Abstract

Drawing on conversations with foreign women in academic positions at one major University in Norway, this article is inspired by Barad’s and Haraway’s theorizing on how matter and discourse are mutually constituted through a diffractive approach. Understanding diffraction as an embodied engagement, a becoming with the data through shared entanglements, this article argues that the researcher’s personal background cannot be separated from the data produced. Departing from the decolonial theorist Castro-Gómez concept ‘hubris of zero-point epistemology’, the existence of an abstract and transcendental western universalism, where ‘the observer observes without been observed’ (Domínguez 2020; Mignolo 2009), assemblages of foreign female academics are explored through posthuman feminism and decolonial perspectives (Jackson and Mazzei 2012; Taguchi 2012; Puwar 2004). Through immersion in assemblages of contradictions, strength, and resistance, this article contends that policymakers’ good intentions of diversity in higher education, and the existence of different bodies, are shaking the world of academia, albeit slowly. Academia is still immersed in zero-point epistemology, favoring western, upper-class, paternalist, and meritocratic thought, detached from academics’ embodied knowledge. This brings into existence ‘bodies out of place’, re/producing grief, resistance, and epistemic disobedience when some academics are not suitable of becoming real academics.

Highlights

  • The call of this Special Issue, ‘The Promise of Education and Grief’, asks us to collaborate with insights from the era of globalization and technologization

  • While agreeing that education has been crucial to knowledge creation, democracy, and justice, regarded as the basis for the development of both individuals and societies [1], I approach this call by immersing myself in assemblages of non-western women academics in Norwegian higher education

  • I argue that entanglements of western, upper class, paternalist, and meritocratic thought prevent those detached from academics’ embodied knowledge from being fully accepted and recognized in higher education academia

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Summary

Introduction

The call of this Special Issue, ‘The Promise of Education and Grief’, asks us to collaborate with insights from the era of globalization and technologization. The right to equal opportunities and free education serve as key premises preventing social dimensions like gender, class, and ethnic background from being obstacles to entering higher education [6] Such rights are not always extended to certain bodies when it comes to academia, such as bodies who do not conform to neoliberal, academic norms that inhabit western institutions of higher education [7]. Race and gender positions women of color outside the academic norm [13], resulting in significant obstacles, e.g., exclusion from professional networks, lack of support, and questioning of competence [34] These studies reveal deeply embedded practices perpetuating white and male privilege in academic institutions of today [11]. The focus is drawn upon the co-constitution of discursive materiality, emphasizing performativity and becomings in Norwegian higher education

Theory
Methods
Bodies in Grief
Dalila
Transgressive Women
Epistemic Disobedience
Findings
Assemblages of Grief and Epistemic Disobedience
Full Text
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