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Campfire Learn Together: Unlearning Toward Hope with Jason Arday

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Home » Blog » Events » Campfire Learn Together: Unlearning Toward Hope with Jason Arday

What we are bereft of is care.

Jason Arday, UNLEARN LIGHTBULB: I guess I’m doing fine, I guess I’m doing fine

Unlearning is the process of identifying an accepted reality that structurally disadvantages its inhabitants, some more than others.

— Anglia Ruskin University Student Race Equality Advocates, quoted in UNLEARN LIGHTBULB: I guess I’m doing fine, I guess I’m doing fine

You don’t necessarily need an ocean full of hope, but you do need a ripple, you do need a drop, and that is often enough.

— Professor Jason Arday, UNLEARN LIGHTBULB: I guess I’m doing fine, I guess I’m doing fine

For our Sunday, August 30, 2026 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK Campfire Learn Together, we are mourning and celebrating Professor Jason Arday with two of his own talks — one on neurodiversity, race, and belonging, and one on what happens to a good word after an institution gets hold of it.

We are doing this because he is gone, and because of how he was taken. Arday was Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge, the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship there, fourth on the Shaw Trust Disability Power 100 in 2023, and one of a very small number of senior academics anywhere who talked about race and neurodivergence in the same breath, as one problem, without flattening either. In the last weeks of his life he was the subject of a media pile-on. The Emancipator counted thirty stories in twelve days from fifteen U.S. outlets, against a white colleague accused of more serious misconduct who got none. The academic who accused him of plagiarism has since been suspended by their own university.

We are not going to pretend to know the inside of another person’s death. We do know what was done to him in public, we know who was enjoying it, and we know that “we were only asking questions about DEI” is what the enjoyment called itself.

And our community is reeling for other reasons in the same week. In the UK, Channel 4 aired an ADHD documentary the Royal College of Psychiatrists had to publicly respond to. Professor Dame Uta Frith published a paper the community had to publicly respond to, and then told The Times it was “absurd” that Chris Packham has a diagnosis, because he communicates well on television. In the US, the same campaign runs on federal letterhead. This is not a bad news cycle. It is a coordinated project, and Arday saw its shape in 2022 and named it out loud in 2025.

So this is a memorial that is also a briefing. We watch the man work. We listen to him refuse to trivialize us. And then we do the thing he asked for, which was never applause.

We watch. We reflect. We bring our whole bodyminds. And we pour one out.

Videos

We’ll watch together at the start of the session — subtitles on, sound up, cameras optional. No need to have watched ahead. We’ll take a bodymind break in the middle.

These are long, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. The first runs an hour and thirty-five minutes, the second forty-six. Here is the honest run of show: we’ll watch Arday’s keynote and the one Q&A answer that matters most for this moment, and the second talk is the deeper cut for anyone who wants to keep going.

UNLEARN LIGHTBULB: I guess I’m doing fine, I guess I’m doing fine. – YouTube

UNLEARN LIGHTBULB: I guess I’m doing fine, I guess I’m doing fine — Anglia Ruskin University, April 2, 2025. One hour thirty-five minutes total. Arday’s keynote runs from about 10:35 to 42:00* — a talk with no slides and no theory, built entirely out of a set list of songs someone wrote out for him and taped to the floor. Then, at about 85:00 to 92:00, he is asked what to do about people who trivialize neurodivergence, and he answers for seven minutes without taking a breath. We are watching those two stretches.** If you have the time and the bodymind for it, the whole Q&A is worth it, including the answer at 48:00 about how to be hopeful on Trump’s so-called Liberation Day, which is the day this was recorded.

Jason Arday — Things Can Only Get Better

Jason Arday — Things Can Only Get Better — Society for Experimental Biology symposium on decolonising and diversifying biosciences education, recorded in late 2022 and posted January 2023. Forty-six minutes; the keynote is the first thirty. Recorded three months before he took up the Cambridge chair, and while he was still, in his own accounting, seven years out from stacking shelves at Sainsbury’s on a night shift. This is the analytical one: what institutions do to a word like inclusion, then diversity, then decolonization, and who is standing underneath when the fashion moves on.

Content note. Both talks discuss racism, ableism, and workplace harm. The first contains an extended first-person account of witnessing a stranger’s suicide, and a story about a colleague who cried in a toilet cubicle every day and reapplied her makeup so no one would know. And Professor Arday has since died, which makes both of them harder to watch than they were. Take this in pieces. Leave the room whenever you need to and come back, or don’t.

Two talks, one question: what is worth building when the words for building it keep getting stolen?

Table of Contents

An Accepted Reality That Structurally Disadvantages Its Inhabitants

Unlearning is a term that our amazing student race equality advocates came up with… which is the process of identifying an accepted reality that structurally disadvantages its inhabitants, some more than others.

That definition is not Arday’s. It belongs to the student advocates at Anglia Ruskin, and the university’s diversity and cultural change lead reads it out at the top of the session over a slide with The Matrix as its background — then declines to explain the reference and leaves it with the room.

