Invited Yet Unwelcomed

• In Event: Writing Against Racism: BIPOC Faculty and Graduate Students in Teacher Education Imagining New Pathways for Collective Justice

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a push in higher education to diversify its faculty. Many universities have developed innovative ways to hire more faculty of color. In this paper, I argue that some Black faculty members have been intentionally invited and equally unwelcomed in the academy. The unwelcomeness is not a feeling; it is a knowing. The temporality of feelings can be endured because they come and go; they ebb and flow. As sentient beings, we know through being attuned with our mind, body, and spirit while communing with other sentient beings' minds, bodies, and spirits. Unwelcomeness is used in this paper to refer to the misalignment, refusal, and disposal of historically marginalized faculty members' minds, bodies, and spirits in the academy. The excitement and joy of accepting a dream job in the academy can quickly switch into panic attacks and intense body pain based on experiences with colleagues and staff. As a Black queer woman, using evocative autoethnography, I draw on my experiences of being recruited and hired at a large, predominantly white institution in the Midwest. I share three vignettes illustrative of the extent that one university went to recruit yet pushed out via silencing, reprimand, unreasonable workload, and passive-aggressive threats. Utilizing revision tenets such as reducing, recovering, and reinventing I described how I applied these tenets as coping mechanisms. Additionally, I used Sara Ahmed’s concepts of orientation (2006), complaint (2021), and emotionality (2014) to ground my stories. Ahmed explained that not all bodies are oriented and feel belong in certain spaces and places. Some bodies expand in spaces and places, while other bodies contract. How might institutions of higher education be intentionally designed and reoriented for minoritized bodies to stretch and spread out and take up space? Because certain bodies were not meant for the academic spaces, harassment and complaints become part of the lived experiences of what one has to endure. What might happen if harassment and complaints are reconceptualized as openings, not closing the door on the one who is harassed and complained? Bodies (dis)orient to places and spaces; some bodies are more harassed and complained about in the academy. Emotions are relational; they do not reside in individuals or collectives but are associated with movements toward or away from certain bodies. How are emotions moving and acting on, in, and through spaces to do things? I conclude that the academy can be violent to the psyche of marginalized scholars, and there is a need to critically design spaces where people of color are invited and welcomed for them to thrive in institutions of higher education.

Author

• Keitha-Gail Martin-Kerr, University of Minnesota