where either Relational and/or Structural Belonging had developed, whereas a deeper sense of mattering resulted from Contributory Belonging alone. The contributions to critical participatory methods resulting from this study include the combination of two visual forms of inquiry in order to access deeper reflections on lived experience and the adaptation of a form of CRiT walking combined with digital collaging to suit the virtual environment, thereby expanding the geographical boundaries of future arts-based research. In addition, I offer seven practical recommendations for universities to increase belonging and race equity for students who are racially ‘othered’ in White-majority contexts.