Sherran Clarence

Research areas

I started my academic career interested in immigrants’ – particularly Muslim women’s – experiences of migrating into the EU. This was the focus of my initial postgraduate research at Honours and Masters level. But, jobs in gender studies and politics were hard to come by at that stage and I was offered part-time work teaching literacy and writing to first year students struggling to bridge the gap between school and university. This work led me to a university-based writing centre in Cape Town, which I managed for 6 years, learning a great deal about academic literacies, writing, and the politics of knowledge and knowing in higher education.

This led me to my doctoral research, which explored the ways in which knowledge is created through teaching and whether and how students are brought into crucial conversations about what knowledge is, how it is created in disciplinary (and extra-disciplinary) ways, and how they can join (and eventually challenge) conversations within their fields of practice and research. My initial postdoctoral work extended on this, and I have completed a book for lecturers and academic developers looking at turning access to higher education into greater success by making pedagogies more explicit and open to student engagement. I supervise doctoral research in the fields of academic development, teaching and learning, doctoral education, and academic literacies and writing.

More recently, I have worked extensively with doctoral and early career researchers. I have been reading, thinking and blogging about emotional labour and emotion work and how and why we need to pay greater attention to this in working with postgraduate, especially doctoral, students in higher education. This has sparked a new research project on representation, belonging, equity and inclusion in the university, understood through the theoretical lens of feminist sociologies of emotion, and the empirical lens of early career academia (including the doctoral period).

Much of my practical work for the last 14 years has been with student-writers, post- and under-graduate, and with lecturers, all focused on writing development and the pedagogical means for knowledge-building and meaning-making in higher education. Underpinning all my research and practice is a concern about social justice and how to better create, enable or enhance this in education and society. How do we truly make people feel at home in unfamiliar places and open out or change those places so that others can become part of them—not through becoming like those who already belong, but through changing the place as they become part of it? How can students change practices of writing, knowing and speaking about knowledge as they come to know it and become knowledge-makers too? How do we challenge and change hegemonic notions of academic socialisation, student deficit, and reified forms of knowledge and meaning-making? How do we meaningfully make it possible for more students to truly succeed in higher education? These are some of the broader questions my research and praxis are concerned with.