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‘Are You Supposed to Be in Here?’ Racial Microaggressions and Knowledge Production in Higher Education

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Book cover Dismantling Race in Higher Education

Abstract

Drawing upon the theoretical concept of racial microaggressions, this chapter considers what it means to study race(ism) in the ‘everyday’ whilst being subjected to everyday racisms within the academe. What does this mean for academics of colour who are fixed as a racialised spectacle within the academe? How does this reproduce a fetishisation of our work (and the racialised people that we work with/for) when the academe situates these inequalities as outside of the institution rather than produced through the academe? We explore this by developing Yancy’s ideas of an episteme of Blackness. By centring our own experiences (and the experiences of other racialised academics) we point to the pervasiveness of white supremacy within these legitimised spaces of knowledge production, and end by exploring the potential within epistemes of Blackness to challenge the legitimacy of the academe as THE legitimate space of knowledge production.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The ‘I too am Oxford’ campaign was one such campaign (see Edds 2014).

  2. 2.

    This refers to the illegality of extra-marital relationships.

  3. 3.

    At the time of writing this chapter, Beyoncé released a visual album which centred experiences of women across the Black diaspora, leading to a flurry of commentary from Black feminist intellects unpacking this popular cultural artefact (e.g. Harris-Perry 2016; Mock 2016; Oluo 2016).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Maryam Jameela and Muna Abdi for reading drafts of this chapter. We would also like to thank the community of doctoral students and academics who have supported us and enabled us to find spaces to survive within these institutions—they have helped us to find the words needed to write this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Azeezat Johnson

  2. The University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

    Remi Joseph-Salisbury

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  1. Azeezat Johnson
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  2. Remi Joseph-Salisbury
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  1. University of Roehampton, London, UK

    Jason Arday

  2. Goldsmiths College, University of London, London, UK

    Heidi Safia Mirza

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Johnson, A., Joseph-Salisbury, R. (2018). ‘Are You Supposed to Be in Here?’ Racial Microaggressions and Knowledge Production in Higher Education. In: Arday, J., Mirza, H. (eds) Dismantling Race in Higher Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60261-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60261-5_8

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-60261-5

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