Sit with the wording, because it is doing something careful. Not identifying a prejudice. Not identifying a bias. An accepted reality. The thing you are asked to unlearn is not a belief you hold; it is the floor you are standing on. And structurally disadvantages its inhabitants, some more than others — everybody, unevenly. That is a definition written by people who had noticed that the building was hurting them and were told the building was just the building.

We have been circling this for years under a different name. Deficit ideology, in Paul Gorski’s formulation, is the worldview that explains unequal outcomes by pointing at deficiencies inside the people getting the worse outcomes, and its whole function is to keep your attention pointed downward. We wrote about it in Unlearning Deficit Ideology and the Scornful Gaze — the same verb, five years earlier, arriving from class and race rather than from neurodivergence, which is exactly the point.

Arday’s contribution in the second talk is to insist on the order of operations, and it is the sharpest methodological thing he says in either video:

I am yet to meet a person who can define to me what decolonizing means… if you remove the de, it’s this idea of colonizing. It’s the colonizing aspect that’s the bit — to get to de, we have to do the colonizing bit. What is the colonizing bit that’s happened?

He builds it into a reflex, in the clinical sense:

I don’t think when I think of decolonizing… I think actually colonizing — what is the colonizing aspect? That is the reflex part. And then the stimuli that comes from the reflex is decolonizing.

Run that on our own field and it stops being abstract. You cannot de-pathologize until you can say what the pathology paradigm is, who built it, and what it was for. You cannot de-segregate a classroom while calling the segregation a service. A movement that skips to the de is a movement that can be talked out of its own vocabulary within a single news cycle — which is, more or less, what we watched happen to DEI.

We Want the Same Thing

When we think about inclusive spaces and we think about neurodivergence, and when we think about equality generally speaking, what everybody’s asking for is this ability to be seen. This ability to be seen. And it’s in the minutiae, it’s in the simple things in terms of how we see people. Something as simple as asking someone how their day has been. Something as simple as how you greet someone.

The keynote has no slides and no framework. It has a set list. Belinda Carlisle’s We Want the Same Thing, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, Better Together, Springsteen’s Dancing in the Dark, Tracy Chapman, Lenny Kravitz’s Let Love Rule, Sade. He says the methodology is the set list, and then apologizes for having no theory: “as someone once said to me, they’re giving professorships out to anyone.”

It is a real method and not a bit. Music is the common ground he can assume in a room of strangers, and he says so. He also tells you why he needs common ground: he came into academia in 2012 and worked out fast that it is “a very unkind space,” where “being unkind in academia is handsomely rewarded” — being selfish, vain, individualistic, exploitative. Then the diagnosis under the diagnosis:

You look at the kind of general landscape and you think, how come certain people occupy certain positions? And then you realize the whole thing is predicated on this idea of exclusion.

And the mechanism:

Exclusion or inclusion becomes a membership — in other words, you pay a subscription. Now who are the arbiters of this subscription? Who decides what these rules are in terms of who is allowed to belong and who isn’t allowed to belong?

This is belonging described as a gated good with a rent, and it is the same object we call engineered exclusion when we find it in a system’s design choices. The room is not accidentally hard to be in. Somebody is collecting.

The part we would underline hardest is the smallness of his examples. Asking how someone’s day was. How you greet someone. Moving away from what he calls “the transactional element of how we engage with people.” He calls this, later and without irony, the greatest magic trick there is:

It’s still to me the greatest magic trick — to make people feel something, to make people feel a sense of belonging in a place. It’s the greatest magic trick ever… because it rarely happens in these spaces, because these spaces are predicated on exclusion.

Anyone who has spent a career being managed rather than met knows why a greeting registers as sorcery. Access intimacy is Mia Mingus’s name for the version of this we know best — the feeling of someone getting your access needs without a negotiation. Arday is describing the ground floor of it, available to everyone, unbudgeted, and almost never done.

Is This What You Are?

Is this what you are? Is this what you are? Is this what you want people to think of you? Is this what you are?

Here is the scene. Five or six years ago he sat and listened to a senior person talk about a colleague’s competence in terms he describes as [ableist] and racialized — the implication being that the colleague only held the post because of positive action. He let them finish. He did not do it in front of anyone. He waited, went to them privately, and asked the question above, four times, and did not wait for an answer:

All that tells me about you is that you are a painfully insecure person, if this is what you’ve got to say about another individual… You’re better than this. You’re better than this. Is this what you want people to think of you? You’re better than this.

Then he turns it around, which is the part that makes it a method rather than an anecdote:

It’s that whole thing I always ask myself — I don’t necessarily ask of other people, I did on this particular occasion — but it’s that whole thing of, Jason, is this what you are? Because the first person I’m going to point the finger at is myself.

