Dr Victoria Odeniyi

Biography

Dr Victoria Odeniyi is an applied linguist and continues to develop professional and research interests related to multilingualism, educational inequality and institutionalised knowledge production; how these issues intersect with race and identity language diversity; and what this means within the context of contemporary higher education. She has worked for UAL since 2020, and is currently a UAL Decolonising Arts Institute Research Fellow. She is an active member of UAL’s Decolonising Arts Education Fellowship Scheme Network and the Institute’s lead for UAL’s Decolonising Arts Education Secondment Scheme. Victoria has a Masters in Education (Sheffield), and a PhD in Applied Linguistics (Canterbury Christchurch University). For her doctoral research, Victoria conducted an ethnographically-informed study of the lived experiences, literacy practices and identity work of African migrant students at a British university.

Before joining UAL, Victoria was a researcher on the ‘Developing Educator’s project (Queen Mary University of London, 2017-2018), designed to gain a fuller understanding of teaching practices across six academic Schools. She was also a research assistant on the Andrew W Mellon Foundation funded Reading Peer Review research project (PI Professor Martin Paul Eve, Birkbeck, University of London, 2018-2019) during which she analysed confidential expert peer review reports from PLOS ONE, the largest scientific journal in the world, creating a taxonomy of the reports. Victoria led UAL’s 'Reimagining Conversations' with multilingual international students project (2020-2022) which sought to raise awareness of the educational and creative potential of the use of language. Victoria is an Editorial Board Member of the ‘In Other Words Dictionary Project: A Contextualized Dictionary to Problematize Otherness. The project involves the collaborative development of an online dictionary of contextualised keywords which problematise and reverse narratives of Otherness.

Victoria is an affiliated member of the UCL International Centre for Intercultural Studies; and is currently Guest Editing a special issue of Decolonial Subversions (Autumn, 2023) with Dr Gillian Lazar on the theme of decolonising the university and the role of linguistic diversity in diverse global contexts.

Victoria supervises Masters and Doctoral researchers in the areas of language studies and education. She would be happy to hear from anyone who is interested in pursuing a PhD, in and across the following areas:

- The coloniality of language
- Educational inequality
- Language ideologies in HE contexts
- Nativespeakerism
- Multilingualism
- Language in education
- The role of language in knowledge production
- Linguistic ethnography /institutional ethnography
- Critical approaches to the international/migrant student experience
- Critical approaches to intercultural communication



Forthcoming:
Odeniyi, V. & Lazar, G. (Guest Editors).(2023). Decolonising the university and the role of linguistic diversity, Decolonial Subversions Special Issue.