Mapping Movements: An Autoethnographic Analysis of Violence in Academia

• In Event: Positionality and Reflexivity in Political Science I: The Domestic Context

Abstract

Why are women of color severely underrepresented in political science, despite significant efforts to diversify the profession? Why do women of color continue to experience political science as a hostile environment, despite the discipline’s decades long commitment to advancing diversity and inclusion? I draw on an autoethnographic tradition of feminist truth-telling and extend it into political science to open up new ways of seeing, being, and writing, which, in turn, can challenge dominant understandings of the discipline as apolitical. I share my family’s experience of racial violence in a post-September 11th environment to map my movements within and across academic institutions. I further explain my motivation to write and conduct ethnographic research, and explore the embodied lived experience of producing knowledge as a middle-class South Asian woman, as a child of authorized immigrants, and as a woman of color in political science. In mapping my movements and motivations, I reveal multiple forms of violence—racial, gendered, and epistemic—within political science, which provides some insight on the difficulty of diversifying the discipline.

Author

• Natasha Behl, Arizona State University, West Campus