He is explicit about the constraint that produced this style, and it is not politeness:

To be quite honest with you, I don’t have the luxury of just shooting from the hip. I don’t have that luxury. There’s things that I don’t like and I have to think very carefully how I say it, because if I say it in a particular way that isn’t particularly palatable, then I’m going to be positioned as an angry, aggressive Black male.

He calls the technique bedside manner, and the goal is to remove the exits:

Part of my thing is, I don’t want to make it easy for you. I don’t want to make it easy for you to dismiss me… I am going to take the time to formulate my argument and I am going to be really articulate and really accurate, really precise. And that accuracy always has people doing the dance.

Then he extends it, unprompted, straight into our territory — the same bag of tricks, restocked for neurodivergence:

If we think in the neurodivergent context, it’s like, well, you know, intellectually they get — they’ve got ADHD, so sometimes… and they’re dyspraxic, so sometimes they mix their words. And they’re Autistic, so their disposition is that they don’t like socializing, so that’s why they can sometimes be socially aloof. All of these easy outs.

That is the disability double bind stated by someone who lived both halves of it. Disclose and you are pre-explained; don’t and you are just difficult. And his answer — precision so tight that the character assassination has nothing to grab — is respectability politics knowingly deployed by a man who has counted the cost and decided to pay it anyway. He says the dance is exhausting: “is it exhausting doing this dance? One thousand per cent.”

We hold this one at arm’s length and we will come back to it in the Synthesis, because he is the test case and the result is in.

Everybody’s Neurodivergent Now

The trivialization that’s happening with neurodivergence at the moment is that everybody’s neurodivergent — everybody’s, because now we have a language for it.

Watch this stretch if you watch nothing else. Someone in the chat has just told him that Neurodivergent people get accused of oversensitivity — “injustice sensitivity” — “when actually it’s authenticity, and neurotypical society aren’t used to it and don’t like it.” He holds the thought, answers a different question first, comes back to it, and opens with two words:

That’s just laziness. That’s just laziness. Someone highlights that I am struggling with something because I’m neurodivergent and it’s like, well, it’s just… you know, it’s laziness to do that.

Then he explains the machinery, and this is 2025 describing 2026:

You can see what’s happening now. It’s like with DEI — these things become franchised, and then they become trivialized.

And then the defence. It is the best three sentences in either video, and it is a defence of exactly the people currently being told they are a fad:

When you have someone who is 50 years old, for example, and didn’t have a proxy for understanding why they felt they were different from other people, and now they have that thing that explains to them, okay, this is why I am where I am — now I have an understanding for that. That’s not to be trivialized. That is a life-affirming thing for a lot of people. So the idea that people can trivialize that, it only speaks to their ignorance and their unkindness.

A proxy for understanding why you felt different. That is late identification described without a single clinical noun, and it is the thing being attacked right now on both sides of the Atlantic. When Uta Frith tells The Times it is “absurd” that Chris Packham has a diagnosis because he communicates well on television, that is not a scientific finding. It is epistemic trespassing — an expert walking over a visible boundary into a domain where she has neither the evidence nor the standing, and continuing to talk. Ann Memmott’s one-word summary was “unwise”. Sue Fletcher-Watson wrote a longer answer, the Thinking Autism Guide wrote another, and the National Autistic Society had to issue a statement. The Royal College of Psychiatrists had to do the same about a television documentary.

That is what a moral panic looks like from inside: the public tricked into overreacting to something that is not dangerous, while the people it is actually about spend their finite energy writing rebuttals. Helen Edgar, whose work we follow closely, put the stakes plainly on Bluesky:

Our community is in crisis. People’s lives will be affected. We will be losing more lives. I am utterly heartbroken at the moment, heartbroken, angry & tired. This is relentless!

— Helen Edgar, Autistic Realms

Eric Garcia named the arc: a real push toward Autistic acceptance in the 2010s that moved alongside acceptance of transgender people, and now a backlash toward neurodiversity in the 2020s. And another observer named the playbook being run — that the anti-autism-diagnosis campaign is using the detransitioner script, beat for beat. The linkage is not a coincidence and it is not a metaphor. It is the same method: find people who regret, amplify them past all proportion, and use them to argue that the whole category is manufactured.

Arday’s closing move is not to argue with the trivializers. It is to make the trivializer’s own life the argument:

You don’t know who might be in close proximity to you who may be neurodivergent. And what are you going to say to them if they turn around to you and say I have ADHD or I have Tourette’s or I’m Autistic or I’m dyslexic? What are you going to say? You’re going to say you’re making it up, come on, don’t be silly? What are you going to say? Because that person could be your son, your daughter, your child. It could be anyone.

He calls what is missing empathy, and he means a specific kind — the kind he named three years earlier in the other talk as the opposite of the disposable variety. Nothing about us without us is the same argument with the emphasis moved: the people being theorized about are in the room, and always were.

Franchised Words and Toxic Soil

If we go back to the lineage of these franchise terms over the last decade — start off with inclusion, then went to diversity and diversification, and now it’s decolonization. I don’t know what the next one will be, but we’ll wait for the next episode and we’ll find out.

