About Mark

What I believe in

I have a 25 year history of activism that I bring into my UCU work, having been involved in campaigns around refugees and asylum seekers, LGBT+ issues, resisting war and much more, across the three main places where I have lived - Australia, Japan and the UK. My activist history is built around sticking up for the underdog, fighting injustice and sustaining relationships of community, collectivity and care that can withstand oppression

My work to date

I am a campaigner, writer, academic and historian, who has worked and studied on three continents before arriving in the UK in 2012. I have worked at the University of Sheffield since then, and been active in various roles in my local UCU branch since 2017.

As a migrant to the UK myself, I initially became active around migrant member rights, co-establishing the group International & Broke, which built a campaign to normalise reimbursement of migration-related fees for workers in UK HE. We won at many higher education institutions, although there remains much more to do to support the approximately one third of HE staff who are international, and the many international staff working in other areas of post-16 education. That’s why I helped lead the internal push to create migrant member representative structures within UCU, a first in the trade union movement when we created them in 2019.

Like many others in USS institutions, my union activity increased off the back of the 2018 USS Strikes. I had joined the local branch committee just before this and subsequently held roles as Equality Officer, Branch Secretary during the pandemic years and Branch Treasurer, as well as acting as a caseworker and representing and advocating for members individually and collectively. That knowledge of individual cases and collective processes has proved to me that we win best when we are building from the ground up to shape campaigns.

Over the last year, my primary focus has been working with colleagues in my department to defend jobs and resist plans to convert teaching colleagues’ roles into term-time only contracts. Over that year, I have helped double our departmental UCU density to over 75% and made it incredibly difficult for management to push through their proposed changes. Density is key for us as a union - the higher our membership, the stronger we are, as we know from other unions’ successes.

I have also served several terms on the NEC as a UK-wide HE rep and representing LGBT+ members. I believe deeply in our union’s equality agenda, and am particularly proud of our unwavering support for our trans and non-binary siblings. I have also been a UK-wide negotiator over pay and related matters and pensions (USS). 

I understand how UCU works, and the reasons why it sometimes doesn’t. But I believe wholeheartedly that our union can and must be better at delivering with and for members, and driving the change post-16 education in the UK needs. That requires us to also change, organisationally and interpersonally. We need to focus more on what brings us together, and less on what divides us internally. 

My professional experience

I am an active scholar, publishing in the fields of Japanese Studies, history and, through a range of collaborations in interdisciplinary forums with geographers, feminist theorists, anthropologists and more. I also collaborate with artists, curators and producers to showcase artists and culture from East Asia in the UK. My academic work, like my activist history, is built on collaboration and promoting ways to work across differences. 

I work actively with other professional bodies, co-authoring the landmark report by the Royal Historical Society on LGBT+ histories and historians, which built on their important work on gender equality and on race and ethnicity. I convened the European Association for Japanese Studies history track, serve on the AHRC Peer Review College and have been an editorial collective member at the leading radical history publication History Workshop Journal for over a decade. Here you can read a couple of my reflections on picket lines and trade unionism for History Workshop. 

I understand how important your professional expertise are to you as members of professional communities. As a union, we can and should be working more effectively with our professional organisations and those academic and professional communities to build alliances that can confront the many challenges we face. My track record demonstrates I know how to do that.

My life outside UCU

I live in south Manchester where I am a member of a local group combating the rise of the far right in the community I live in, and am also active in local LGBT+ groups and those working to end the HIV crisis. I am not a member of any political party.