Decolonising Research Series: Interview with Professor Louise Lawrence

This series of podcast episodes will focus on Decolonising Research, and feature talks from the Decolonising Research Festival held at the University of Exeter in June and July 2022.

The fifteenth episode of this series features University of Exeter PGR Olabisi Obamakin interviewing Exeter academic Professor Louise Lawrence.

Music credit: Happy Boy Theme Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Transcription

00:09

Hello, and welcome to rd in the in betweens. I'm your host, Kelly Preece. And every fortnight I talk to a different guest, about researchers development, and everything in between. Hello,

00:33

and thank you for joining us on this online resource. My name is Bisi Obamakin, and I'm a theology PhD student at the University of Exeter. Today, we are joined by an amazing New Testament scholar, and author of many books, including her newest book, creating compassionate campuses, Professor Louise

00:50

Lawrence. Thank you for joining us, I really, really appreciate it like a really, really big

00:57

thanks for inviting me.

00:59

So yeah, a little bit about yourself what you do and what your research passions are.

01:03

Yeah, so my name is Louise Lawrence, as you as you said, I'm Professor of de testament interpretation here in Exeter. My research interests I work in New Testament studies. So particularly sort of cross cultural anthropology, with biblical texts, but latterly, for the last sort of decade, I've been really interested in the ways in which religion and sacred texts sort of sensor bodies and minds and particularly around disability studies, so yeah, so that's, that's my interests,

01:42

for the people that are watching that maybe they've just gotten a PhD or whatever they're doing, right at the beginning of their career, they're not socialized into any institution, what would you say to them? What would you employ to them? With regards to pedagogy and decolonization? And that kind of thing?

01:57

I think, I mean, well, you're a brilliant example of this. And you should probably say a bit about how you're, I'm picking, I'm picking New Testament studies. But, you know, I'll let you talk about you've got more important things to say on this, I think that you must be true to yourself, you know, and in a sense, if it matters to you, it matters. And if you identify in justice, even if other people haven't seemed to be able to have recognized or have sort of been made conscious of that, then call it out. And I think, I think as an early career, academic, you can, there's a very well known thing called imposter syndrome, I shouldn't be here. I don't look like I should be here. I don't sound like I should be here. I'm not clever enough. But everyone goes through those things. Everyone feels those things, it, it's a very natural part of it. And that says probably more about the in hospitality of academia, or the perceived sort of sense of academia than it does about you. And you just have to have the confidence to have that voice. I you say about your, your ways in which you're sort of challenging the Eurocentrism of Biblical Studies. Yeah, and finding a voice that's been lost or not even recognized. It's that that that no curriculum that you've kind of picked up?

03:26

Yeah, I guess it's just kind of coming into the field and not seeing myself and not really knowing where I fit. And thinking, obviously, recognizing that I was born in the UK, and I do have a Western education. But not really fully feeling like I fit into that box. And then, you know, thinking, oh, yeah, I'm African. That's what I am. And they're not fully fit in that box, either. So yeah, I think bringing a kind of Nigerian British kind of hybrid viewpoint, it's been