This is the 2022 talk, and it has aged into a prophecy. Arday’s thesis is that a good word enters the sector, gets packaged, gets performed, gets abandoned, and leaves the people it was supposed to serve holding the bill. He is blunt that the decolonization wave did net harm:

Most of the decolonizing processes that exist in the last two or three years have actually caused more harm to Black and ethnic minority people, because they find themselves at the sharper end having to mobilize those interventions at a cost to their own physical and mental well-being — also without the professional recognition for doing that, and it being valued as professional currency.

He tracks where the labour sits. In 2022 he describes the labour as exploited, unaligned with any career trajectory, and outside the narrow parameters of what counts as academic or professional excellence — done “without the professional recognition for doing that, and it being valued as professional currency.” In the 2025 session he says who is doing it: EDI in higher education “relies on intrinsic endeavour, particularly that of women of colour,” and “if those women of colour don’t engage in those processes, nothing EDI is happening in the sector.” Three years apart, the same finding — the work is load-bearing and unpaid. Then the sentence from 2022 that reads differently now:

The victory is the universities’ to share when it goes well, but is ours to own when we fail.

We have a name for that arrangement — the surplus made profitable, extractive abandonment — and a name for the version that sells the movement back to us as a brand: performative neurodiversity, or neurodiversity lite. And weirdwashing for the surface indicators of difference traded without making space for the real thing. Arday’s word for it is franchised, and franchised is better, because a franchise has an owner.

His metaphor for why none of it holds is the best image in either talk:

That’s the problem, and I think part of that is because we’re building on toxic soil. If you build on toxic soil, you don’t really have firm roots. What you have is things that may bloom, but ultimately they will eventually die. Whereas if you build in fertile soil, then that tree has really firm roots.

Our version of that arithmetic is a diagram Soni Gill drew and we reprinted in Equity Literacy: Learning to Be a Threat to Inequity in Our Spheres of Influence: racism + diversity programming + an anti-bullying program + Kindness Matters + SEL, PBIS, and restorative practices + grit and growth mindset = racism. Same claim. Programs planted in toxic soil bloom on the newsletter and die in the ground.

Two more things from this talk deserve to be said at a campfire.

The first is his account of why the machine never stops. He reaches for Malcolm X:

Racism is like a new Cadillac — a new model comes out every year. And I guess the only thing you can do is be reactive to racism, so you can never get ahead of racism, because it is so sophisticated that it reinvents itself all the time.

And the image of what that does to a person, from his years as a PE teacher:

Netball — you pivot, you can’t move with the ball. So you pivot, but fundamentally you’re a person of colour and very often you’re pivoting… you can’t actually move from the same spot. You spend all of your time pivoting from one reaction to the next.

The second is what he says we are actually short of, and it is the same word both talks land on. Asked what he would build rather than dismantle, he answers with his heroine:

My heroine is bell hooks, and pretty much everything that I’ve done has revolved around that notion of solidarity, love, and pedagogy for empowerment across the intersect… The way that I’ve always envisioned what I would have in its place is this idea of non-disposable empathy.

Disposable is the term he coined for the ordinary kind, earlier in the same talk — the empathy that lasts until the next item on the news. And then his father’s line, which is the whole critique of the sector in eleven words:

My dad says the only concept that is colourblind is individualism.

We would put that next to It Is Time to Celebrate Our Interdependence and leave them to talk.

No One Can See Me Cry

They said to me, “You know, Jason, I have to apply my makeup on twice every day.”

A professional services colleague with a prominent job told him she had heard he liked music, and asked whether he knew the R.E.M. song Imitation of Life. He did. She asked whether he knew the line — come on, come on, no one can see me cry. He did.

“I lead direct submission, and so everything I do is around anti-racism, and every day I find myself talking to people about this issue and them completely rebuffing everything I do… And so every day I go into this toilet and I cry, and my makeup gets all over the place, and then I take my small mirror and I reapply this makeup, and I always say to myself, come on, come on, no one can see me cry.“

That phrase is the title of his 2021 paper in Higher Education, built from the narratives of forty Black and minority ethnic academic and professional staff, about what racism does to the mental health of the people employed to address it and what happens when they seek help. It is the paper Ryan linked when he heard the news. The man wrote the study, then stood on a stage and told you where the title came from, and then the thing in the study happened to him in front of fifteen American newsrooms.

He names the state it produces — “this fatigued, racial-battle-fatigued state” — and the sector’s standard response to being told about it:

I tell you that this is happening, and you say to me, provide statistics and provide evidence that that’s happening. Now just take my word for it — these people are having a really, really bad time through no fault of their own, by just existing.

Provide evidence that you are being harmed is epistemic injustice in its plainest operational form: your status as a knower of your own life, discounted at the door. We know the neurodivergent dialect of it well. So is the physiology — racial weathering and minority stress are the literatures for what chronic, low-grade, deniable hostility does to a body over years, and neither of them is a metaphor.

