To empower the next generation of creatives

How did you come to be a visiting professor of Diverse Selfhood?

I have a long association with academia, and I was invited to consider a post which I didn’t feel able to take up because I think I best serve when I’m not beholden to corporations or institutions. I’m a big work-from-the-gut, work-from-the-heart person, and a lot of corporate institutions require their workers to over-ride that in order to serve the bigger picture. I’ve just simply never been able to do that. So, with the institution, I discussed what I felt I wanted to achieve, based on what I’d learned over nearly 40 years (and what I’m still learning) and I’m thrilled to say they agreed. A big part of it came from the fact that I’ve always been very outspoken about unachievable body ideals, and I started talking about this to mainstream British press in the early 1990s. Equally, I’ve always felt very strongly about the lack of race diversity in our media, given that our world hosts a spectrum of humans and yet our commercial portrayals are often very limited. I know how that affects people psychologically on many levels, because I know how it affects me. Throughout the decades, whenever women have come up to talk to me about how beauty and fashion imagery has made them feel excluded, my heart and my gut have been in play. I’ve also known what this means from the perspective of psychological impact. More recently, I chose to do a Masters in Applied Psychology, because I wanted to really engage with a more powerful vocabulary.

My choice of a position relating to Diverse Selfhood is also about recognising that the thinking has moved beyond the word ‘diversity’; it’s become a sort of sticking plaster put on everything by corporations who have appropriated it as a trend. Moving into diverse selfhoods involves a spectrum of identities. And this we need to see in front of the lens but also behind the lens. This is what we focused on with All Walks Beyond the Catwalk, the organisation I co-founded in 2009, because if you’ve got all white, middle class, mostly male, teams coming up with ideas about how humanity is represented, then it’s going to be limited and riddled with unconscious bias.