Session Information
33 SES 03 A, Intersecting Inequalities in STEM and Academic Careers
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper investigates high achieving racialized and minoritized female junior scholars’ negotiations of (in)visibility in academia – more specifically within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in Denmark. Women are generally underrepresentated in STEM and even more so when it comes to women with ethnic minoritized backgrounds.
Some bodies by their mere presence become a source of surprise and disruption in the settings and spaces of academia. This paper takes, as its point of departure, the question of what it means to become a surprise. Working from a conceptual framework of racialized differentiation as an affective, intersectional, and spatialized process (Deleuze 1990, Ahmed 2012, Manning 2023) and an empirical foundation of qualitative interviews with racialized minoritized female scholars in STEM, the analysis delves into the affective, spatial and embodied experiences of standing out or passing as a racialized and gendered Other in academia. Focus is specifically on how the experience of being a surprise element relates to structural and hegemonic orderings of the university as a space embodying some bodies and not others as naturally belonging (Puwar 2004). This entails a focus on the meritocracy of academia, the negotiation of visibility-invisibility and the right to stay opaque.
The analysis shows how the female scholars’ narratives, experiences and strategies can expand our knowledge on how processes of racialization, othering and opacity take form in higher education in ways that fixate them in a state of perpetual arrival and as a source of potential surprise. This has relevance to how it is possible to think about diversity and inclusion in higher education.c
Method
The study is based on semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted in the period of fall 2021 to spring 2023 with racialized, minoritized female junior scholars in STEM as part of the larger project, Affective investments in diversity work in STEM at Danish universities . In this article I will draw on the empirical material from the interviews conducted with junior scholars with ethnic minoritized immigrant and refugee background as their position in academia exemplifies a paradoxical situation of racialized (non)belonging. On the one hand they know Danish, the Danish society and have succeeded in progressing in the educational system. On the other hand, they are made to feel that they do not rightfully belong both in Denmark and academia because of their visible otherness. Some have refugee and others have immigrant background. They are all Danish citizens and racialized minoritized, visible through for example skin-, hair colour, and hijab. Most of them are first generation academics and high achieving scholars within their respective fields. In the interviews I have focused on questions regarding their academic journey, their ways of making it in academia, their future-plans, and moments of success and challenges.
Expected Outcomes
The paper sheds light on the complex negotiations of being positioned as hypervisible but at the same time invisible- and how the racialized female junior scholars take upon the logics and strategies of the meritocracy of academia by in some instances invisiblizing themselves and making "their results speak" for themselves. Being marked but invisible is a poignant way of understanding what is at play for the female racialized minoritized scholars in STEM. It can also be described as a case of being apparent but transparent- that is being invisible and obvious at the same time which can be linked to Edouard Glissant’s (2006) point of who has the right to stay opaque. Glissant defines opacity as an alterity that is unquantifiable- a form of differentiation and diversity that transcends categories of identifiable difference, visibility and representation. The female scholars in this study can in some ways be seen as embodying an opacity- a form of differentiation always in motion oscillating between visibility, recognition, invisibility, misrecognition via their different intersectional positionings regarding gender, religious affiliation, race, cultural and class background. The paper offers a theoretical understanding of how processes of racialization come into being as differentiations and disruptions to the existing logics and ontological scheme of the given context- which is here specifically STEM in Denmark.
References
Ahmed, S. (2012) On being included- Racism and diversity in institutional life, London, Duke University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990) Negotiations. New York, Columbia University Press. Diallo, O. (2019). At the Margins of Institutional Whiteness: Black Women in Danish Academia. 10.2307/j.ctvg8p6cc.20. Glissant, Édouard (2006): Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing and Ann Arbor. Michigan, Michigan University Press. Manning, E. (2023) The being of relation, eFlux journal, Issue #135, April 2023, retrieved May 2023 https://www.e-flux.com/journal/135/529855/the-being-of-relation/ Massumi, B. (2009) Micropolitics : Exploring Ethico-Aesthetics. Inflexions: A Journal for Research-Creation. No. 3. October 2009. www.inflexions.org Puwar, N. (2004). Space invaders: Race, gender and bodies out of place. Oxford and New York, NY: Berg Publishers. Wekker, G. (2022) ‘How Does One Survive the University as a Space Invader?’: Beyond White Innocence in the Academy, Dutch Crossing, 46:3, 201-213, DOI: 10.1080/03096564.2022.2145048 Zembylas, M. (2015) Rethinking race and racism as technologies of affect: theorizing the implications for anti-racist politics and practice in education, Race Ethnicity and Education, 18:2, 145-162, DOI: 10.1080/13613324.2014.946492
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