Then the gesture, which you have to see to get:

Ideally we all want to be like this. And what I often see in higher education spaces when people are doing anti-discriminatory work is that they’re like this — they’re made to be small. They’re made to be small, and they can only ever talk from this small place, and be small, and they’re expected to stay small. And should they ever rise up, there’s always someone to put them back in the corner and remind them that you don’t belong here.

Made to be small. Not feeling small — made, by someone, on purpose, with a person assigned to the putting-back. Every Autistic person told to use their quiet voice, every Disabled person told they are being difficult about a ramp, every late-identified adult told they are trendy, knows the hand on the top of the head.

Arday’s answer to it is cultural and not strategic, and he is emphatic about the order:

You cannot strategize culture. Culture is a feet-first thing — you go in feet first with culture. Feet first, head second. Your head is your strategy. You cannot have a good strategy without a good culture.

He also tells a much harder story in the same hour, and it is the reason for the content note. He was in Liverpool Street; he met a friend; a stranger in his eyeline finished a meal, walked onto a mezzanine, and died. He does not dramatize it. He draws one conclusion:

Never make the presumption that somebody is okay. Always go that extra mile to ask someone how are you doing, are you okay — particularly people you work with. Because the amount of masking people do at work, never mind neurodivergence, genuinely speaking the amount of masking people do emotionally at work is insane.

Masking is our word and he uses it in the wider sense, and the wider sense is correct. He says the difference between a person deciding they are on their own and a person deciding otherwise can be the memory that “even for five minutes today I was a part of something. I was a part of a conversation where someone asked me how I was doing.”

He is describing the intervention that would have helped him, roughly a year before he needed it.

A Finger Never Penetrates a Wall

This idea of twitching fingers never works. I’ve never seen it work. I’ve never seen a finger penetrate a wall — but what I have seen is a collective fist penetrate a wall. I have seen that. I’ve seen it many, many times.

The last third of the keynote is about hope, and it is the least sentimental treatment of hope we have run at a campfire. He is asked, on the day Trump announced his tariffs, how UK institutions can rally against the anti-intellectual landscape. He starts by refusing the job:

I’m very fortunate that I get asked to do things like this, and the one thing that people want you to often provide is this kind of elixir for hope. But I try not to speak with false tongue, and it’s very hard to be hopeful in these times, because the pushback, the current, the [torrent] that we’re against is so strong.

Then he rations it deliberately:

You don’t necessarily need an ocean full of hope, but you do need a ripple, you do need a drop, and that is often enough… Do I need a lot of hope? Ideally I’d like a lot of hope. But actually it’s enough just to even be on a lifeline of hope — as in, he’s got a one per cent, or she or they have got a one per cent chance. And that one per cent chance is enough to convert anything.

And then, crucially, he does the energy budget out loud:

We all have a finite amount of energy, and it depends where we invest our energy. Someone like Trump is overbearing, all-encompassing, and it’s amazing how much energy you can give to an individual like that. I do it every day. But it’s thinking about what we do with that finite energy — and actually a better use of that energy potentially is to focus on that small sphere of influence that we can change… tiny drops making a mighty ocean.

Sphere of influence is not a phrase we can hear neutrally. It is the back half of the Equity Literacy Institute’s tagline, which we have quoted for five years: learning to be a threat to inequity in our spheres of influence. Arday arrived at the same unit of measurement from a different direction, and he adds the thing Gorski’s version leaves implicit — the reason to work at that scale is that your energy is finite and the outrage machine is designed to eat it.

His image for the minimum viable input is a fire, which is what we are:

All you need is an ember. You know, you’re in the woods, you’re trying to start a fire — all you need is a little flicker of an ember for the whole thing to become ablaze. That’s all you need.

We call the small ones glimmers — the opposite of triggers, tiny moments of awe. He calls them embers and asks who is going to take responsibility for the spark, because it takes courage to be the one who leads the charge, and because “there are a lot of people who are invested in people’s downfall.”

Two more from this stretch, because they are the ones to bring to the fire.

On allyship, asked how to advocate for people who cannot advocate for themselves without taking up their space:

There’s an Islamic proverb, and it says that your right hand shouldn’t show what your left hand is doing… All too often people engage in allyship and, rather than maybe sit in the back seat, they still want to be a front-seat driver. It kind of defeats the whole purpose. Your job is to either be behind the camera and be quiet, or sit in the back seat, put your seat belt on, and nod your head to the music — but I don’t want to hear a word out of you.

That is allyship with the incentive removed, and he is unsparing about the alternative: “when I see people engaging in allyship and being seen, I recoil. To me it’s almost grotesque.” He adds, “if you need the validation of people to tell you you’ve been a good ally, it’s a problem.”

And on how power actually moves, which is where the warm version of the talk ends and the hard version starts:

The grip you just had was a really good grip, and what it should be a physical metaphor for is that power is never given, it’s taken. You take power… because the truth is there are people who don’t want to relinquish that, and they are happy for things to stay unequal and stay inequitable.

