Navigating the White Masculine Imprint in Higher Education

• In Event: 63.033 - Reimagining the Modern/Colonial University: Toward Alternative Horizons of Higher Education Otherwise

Abstract

This paper maps Pasifika women’s experiences of working in higher education institutions in Aotearoa, New Zealand. It rewrites the “world from the experience of not being able to pass in the world” (Ahmed, 2012, p. 176). By rewriting this world, we reveal more about higher education institutions and how they operate to exclude certain bodies and ideas in order to maintain the current system. Pasifika women currently experience higher education as a space that is defined and structured according to a white masculine imprint that enables and enforces excess labour, non-performative diversity, infantilization, hyper-surveillance, lateral violence, and sexual assault (storms and cyclones). This space is influenced by the wider systems (weather systems) of neoliberalism and colonisation. Pasifika women continue to engage in higher education as we believe it will help us to navigate to our island. We are at a moment in time where higher education institutions need to acknowledge how they slow our journey and make steps to change the very core of what they are. Pasifika people will continue to navigate towards our island whether or not higher education institutions join us in the drua (double hulled canoe) or create storms to slow us. What remains to be seen is if higher education institutions will be courageous enough to leave their own shores.

Author

• Sereana Naepi, Thompson Rivers University