Dr Azumah Dennis

Professor of Education, Policy and Practice

I have worked in Higher Education since 2010, first at the University of Hull where I was employed initially as a Lecturer in Education: Programme Director for Post-16 Teacher Education and later as Programme Director for Postgraduate Taught provision. I have worked for the Open University as a Senior Lecturer: Education, Leadership and Management since 2017.  My current post with the OU is  PRAXIS: Director. I was Programme Leader for the Doctor in Education (EdD) from 2020 - 2023. I am a Senior Fellow of the HEA.

Other appointments:

• Lead Editor: British Educational Research Association (BERA) Curriculum Journal
• Visting Professor Canterbury Christchurch University
• Editor: Book Reviews Board Widening Participation and Lifelong Learning
• Editor: Book Reviews  Management in Education, British Educational Leadership, Management and Adminsitration Society (BELMAS)
• Member: SAGE’s Pedagogy Advisory Board
• Educational Leadership Special Interest Group Co.Leader: British Educational Research Assocoation (BERA)
• Co.coordinator: EdD Directors' National Network

Prior to working in Higher Education, I had worked for a number of years in Further Education Colleges where I was responsible for teaching, training and managing adult basic skills. I completed my EdD at the UCL, Institute of Education in 2010, with a thesis exploring leading and managing quality in adult literacies provision. 

Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Research

An important aspect of my current work with the Open University, is exploring Equity, Diversity and Inclusion in Research. This has included drafting a positonaility statement to assert the ways I which we orient ourselves within a research space.

My statement is as below: 

I position myself as the unmarked scholar.   What I say is more important than who I am. The unmarked scholar speaks from that place which is just there, that place which is no place.  

But, my attempts to assume this position, if such a position exists,  are thwarted. It is already filled by some other body. I try write as the unmarked scholar but I am restless, accusatory, emotional and aware that I occupy the wrong body.  I am immediately recognized as not occupying the space of disembodied neutrality. I am embodied in alignment to this or that struggle.  My being there is a strange defiance. I am a strange defiance.

Occupying that just there space is an accomplishment denied to non-traditional bodies (we are Black, we are female, we are gay, we are transgendered, we are poor, we are disabled). We are so penetrated by the wild, that the just there space is beyond our ontological status.  

I could say, ‘I am a diasporan’  with the same inflection others say ‘I am a Fanti’ or ‘I am a Yoruba’, signaling a past both mythologized and reclaimed; a past that refuses erasure. But this shows my unbelonging.

When I write from a position, I assume a right to be just there. When I write about a position, it implies my scholarly self requires an explanation, a qualification, a marker of some sort. It requires I make my invisibility visible.