The Stimpunks Synthesis

The following is a Stimpunks synthesis — our own extension and critique, not a claim made by Professor Arday, Anglia Ruskin University, the Society for Experimental Biology, or anyone else in either video.

Grant the whole thing first, because it deserves it and because we are about to argue with a man who cannot answer.

Arday did the rarest thing in this field: he held race and neurodivergence in one hand without letting either become a metaphor for the other. There is a large literature on racial inequality in higher education and a separate one on Neurodivergent staff, and the field that joins them has, in its own founders’ words, only “small but growing” attention. He worked that seam in front of a live audience, extemporaneously, using a set list. He defended late-identified people in a year when defending them was already costly. He named the labour of women of colour as the thing holding the whole edifice up. And when he was asked for an elixir of hope he said no, and then offered a rationed, honest, one-per-cent version that is far more usable than optimism. DisCrit — Dis/ability Critical Race Studies — is the academic name for the seam he was standing on, and he was doing it without the scaffolding, on a Wednesday afternoon, to a room that had come for an hour of inclusion training.

Four places we push.

First: the diagnosis is structural and the prescription is mostly interpersonal. He tells you the space is predicated on exclusion, that belonging is a subscription with arbiters, that power is taken and never given, that people are invested in your downfall. Then the remedies are: ask how someone’s day was, be authentic, be humble, have good bedside manner, work your sphere of influence, show kindness to people who least deserve it. Those are real goods and we practise most of them. They are not load-bearing against a coordinated political project with funding, legislation, and a media apparatus.

He does offer exactly one structural prescription, and it is the strongest thing in the second half of the Unlearn session: put EDI into the university’s five-year strategic aims, where the fiscal and human resource allocation lives, so that the board of governors can hold a vice-chancellor to it. That is accountability with teeth, and it is the only remedy he names that survives a change of personnel. The problem is that it appears once and the interpersonal remedies appear forty times. A reader could leave that talk believing the answer to engineered exclusion is manners. We do not think he believed that — he said the collective fist, not the twitching finger — but the balance of the talk teaches the finger.

Second: “show them kindness when they least deserve it” is a tax, and it is levied on the person already carrying the harm. His mother’s line is that when people least deserve kindness is when you should most show it, and his framing is that kindness is itself an education you hand over, and free will means they can refuse the gift. There is something genuinely powerful in that: it refuses to become the thing, and he is right that shame turns into hate, which is a mechanism we have described for years in behaviourist classrooms.

But look at what the arrangement asks and of whom. In the same hour he says he does not have the luxury of shooting from the hip; that he must be cultured, precise, articulate, and accurate or be recast as an angry, aggressive Black male; that the dance is exhausting, “one thousand per cent.” So the person being harmed must also be the most composed person in the room, must supply the education, must absorb the refusal gracefully, and must do it while being told that their justice sensitivity is a symptom. That is not a moral achievement. It is a toll booth. The correct goal is to abolish the toll, not to pay it more beautifully. Michelle Obama’s when they go low, we go high — which he quotes — is a strategy for a contest with a referee.

Third, and this is the hardest thing we will say on Sunday: he was the test case for the bedside-manner argument, and the result came back negative. His claim was that sufficient accuracy disarms the bag of tricks — “those tricks don’t work, they don’t work.” Watch either talk and you will see the method working exactly as advertised: precise, generous, funny, relentlessly kind, careful with everyone including the person he is criticising. Thirty stories in twelve days from fifteen U.S. outlets, per The Emancipator’s count; a white colleague accused of more serious misconduct, none. The accuser suspended by their own institution after the fact, which is the sequence in which vindication arrives too late to be of any use to anyone.

We are not claiming to know what killed him, and we will not perform certainty about the inside of a person’s death. We are claiming something narrower and checkable: respectability did not protect him, and it was never going to, because the machinery does not run on your conduct. That matters enormously for what we tell each other. Every Autistic person who has been coached to mask harder for safety, every Disabled person told to be more palatable in a meeting, every Black academic told to formulate the argument more carefully, is being sold the same insurance policy. It does not pay out. Which is not an argument for rudeness — he is right that delivery has consequences. It is an argument for never confusing a survival tactic with a defence, and for putting our real hope in the collective fist he named and then under-prescribed.

Fourth: “we all want the same thing” is the warmest claim in the talk and the one the talk itself refutes. He says he is yet to meet someone who does not want to be valued, nurtured, and supported, and builds the opening on universal shared desire. Then, over the next ninety minutes, he describes people invested in others’ downfall, people who will not relinquish power from dead hands, people who are “happy for things to stay unequal,” a sector that rewards unkindness handsomely, and a man in a meeting who wanted a colleague diminished. Both cannot be fully true.

