"[...] you built immense communities of care": #LSEID graduation 2019-2020, closing remarks

Yesterday (17 December 2020), we celebrated our 2019-2020 cohort for successfully graduating with degrees in MSc in Health and International Development, MSc in African Development, and MSc in Development Studies. A bit anti-climactic for everyone to have a virtual celebration, but I was incredibly moved to see parents and family members jumping up and down, cheering, and looking very proud of their graduands! It was rather affecting- I had to turn my camera off for a few seconds to wipe a tear or two and compose myself!

As an LSE Fellow in Health and International Development, I had the immense privilege and joy of teaching on two courses last academic year- Key Issues in Development Studies and Key Issues in Global Health and Development. It remains one of the most challenging and fulfilling teaching experiences of my career so far [and one of the best programmes to work on- wonderful colleagues and mentors who really stepped up for me as an ECR]. I was really sad about the abrupt way the year panned out, and worried I wouldn’t have a chance to say goodbye to the students and tell them how proud I was of them all.

While a virtual graduation isn’t ideal, I’m really glad we all had a moment together again- to not just take stock of everything that has come this year and what people have endured, but to hold space together again.

I was really humbled to be asked to say a few words at the end of the ceremony too. I skipped my undergraduate and postgraduate graduation ceremonies- and my PhD ceremony was cancelled due to COVID- so this was my first graduation (in many ways and for many things). I wasn’t entirely sure of what to say, and really did not want to say something trite (or something that made everyone cringe/eye-roll**).

Here’s what I did end up saying:

Wow- what a year to graduate in!

Not just a ‘could never be predicted’ (but it kind of could) pandemic, but a year that grappled and contended with a push for global, social transformation, things that have been a long time coming: the movement for Black Lives Matter demanding an end to police brutality and a long-overdue reckoning with racial injustice– echoed in the protests to end SARS in Nigeria; and the new year’s day protests in Hong Kong, all linking to the increasingly loud calls for decolonization: not just in words, but in actions and thought at every level- the toppling of statues, just a start. A devastating explosion in Beirut, Shaheen Bagh and the current farmer’s protests in India, the ongoing climate action strikes- 

These are just some of the events, the moments that surrounded your year but these moments and movements also shaped your learning and understandings of the worlds we live in, the challenges we face, and the ways in which power is wielded, enacted, felt- and resisted. There were a lot of moments of disruption, of un-mooring: the personal, the academic and the collective pain and distress we all faced, whether individually or as part of our different communities.

These are just some of the very difficult circumstances that many of you endured or were forced to be resilient in, or asked to persevere with your studies in moments of sorrow and stress. In spite of all this- you have all created, built, and inspired in many moments too:

Like many of the movements that we have witnessed and participated in this year, you have all built immense communities of care. I witnessed how you consistently reached out to each other in these moments, creating spaces of care and solidarity. In the classes that I was privileged to teach last academic year, you challenged me in every class: bringing so much insight and thoughtfulness to your work, how you grappled with sometimes quite dense theory- and the probing, sharp, clever questions that often caught me on the back-foot, and flummoxed me! I remain deeply moved, enriched, and awed by how you did not just recognise injustice but named it- in the department forum on race earlier this year, how you held us to account, demanded that we do better. You took all that critical thinking we’re always talking about in our classes, you took that “critical thinking” and you put into praxis.

And this is what I hope you all take with you into the future, to the work that you, as graduates in International Development, seek to do or continue to do in ‘development’- whether in research, policy, or in organisations: the skills and knowledge with which to identify and understand the inequities in our world, to name them and use the tools that you have to challenge them- and to create and imagine new communities, spaces and solidarities. The commitment to continue what you started here- and work towards a world to transform, to shift, to push us a step closer towards justice.

May you all continue to be the sparks that light a fire*! Congratulations!

 *yes, I obliquely referenced Bruce Springsteen’s ‘you can’t start a fire without a spark’.

[**With thanks to my partner, JF, along with Professor Ernestina Coast & Joe Strong for their support with a ‘cringe-check’]