Finding a Voice as a Researcher of Color: Disrupting and Reinforcing the Narrative

• In Event: Difference and Dissidence: Im(Possibilities) Within the Neoliberal and Imperial Educational Complex

Abstract

Purpose: This paper evaluates how scholars and researchers of color understand and negotiate identity in the academy. I use autoethnography to investigate the interaction between the academy and scholars of color, vis a vis those between white scholars and the academy.

Perspectives: In the current American political and social climate, ‘white rage’ (Anderson 2016) is the reality people – and scholars – of color live in. White emotionality refers to the feelings that arise when white people are confronted with race. Their reactions – ranging from denial of race to addressing racial injustice – are laced with an ignorance and/or inability to encounter white privilege (Lipisitz 1998) and white fragility (DiAngelo 2016). More important, discourse on race is centered around ‘whiteness,’ with ‘non-white’ being a prime category to describe a wide variety of people of different backgrounds (Matias 2016). The academy is the unique site where these realities can be disrupted or reinforced (Siu 2016). Freire (1990) suggests education has a liberatory power, however, as a space and repository of knowledge and as a body that determines the legitimacy of knowledge, the university is a colonizing space with a colonial history (Tuhiwai Smith 2012).

Methods: bell hooks (1995), while asking people of color to ‘collectively name and confront suffering in ways that are constructively healing’ asks one to ‘locate one’s suffering’ as the first step towards doing that. This work employs an autoethnographic approach work of (Bhattacharya & Gillen 2016) to understand how, I, as a scholar of color interact with the colonial space that the academy is. Ethnography is one of the oldest qualitative traditions, while autoethnography is still an emerging one (Patton 2014).

Sources: This study reflects on my everyday lived experiences of being in the academy. I juxtapose these experiences with theoretical insights on power, colonialism, and the university.

Point of View: One of the biggest critiques of ethnography was its exoticism of the ‘other’ and it being a study of the ‘primitive’ (Patton 2014). Hence, as the ‘primitive, exotic other,’ there is no greater disruption of the traditional narrative than to tell my own story. As a woman of color, of Indian origin, raised in Kenya, this autoethnography details how I navigate a heteronormative academy rooted in colonialism, racism and gender discrimination. As a neoliberal capitalistic space, the academy does not allow for many moments for me to disrupt the narrative, and yet, as a woman and a person of color, it is my responsibility, the price I pay for being allowed into these spaces, to disrupt the narrative.

Significance: This work is important to make the academy a safer space for women and scholars of color, especially in the current political climate.

Author

• Akashi Kaul, George Mason University