The bigot did not want the same thing. He wanted the ranking. Naming that is not cynicism — it is a design requirement, because a politics that assumes universal goodwill has no plan for the people who want you gone. Arday half-supplies the missing plan when he says power is taken, not given. We would make it the premise rather than the coda. Design for the arbiters of the subscription, not for the fellow-feeling of everyone in the building. Design is tested at the edges, and the edge case here is the person collecting the rent.

None of which makes the argument wrong. It makes it an argument in progress, which is the best kind to bring to a campfire — and he cannot revise it now, so we will have to do that part, carefully, in public, with his name on it.

Where we land is where he did, twice, in two different rooms three years apart. In 2022, asked what he would build instead of what he would tear down: solidarity, love, and non-disposable empathy, because “the only concept that is colourblind is individualism.” In 2025, asked for an elixir he refused to fake: a ripple, a drop, an ember, one per cent, and the finite energy to spend on the sphere you can actually reach.

That is what unlearning toward hope means, and it is not a mood. It is a budget. You audit the accepted reality, you decline the franchised words, you keep the one per cent, and you spend your energy where your hands are.

Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Join Us

Campfire Learn Together happens every Sunday at 10AM Central, online via Discord. This session is on Sunday, August 23, 2026 at 10AM CT, 4PM UK. Open to the whole community — no preparation needed, no expertise required. Come as you are.

We’ll watch Arday’s keynote together, take a bodymind break, watch the neurodiversity answer, and then open up the reflection questions as a community conversation. You can participate by video, voice, text chat, or just by being in the room. All modes are welcome. Cameras optional. Silence is participation.

There is no designated expert here, including us — which is what he said too. “Really my job is facilitatory. We’re facilitating, we’re conduits to learning, we’re not the orators of learning.” He also said that in most lecture rooms of his career, most of the students were more intelligent than he was, and he meant it as a working assumption rather than a compliment.

This one is grief and it is also a briefing, and those two things do not sit comfortably together. Some of us will want to talk about the backlash and some of us will need not to. Both are fine in the same room. There is no agenda item you have to be ready for.

Join our community to get access, then find us in our online space. Our Campfire Learn Together page describes some of what to expect. If this is your first Campfire, you’re in good company — many of our regulars showed up for the first time not knowing quite what to expect, and stayed.

Come with a song. His whole method was a set list taped to the floor, and he built a keynote on inclusion out of Belinda Carlisle, Marvin Gaye, and Lenny Kravitz because music was the common ground he could assume with strangers. Bring the one that does that for you. And if you have one, bring the name of a person who once asked how your day was going and meant it — the greatest magic trick, according to him, and we are inclined to agree.

Belinda Carlisle – (We Want) The Same Thing (Official HD Music Video) – YouTube
Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On (Lyric Video) – YouTube
Marvin Gaye – What’s Going On (Official Video 2019) – YouTube
Lenny Kravitz – Let Love Rule (Official Music Video) – YouTube
Bruce Springsteen – Dancing In The Dark (acoustic live version) – The Concert For Valor – YouTube
If Not Now… – YouTube

