In this piece, BILT Student Fellow Elliot Green interviews Dr. Rosie Ola Marie, a Senior Lecturer in Gender in the School of Sociology, Politics and International Relations at the University of Bristol.
In this piece, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr Rosie Ola Marie, a senior lecturer of gender at the University.
What is your background?
My academic experience has been driven by passion, I’m a giant nerd and that’s led to the commitment to the subject and stuff I’m interested in. I’m from Wales, and for sixth form I applied for an international school scholarship and ended up doing two years in Singapore. It was very interesting to meet lots of different people, whereas I’d previously been in a very small Welsh school, so it was a very different experience. I had a great time.
I ended up applying to both the US and UK to go to university and was offered a place at a small university called Colorado College. This is where I was most shaped by education, because it was a liberal arts university, which is a very different system to how we educate in the UK. You don’t go in and declare a specific trajectory, like ‘I’m going to do a sociology degree’, rather you take lots of classes in lots of different areas and eventually you build what’s known as a major. So I took classes in all sorts of different things, I had this very exciting time, and I graduated with a degree in history and feminist and gender studies.
When I was growing up, I was in a very fortunate position where I thought gender inequality was a historical thing, but when I went to University, I realised that actually it was still ongoing. And this led to an interest in gender and sexuality, accompanied by the fact that I have my own personal relationship to this as a consequence of my identities as a bisexual person.
After this, I decided I wanted to come back some, so I came to Bristol for my Master’s. I did politics, followed by A PhD in sociology, and I enjoyed it so much. The reason I chose sociology in the end was because I felt like it was a perspective where you are able to hear not only people’s stories from all different parts of life, and think about the kind of ways in which our social world fits together, while also developing research methods training. I was hired after as a lecturer, and that’s how I got to where I am today
Do you have a particularly memorable teaching experience?
I’ve been teaching for a number of years now, and there are so many moments I can think of that have either been personally meaningful to me or important in terms of me learning to be a better lecturer or better researcher, even. I love teaching, especially in sociology, teaching things that obviously can touch upon people’s lives can be really interesting because you can always see people make some connections which are quite meaningful to their day-to-day life. But I also think there’s this view that teaching is always unidirectional in terms of me as the lecturer always teaching and never learning, but that’s not true. I learn so much from students and the discussions we have in seminars and classes.
Sometimes someone will have framed something in a particular way or offered a particular example or just said something that’s made me think totally differently about the area of work I’m in. And those experiences have all been incredibly meaningful.
How do you create a sense of community while teaching?
As a feminist and queer researcher, I’m quite interested in what’s known as ‘situated knowledges’, which is the idea that you understand the world from your vantage point and you recognise that objectivity is not such a thing. So that perspective translates into my teaching style, in the sense that I try to be transparent about the fact that there are limits of knowledge, and not every lecturer knows everything. And I think that helps add a level of trust and a level of community, and also hopefully breaks down a bit of a power thing, because I don’t want to be a lecturer in the room that seems untouchable and the most genius person in the world, or something. I want my lecturers to be a collaborative learning space where students also feel they can voice their opinions and debate things with me.
I’m also keen to think about the diversity of the curriculums I teach. So, thinking about the representativeness and diversity of sexuality and gender are obvious examples of this, and I am trying to make sure there are lots of avenues of talking about such major social issues. That way I’m hoping it might connect with certain students, and make them feel more able to engage.
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