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Kefeshe Bernard

Kefeshe was an intern at the Intellectual Forum, 2022-2023. They are an undergraduate at Jesus College studying Human, Social, and Political Sciences, specialising in Sociology.

Within Sociology, Kefeshe is interested in social and political questions of ethnicity and how they overlap with issues of the environment, food, health, and wellbeing.

Their research at the Intellectual Forum investigated the cultural and ethnic biases and inequality of universal school lunch provision within primary schools, considering how this is important to lifelong food habits, and how this contributes to ethnicity-based disease inequality. 

In the future, they hope to continue as a researcher on different intersectional issues of ethnicity, food, and environment, especially on how these manifest within the Caribbean Islands. 

We spoke to Kefeshe about their project and how their IF internship has impacted their future plans. 

What are you working on?

I’m doing a systematic review on universal free school meals. More specifically, I’m looking at how the Covid-19 pandemic affected how people were able to access free school meals. In the UK in particular, there was a situation where the government decided not to provide free meals. It was a period that really highlighted how valuable free school meals actually are for a lot of kids, but it also highlighted what free school meals are not able to do. There were a lot of kids who were missing out because they weren’t eligible. The eligibility criteria are so slim that a lot of kids who are at risk of food insecurity are not able to get free school meals even though they probably should be able to. I’m looking at what research is out there already on the topic and highlighting the gaps in the knowledge.

Were you surprised by anything you found?

I don’t know necessarily if there are any surprises, which I think is a little bit sad. I kind of expected to see that the pandemic had highlighted how many issues there are with free school meals, and I was hoping that there would be a surprise and that actually the system would be really good and improved now… There was a surprise in that I didn’t realize that the government had slightly expanded their eligibility criteria to allow undocumented children to have free school meals, which I didn’t think they did. But it’s not very well advertised, so I don’t know how many people actually make use of that.

What impact do you hope your research will have?

A lot of the studies mention that race and ethnicity are factors, and that a lot of children of colour have a higher risk of being exposed to food insecurity, but not a lot of them actually went into specific detail about it, or they would categorise it as white vs non-white without going into both of the categories. There’s a lot in that department that’s not really being studied as much, so I hope that, if people read my systematic review, they will realize that’s a tunnel of research that we should look more into, and hopefully that would lead on to policy changes to widen eligibility. Ideally, free school meals would be universal across all school years, but I think that will take a while.

How has the IF helped you do this research?

I did my internship over two years, and right at the start of last year, I got in contact with IF SRA David Stuckler, who does a lot of courses for grad students on loads of different academic writing topics, which was really helpful. There’s been a quite a few interesting SRAs that have popped into the office, and it’s really good to sit down and have a conversation with this person about this topic even though it might not be directly linked. Because the IF is so expansive in what it does, there’s a lot of people who have interesting things to speak about, and they are valuable conversations and good people to have in your network.

Has your internship impacted what you want to do in the future?

It has actually! I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do, and I’ve done a lot of internships where I was like, I know for sure that I don’t want to do this. This is the first internship where I was like, I would love to have free reign to research real-world issues and try to find solutions to them. It’s led me to start looking at charities and NGOs that work on food insecurity, either here or in the Caribbean. I didn’t really know that was an opportunity—I thought you would have to have a PhD to do any kind of research, but it’s cool to see that there’s a lot that welcome undergrads to apply and get started in research—and actionable research, which I like. 

You can meet the rest of the Intellectual Forum team or contact us via email.