Dr Emma Battell Lowman (University of Leicester)

Election address

DR EMMA BATTELL LOWMAN (SHE/HER/THEY)

@EMMAJBL

My name is Emma Battell Lowman, and I am currently the vice-chair of the University of Leicester UCU branch, and a fixed term contract teaching fellow in the School of History, Politics and International Relations. I am a historian and sociologist who has been proudly living the East Midlands since migrating to the UK in 2009 from Canada. I began working in UK HE in 2011 while completing my PhD, and have direct experience in both pre- and post-92 HE institutions. Previously, I worked in the Canadian civil service including as a Higher Education analyst. Education and participation in Indigenous resurgence and decolonizing work in the settler colonial nation-states of Canada and Australia is what motivates me to tackle institutional and systemic inequality in UK HE.

In addition to helping lead our branch's COVID response, including a Health and Safety dispute that held our institution to account for staff and student safety, I have brought a strong focus to the needs of precarious workers - like myself. You may remember my energetic turn as the #WalrusOfRighteousProtest during the 2019-20 strikes, and I also work hard to develop collaborative, compassionate and creative approaches to addressing key issues in HE. During the last strikes, I organised and facilitated a compassionate listening meeting between the university executive and casualised and precarious members. The executive's only role was to listen as the members shared their precarity stories of excellence, struggle, hardship, and heartbreak.

We all know the conditions that have overcome UK HE over the last two decades. There are fewer positions opening, fewer permanent positions, increasing precarity, stagnation of wages, rampant overwork, burnout, and stress. Rather than seeing these as insurmountable, I choose to work from an ethic of compassion and a practice of critical hope. Specifically informed by critical Indigenous scholarship and expertise, I believe in the power of diverse approaches to making change, from diplomacy in the spirit of generosity, to taking direct action to hold power to account. In this, I value building trust, clear communication, and mutual aid as cornerstones of any social movement, including trade unionism.

As an elected representative to NEC, you can count on me to be clear and responsive, to transparently present and passionately argue for my vision of what the UCU should be, while also diligently serving the interests of UCU members, especially the most vulnerable and precarious. I want to bring my expertise in iterative, constructive communication and community building processes to both the UCU, as we work to improve our own collective approaches, and the relationships between branches and employers.

I am standing for election with like-minded folks as a member of UCU Commons www.UCUCommons.org