Constantly evolving Research Questions

At the outset of this MA, I held three loose questions. They weren’t yet formed through theory, but through feeling. Each one came from a different angle, voice, identity, method, but they circled the same space. How does accent bias shape how we see ourselves? How does it limit who gets to belong? Can design speak back to it?

The questions shifted over time. They became sharper, more embodied. Through diary entries, conversations, and slow design work, they began to converge. The first asked how accent bias affects identity and emotional well-being inside creative spaces. The second focused on the relationship between voice, class, and opportunity. The third moved into method, asking whether speculative design could do more than describe, could it challenge, reframe, intervene?

Eventually, these threads pulled into one line: How accent and class biases influence self-identity and access to opportunities in the creative industries, and how speculative design practices may be employed to interrogate, challenge, and reframe them.

This entry traces how I arrived there. It follows the evolution of those questions, how they rose from lived experience, how they were shaped through theory, and how they landed in a design practice that became both inquiry and resistance. Voices of Creativity is central to that journey. So is Bourdieu. So is every moment I paused before speaking.

Question 1: Accent Bias and Identity in Creative Environments

This question came from the body, not the brief. In the early stages of the course, I felt the weight of my own accent in ways I hadn’t before. It was subtle. A hesitation in feedback. A shift in tone. A mimicry, once, in a group critique. It was meant lightly. But it stayed with me. I remember writing in my diary that day about the sting, the moment my voice felt like a liability. Something that made me visible, but not necessarily welcome.

That discomfort became a line of inquiry. How does accent bias shape identity in creative spaces? What does it mean to carry a voice that marks you out?

Evidence arrived quickly. The Sutton Trust reported that nearly a third of working-class professionals had been mocked for their accent in the workplace. One in three students said they felt self-conscious about how they spoke. Received Pronunciation still carried weight, not only as familiarity, but as authority (The Sutton Trust, 2024). These hierarchies of speech create psychic costs. People learn to code-switch, soften, rehearse. In interviews, several creative professionals told me the same thing. No matter their skill, their voice was often the first thing judged. One participant said plainly, no matter my talent, as soon as I open my mouth, I feel judged.

Reading Bourdieu gave me language for what I was experiencing. His concept of symbolic violence described the pressure exactly. A slow, internalised coercion. Not enforced, but absorbed. The dominant voice becomes the norm, and those outside it begin to feel the difference. Not just in how they’re heard, but in how they hear themselves (Bourdieu, 1991).

That insight reframed everything. The discomfort wasn’t individual. It was structured. The problem wasn’t how I spoke. The problem was how certain ways of speaking had been made to feel lesser. My first question took shape here. It was both personal and political. I wanted to understand what happens to identity, to confidence, to creative presence, when voice becomes a site of judgment.

Question 2: Connecting Accent and Class, Identity and Opportunity

As I moved deeper into the research, it became impossible to separate accent from class. Conversations, interviews, and reflections made this clear. Accent, especially in the UK and Ireland, is rarely heard in isolation. It signals something else. Class background. Region. Education. The same bias that targets how you sound often shadows who you are and what you can access.

My second research question evolved from this realisation: Does accent and class bias impact self-identity and opportunity in the creative industries? It allowed me to connect internal effects such as confidence and belonging with external outcomes like hiring, visibility, and progression.

The evidence was sobering. A 2025 Guardian analysis described the creative arts as a “rigged system” where working-class talent struggles to break through. Nearly a third of major arts leaders came from private schools, despite only seven percent of the population being privately educated (Harrison, 2025). The Sutton Trust reinforced this. They found that creative careers are disproportionately filled by the affluent, and that class and accent often act as quiet filters for entry and advancement (The Sutton Trust, 2024). One report simply called the sector “elitist” and “inaccessible.”

I heard the human side of this in interviews. Emerging designers spoke of being passed over for internships or placements in favour of those with more polished voices or cultural ease. One participant said walking into a gallery job interview felt like walking into someone else’s world. Even small talk felt alien. The accents, the references, the unspoken rules. Many echoed the same quiet belief: The arts are not for people like me.

