There is a familiar rhythm to conversations about equity across higher education and the cultural sector.
We speak about values. We speak about commitments. We speak about inclusion, collaboration, and care.
What we examine less often is how those commitments are enacted, how they translate into decisions, and what happens when they do not.
This session The 5Rs: A framework towards social justice in practice, hosted by NCACE as part of its annual festival, stayed with that gap. The panel Samia Malik, Dr Janine Francois and Suzie Leighton were chaired by me, Aisha Richards were engaged in the discussion which centred practice and practices in the gap institutionally, professionally and personally.
Moving Beyond Intention
The issue is not a lack of intent.
Across institutions, intent is often clear and sincerely held. The difficulty lies in how systems are structured, how decisions are made, how work is resourced, and what those systems make possible.
The question is not simply what we value. It is what we are resourcing, sustaining, and changing.
The 5Rs, Representation, Remuneration, Reparation, Reclamation, and Redistribution, were introduced not as a set of principles, but as a decision-making system. Each operates at a different point in practice: representation at the level of visibility, remuneration at resource, reparation at accountability, reclamation at knowledge, and redistribution at power.
Taken together, they make visible where work is partial and where it is structural.
What Became Clear
A consistent pattern emerged across the discussion.
Representation is where most progress has been made, who is present, who is invited, who is seen. It is also where institutions are most comfortable.
What remains resistant are remuneration and redistribution. Paying for labour, recognising the full cost of participation, and sharing decision-making power continue to be difficult, particularly within long-standing institutional structures.
Without these shifts, a familiar condition appears: participation without resource, collaboration without shared power, inclusion without structural change. At that point, what looks like progress is largely surface level.
The 5Rs does not frame this as a failure of values. It identifies it as a pattern of decisions.
Institutions Are Not Abstract
Institutions are often described as complex, slow, and difficult to shift. That is true.
But they are not abstract. They are made up of decisions, processes, and people.
That matters, because it means the gap between intention and practice is not accidental. It is produced through what is prioritised, what is funded, and what is left unchanged.
The 5Rs brings this into focus by asking direct questions about where labour is being extracted, where participation is encouraged but not resourced, and where power is retained even as inclusion increases. These are not theoretical questions. They are operational.
Care Is Not Neutral
Care featured heavily in the discussion.
It is often positioned as a value. In practice, it is uneven, informal, and frequently unrecognised. It is also not neutral.
Care sits most heavily with those already carrying the greatest burden, particularly Black and brown practitioners, educators, and cultural workers. Without remuneration and redistribution, care becomes another form of labour: unpaid, expected, and repeated.
In that context, care is not supported. It is extraction.
When Practice Falls Short
Some of the most useful contributions came from moments where things had not worked.
These were not framed as failures of intent, but as failures of anticipation where harm was not considered, where costs were underestimated, and where impacts were uneven.
What changed in those moments was not intention, but approach. There was greater attention to who is affected, what is being asked, and what support is required.
This is where the 5Rs is most effective not after the fact, but earlier in the process.
Working Within Constraint
A key audience question focused on how to apply this work with limited power, particularly for freelancers and those working on short-term projects.
The response was not to scale the framework down, but to apply it with precision. The 5Rs is not only for institutions; it can be used within teams, across collaborations, and in individual decision-making.
Even at a small scale, it sharpens the questions: is this work resourced, who is making decisions, and what is being recognised and what is not?
It does not remove constraints. It makes it visible.
What Shifted in the Room
What became clear through both the discussion and audience responses was not that these issues were new. They were familiar.
What shifted was the level of precision.
Participants recognised their own contexts in what was being discussed, particularly the imbalance between visibility and resource, and the persistence of extractive collaboration. The difference was language.
The 5Rs provided a way to move beyond general commitments and towards more exact questions about labour, power, and accountability. That shift matters, because without precision, change remains rhetorical.
Limits Are Part of the Work
The session itself was not outside the conditions it examined.
Time constrained depth. Some questions required further unpacking. The balance between structure and openness remained in negotiation.
This is not separate from the work. It is part of it.
Frameworks like the 5Rs do not remove constraints. They expose it and require more deliberate decisions within it, including in facilitation.
What Needs to Change
If institutions are serious about equitable knowledge exchange, the shift is not conceptual. It is practical.
They need to move beyond recognising participation to resourcing and valuing knowledge wherever it sits, particularly outside academia. This means paying for labour, recognising non-academic knowledge as equal, retaining authorship and credit, and redistributing not just opportunity, but power.
Without this, knowledge exchange remains extractive.
Final Reflection
The gap between intention and practice is not a mystery. It is structured through decisions.
What became clearer both on the panel and across the audience, is that this gap will not close through stronger statements of value. It will only shift when decisions about resource, labour, and power change.
The 5Rs does not resolve this. It makes it visible. And once visible, it becomes harder to ignore.
The work, then, is not only to articulate values, but to examine how they are enacted and who benefits from how they are currently structured.
This includes my own practice.
Until that level of scrutiny is sustained, change will remain uneven. And where change is uneven, it does not hold.
Image credit: Shades of Noir