Main Takeaways

  • Unlearning is not correcting a belief; it is auditing the floor. “The process of identifying an accepted reality that structurally disadvantages its inhabitants, some more than others” — written by students, not professors, and better than most of the literature.
  • You cannot get to de without doing colonizing first. Skip the diagnosis and you get a slogan that can be talked out of your hands in one news cycle. Ask it of the pathology paradigm and see how much is actually known.
  • Belonging is a subscription, and somebody is collecting. The room is not accidentally hard to be in. Ask who the arbiters are and what the rent is.
  • Being greeted registers as sorcery because these spaces are predicated on exclusion. “The greatest magic trick ever” is asking how someone’s day has been. That is a damning sentence about the institution, not a heartwarming one about manners.
  • Late identification is a proxy for understanding why you felt different — and that is life-affirming, not a trend. The fifty-year-old who finally has a word for it is the person this backlash is aimed at, and Arday defended them a year before it peaked.
  • A franchised word has an owner. Inclusion, then diversity, then decolonization, then whatever is next: packaged, performed, abandoned, with the people it named left holding the bill. Programs planted in toxic soil bloom on the newsletter and die in the ground.
  • The victory is the institution’s to share and ours to own when we fail. He said that about EDI work in 2022. Read it again knowing how his own year ended.
  • Provide evidence that you are being harmed is not a request for rigour. It is epistemic injustice with a clipboard.
  • People are not small. They are made small, and someone is assigned to the putting-back. Every Neurodivergent person told to use their quiet voice knows the hand on the top of the head.
  • Respectability is a survival tactic, not a defence. He was precise, kind, and careful, and it did not protect him. Never confuse the toll you pay with the wall you need.
  • You do not need an ocean of hope. You need a ripple, and a finite energy budget you refuse to spend on the outrage machine. One per cent converts anything. All a fire needs is an ember.
  • A finger never penetrates a wall; a collective fist does. The only remedy in either talk that survives a change of personnel is the one with money and accountability attached — and it is the one he mentioned least.
  • Belonging — The extent to which we feel accepted, respected, included, and supported. Arday’s whole keynote is an argument that it is currently sold by subscription.
  • Engineered Exclusion — The predictable sidelining of Disabled people through design choices. His phrase for the academy was “predicated on exclusion,” which is the same finding in older language.
  • Deficit Ideology — The worldview that locates inequality inside the people getting the worse outcomes. What unlearning is for.
  • Epistemic Injustice — When your standing as a knower of your own life is discounted. “Provide statistics and provide evidence that that’s happening.”
  • Epistemic Trespassing — An expert crossing a visible boundary into a field where they have neither the evidence nor the skills, and continuing to talk anyway. See: deciding on television who is and is not Autistic.
  • Moral Panic — The public tricked into overreacting to something that is not dangerous. The shape of the current ADHD and autism coverage on both sides of the Atlantic.
  • Justice Sensitivity — Perceiving unfairness more often and feeling it more acutely. Pathologized as oversensitivity; a participant in the chat renamed it authenticity, and Arday called the pathologizing “just laziness.”
  • Masking — Suppressing yourself to survive a space. He uses it in the widest sense — “the amount of masking people do emotionally at work is insane” — and the widest sense is correct.
  • Racial Weathering — What chronic, deniable hostility does to a body over years. Not a metaphor, and the subject of his own research.
  • Minority Stress — Why health disparities track social standing rather than individual coping. The literature underneath “no one can see me cry.”
  • DisCrit — Dis/ability Critical Race Studies: race and ability as co-constructed and interdependent. The seam Arday worked without the scaffolding.
  • Disability Double Bind — Disclose and be pre-explained; don’t and be difficult. He lists the neurodivergent version out loud: they’ve got ADHD, they’re dyspraxic, they’re Autistic, so that’s why.
  • Respectability Politics — Purchasing safety with conduct. His bedside-manner method, knowingly deployed, and the reason we are arguing with it.
  • Performative Neurodiversity (Neurodiversity Lite) — The movement sold back to us as a buzzword. What “franchised” produces on our side of the seam.
  • Extractive Abandonment — Making the people a system discards profitable to it. The economics of unremunerated EDI labour carried by women of colour.
  • Allyship — Solidarity without an audience. “Your right hand shouldn’t show what your left hand is doing,” and back-seat only.
  • Glimmers — The opposite of triggers; tiny moments of awe. His word for them is embers, and one is enough to start the fire.
  • Interdependence — Our survival bound up together. Set against “the only concept that is colourblind is individualism.”

Reflection Questions

On the accepted reality. Unlearning starts by naming a reality everyone around you treats as simply the way things are. What is one of those in your life right now — at work, in a school, in a clinic, in a family — that disadvantages its inhabitants, some more than others? Who taught you to call it normal, and what would it cost you to stop?

On the subscription. Arday says inclusion is a membership with arbiters who set the rules about who belongs. In a room that matters to you, who are the arbiters? What is the rent you have been paying — masking, over-preparing, being twice as careful, being the calm one — and what did you buy with it?

On being made small. Not feeling small. Made small, with someone assigned to the putting-back. When did that happen to you, and whose hand was it? What would it take for that room to stop needing someone in that role?

On the toll booth. He had to be articulate, precise, and kind or be recast as angry and aggressive. Many of us have a version of that: be palatable or be dismissed. Have you been treating that as a skill you are proud of? What changes if you call it a toll instead — something extracted from you rather than something you achieved?

On the finite energy budget. He admits he gives an enormous amount of his daily energy to a man who will never know he exists, and says a better use is the sphere he can actually reach. What is currently eating your energy that cannot be moved by it? What is within arm’s length that could be, and what would you have to stop reading to find out?

On the one per cent. No ocean of hope. A ripple, a drop, an ember, a one-per-cent chance. Where is your one per cent this month — the specific small thing that is not certain but is not nothing? And who else would need to know about it for it to become a collective fist rather than a twitching finger?

On the greatest magic trick. Someone once asked how your day was going and meant it, and it got you through the day. Who was it? Have you told them? And who near you right now is doing a lot of very quiet masking that a single unhurried question might interrupt?

—

This page draws on UNLEARN LIGHTBULB: I guess I’m doing fine, I guess I’m doing fine (Anglia Ruskin University, April 2025) and Jason Arday — Things Can Only Get Better (Society for Experimental Biology, recorded late 2022, posted January 2023); on Professor Arday’s paper No one can see me cry: understanding mental health issues for Black and minority ethnic staff in higher education (Higher Education, 2021); and on reporting and community response linked throughout. Quotations from the videos are transcribed from their captions, with filler words removed, and proper nouns and obvious caption errors corrected in square brackets. The definition of unlearning belongs to the Anglia Ruskin University Student Race Equality Advocates. The Stimpunks Synthesis section is our own extension and critique, and is not attributed to Professor Arday, Anglia Ruskin University, or the Society for Experimental Biology.

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