That line stayed with me. I had felt it myself. In my diary, I wrote about how long it took to call myself a designer without apology. The hesitation wasn’t about skill. It was about legitimacy. Could I be taken seriously in a field that rarely heard voices like mine?

This is where Bourdieu’s work became central. His idea of habitus, the embodied feel for how to be in the world, helped explain what I and others were navigating. The creative field rewards those who already carry cultural capital. The right way of speaking. The right references. A shorthand of belonging. For those from working-class backgrounds, that shorthand often needs to be learned, mimicked, or performed. Some learn to do it. Others stop trying.

Judith Butler’s work on identity as performance helped me name that daily labour. Her idea that identity is a doing, shaped through repeated acts, resonated deeply. I began to see how I, and many others, were doing class every day. Adapting voices. Adjusting tastes. Changing tone. Not just to succeed, but to stay in the room.

This was not just performance. It was protection. But it came at a cost. Over time, it chips away at the self you might have been. This intersection of Bourdieu and Butler reframed class bias for me. It was no longer just external. It was internalised. It wrote itself into behaviour. Into possibility. Into how we see ourselves, and who we imagine we might become.

By broadening the question to include class, I began to see accentism as part of a larger system of exclusion. Self-identity and opportunity are connected. How you are seen shapes what you can access. But the reverse is also true. What you are denied can distort how you see yourself.

I also started to see sparks of resistance. I learned about the Working Class Creatives Database, an initiative that centres working-class voices in art and design. They reject tokenism. They work to dismantle barriers. They make space where it didn’t exist before. Their work reminded me that critique must also make space for alternatives. That became the pivot to my final question, one that asked not just what the problem is, but how design might start to respond.

Question 3: Speculative Design as a Tool for Change

By this stage, I had mapped the impact of accent and class bias. Not just in theory, but in the psyche. In the room. In the structure. I had gathered evidence, heard stories, and reflected on my own experience. The question that followed was simple: what can design do?

That impulse shaped my third question: How can speculative design practices interrogate, challenge, and reframe accent and class biases, fostering more inclusive and empathetic creative environments?

This shift came from practice. I was looking for a method that could hold contradiction without resolving it too quickly. Traditional design approaches felt too linear and solution-focused. Speculative design offered something else. It asked questions. It made space. It opened the present up to reimagining.

The work of Dunne and Raby helped frame this approach. Their idea that speculative design uses what if scenarios to probe accepted realities felt relevant. They were not designing to fix. They were designing to reveal. That felt appropriate for a problem like accentism, where the harm is often unspoken and the systems upholding it remain implicit.

In the studio, I began developing Voices of Creativity as a speculative intervention. The platform became a space for critical storytelling, a way to surface bias not as data, but as experience. One of the first experiments I built involved audio recordings. Identical content, voiced in different accents: northern English, Received Pronunciation, non-native English. Participants were asked to listen, reflect, and note their reactions. Many admitted they made unconscious assumptions about education or authority based on voice alone. That moment of awareness became the design.

Cameron (1995) explains this dynamic clearly. Speakers with Received Pronunciation are often assumed to be professional. Smart. Competent. Their voice does the work before they do. Regional and working-class accents, by contrast, carry weight. They are heard with hesitation. Or suspicion. Lippi-Green (1997) shows how the pressure to adapt is real, even when it is not spoken aloud. People soften, adjust, perform neutrality just to be taken seriously.

Another speculative experiment took the form of a fictional admissions form, a satirical document asking applicants to list their parents’ accents and occupations. It was playful in tone but rooted in truth. The discomfort it created surfaced the hidden filters already shaping creative hiring. It made the familiar strange. That was the aim.

These speculative artifacts became tools in workshops and conversations. They did not explain bias. They invited people to feel it. One participant, usually quiet, spoke at length after engaging with the prompts. She described how “speaking proper” had been drilled into her at art school. She said it felt like wearing someone else’s clothes. The artifact gave her the words to say that.

