REFLECT PRACTICE REFLECT 2 - The occluded practice of peer review
Expert peer review can be described as a set of practices and processes through which academic work for publication is judged. Yet, what peer review is, why it matters, and who it is for is not always articulated clearly. The facilitator will share their experiences as author, peer reviewer and as a project ‘reader’ of anonymised peer review reports, with the aim of making the process more transparent. The session ends with an open discussion of peer review in relation to who gets published, whose knowledge counts and how it is disseminated.
Facilitator: Dr Victoria Odeniyi, Researcher in Applied Linguistics Decolonising Arts Institute at the University of the Arts, London (DeAI)
Free to attend, but registration is required.
Please email the team at [email protected] if you have questions about access.
REFLECT PRACTICE REFLECT, 21 May - 4 June
This session is part of the REFLECT PRACTICE REFLECT online workshop series facilitated the Decolonising Arts Institute at the University of the Arts, London (DeAI) and taking place at 12-1pm GMT on the following Thursdays:
21 May 'Articulating positionality: the invisible labour of access in academic writing' with Dr Martine Rouleau
28 May 'The occluded practice of peer review' with Dr Victoria Odeniyi
REFLECT PRACTICE REFLECT is part of BREAKING THROUGH: Support for global majority researchers and creative practitioners navigating the journey to scholarly publication, a programme co-organised by the UAL Decolonising Arts Institute (DeAI) and the Feminist Review Collective hosting weekly online workshops from 30 April to 5 June 2026. All events are free to attend, but registration is required.
Click here for the full programme and links to register.
CONTRIBUTORS
Dr Victoria Odeniyi is a researcher in applied linguistics at the Decolonising Arts Institute. Research and professional interests include the coloniality of language, critical/institutional ethnography, language diversity and institutionalised knowledge production, and how these phenomena intersect with race and identity in the contemporary world. For her doctoral research, Victoria conducted a critical ethnography of the lived and migration experiences of African students at a British university. Victoria was a researcher on the Andrew Mellon Foundation Reading Peer Review research project during which she analysed confidential expert peer review reports from the PLOS ONE scientific journal. The project resulted in the co-authored book Reading Peer Review: PLOS ONE and Institutional Change in Academia. As post-doctoral researcher at UAL, Victoria led the Reimagining Conversations project which sought to raise awareness of the educational and creative potential of the use of language in creative education. Victoria and Dr Gillian Lazar guest edited a themed issue of Decolonial Subversions (2023) on decolonising the university and the role of linguistic diversity in diverse global contexts. Victoria is the incoming Editor-in-Chief for the multilingual, open access, peer reviewed publishing platform Decolonial Subversions.
The UAL Decolonising Arts Institute (DeAI) seeks to challenge imperial legacies, ongoing colonial violence, and disrupting ways of seeing, listening, thinking, and making to drive cultural, social and institutional change. We imagine the Institute as a decentred, disruptive, evolving and porous space. As the Institute evolves, we aim to amplify local and global movements to decolonise and address the complex genealogies and geographies of postcolonial, decolonial and intersectional thinking and practice.
The Feminist Review Collective edits and publishes Feminist Review, a pioneering interdisciplinary journal that explores gender in its multiple forms and interrelationships with other social categories and systems of power, publishing accessible knowledge and timely interventions that build on the work of Black, Indigenous, decolonial, and transnational feminist struggles. Publishing since 1979, Feminist Review has a global editorial board and readership, and currently prints and distributes in partnership with Sage Publications Ltd. The Feminist Review Collective is committed to inspiring exchanges of ideas and explorations of praxis that address, disrupt, and break through structural violence to make and nurture communities, connections, and ways of sharing knowledge founded on mutual respect, kindness, and care. We are committed to building, living, and extending a space of radical feminist practice that places care at its heart.
Image credit: Obentō no Jikan, Otomi Larcher, 2022 MA Graphic Communication Design, Central Saint Martins, UAL