Lunchtime seminar with Prof Audrey Osler: Where are you from? No, where are you really from?
| Dates: | 11 February 2026 |
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| Times: | 12:30 - 13:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Environment, Education and Development |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, Adults, Alumni, Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | Prof Audrey Osler |
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MIE Anti-Racist Education Network would like to invite you to a lunch-time seminar with Professor Audrey Osler who will be speaking about her recently published book 'Where are you from? No, where are you really from?
In this talk, Audrey Osler will present and read from her recently published book, a story of migration, identity and belonging, drawing on the stories of people from her own mixed-heritage family, over three centuries.
Whether or not we trace our families from beyond the shores of Britain, we deserve a better understanding of our shared past, and opportunities to explore and recognise the complexities and contractions of empire. Careless or wilful amnesia has allowed the British migration narrative to begin in the mid-twentieth century, with migrants from India, Pakistan and the Caribbean forming the foundation of present-day multicultural Britain. A racist fixation means that some twenty-first-century Britons fantasise that people of colour arrived after World War Two, without any link to the country, to exploit the British welfare state and British hospitality.
For people of colour the questions, Where are you from? No, where are you really from? often imply more than simple curiosity. They are political questions of identity, since the assumption (naive or aggressive) is that to be British and to belong you must be white.
Speaker
Prof Audrey Osler
Role: Professor Emerita in Human Rights and Citizenship Education
Organisation: University of Leeds
Biography: Audrey Osler is Professor Emerita in Human Rights and Citizenship Education at University of Leeds and founding editor of the scholarly journal Human Rights Education Review. In 1999, she became the first woman of colour in the UK to hold a professorship in Education when she joined the University of Leicester. Audrey has also held posts at the universities of Birmingham and South-Eastern Norway and visiting professorships in the USA, Costa Rica and China. She has published widely, on Black teachers careers, racial justice, citizenship, child rights and human rights education and has co/authored 22 books - some translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Persian and Ukrainian - and more than 120 refereed articles.
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
A2.7
Ellen Wilkinson Building
Manchester