That moment stayed with me. It reminded me that this process was not only for others. Speculative design was also helping me see the present differently. It became a kind of reflexive practice. I was not building fictional futures for distance. I was using fiction to get closer to the systems already in place.

This third question brought everything into focus. It added action to analysis. It allowed the research to move from diagnosis to possibility. It kept things critical, but also hopeful. If bias is absorbed quietly, maybe reflection could surface just as quietly. Through narrative. Through design. Through a moment held long enough to notice what had gone unnamed.

By the time I had piloted Voices of Creativity with peers, the shape of the work was clear. One thread followed the internal impact of accent bias. Another traced the structural effects of class. The third offered a method for intervening. What remained was to bring them together into a single, coherent inquiry.

From Three Questions to One Synthesis

As the project unfolded, the space between my three questions began to collapse. The boundaries blurred. Insights from one led directly into another. I found that self-identity, opportunity, and creative intervention were not separate lines of inquiry. They were entangled. My diary began to link moments of personal discomfort to broader patterns of exclusion, then to possible design responses. After reading The Guardian’s report on working-class exclusion in arts leadership, I wrote about responsibility, my own as a designer, to counter that narrative. I asked, what if the industry celebrated diverse accents as creative assets?

That thought became a seed. It sparked a speculative idea for an Accent Symposium exhibition, but also reframed how I understood the research as a whole. In supervision meetings, I often described the project in a single sentence. I was exploring how accent and class bias shape who feels like a creative insider, and how design might help shift that perception.

Eventually, the three questions became one. Not just for clarity, but because they were never truly separate. Bias and identity, perception and access, critique and response, these were different parts of the same structure. The final research question reflects that synthesis: How do accent and class biases influence self-identity and access to opportunities in the creative industries, and how can speculative design practices be employed to interrogate, challenge, and reframe these biases?

The wording is intentional. Interrogate means to investigate and expose, which I did through interviews, critical reflection, and narrative analysis. Challenge means to question what is treated as inevitable, which I pursued through speculative tools that confront assumptions. Reframe means to offer another way of seeing, which I explored through design scenarios that ask people to hear bias differently.

Theory remained a constant companion. Bourdieu’s idea of symbolic power helped explain why exclusion often looks like preference. His writing about how we internalise limits stayed with me. He describes how we refrain from activities that would threaten our social place (Bourdieu, 1991). That line captured so much. It described the hesitation I felt, and the resignation I saw in others. Butler’s work on performativity offered another layer. Identity is not fixed. It is made, over time, through repetition. If creative identity is performed, then it can be rewritten. Each time a different voice claims authority, the script shifts.

These theories gave shape to the problem. Speculative design gave me a process to work with it. Together, they allowed the research to remain critical and imaginative at once. The final question holds that balance. It asks how we can name structural exclusion while also making space for new futures.

Each earlier question brought something vital. Question one made the issue personal. Question two made it structural. Question three made it actionable. By connecting bias to the self, and then to systems, I could move toward design as response. Speculation became a way to refuse what is already assumed, and to imagine something less exclusionary.

Arriving at this question changed how I saw myself. It reframed what I thought a designer could be. Not someone trying to sound correct, but someone using their voice and the voices of others as the material of the work

References

1. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power (J. B. Thompson, Ed.; G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

2. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.

3. Cameron, D. (1995). Verbal hygiene. London: Routledge.

4. Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States. London: Routledge.

5. Creative Access & FleishmanHillard UK. (2023). The language of discrimination: Class barriers and accent bias in the creative industries. Creative Access.

6. The Sutton Trust. (2024). A class act? Social mobility and the creative industries. London: The Sutton Trust.

7. Harrison, P. (2025, February 21). Working-class creatives don’t stand a chance in UK today, leading artists warn. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com

8. Working Class Creatives Database. (2022). About us. https://www.workingclasscreativesdatabase.co.uk