Navigating Multiple Identities: Decentering International Relations

Abstract

AbstractThe article argues that academics navigate and occupy various localities, spaces, and identities, which allows them to be self-reflexive in understanding the inherent challenges in diversifying the discipline. Using personal narratives as a methodological and theoretical tool, this article situates plural experiences and contexts of a woman of color, working in precarity in academia. The intersection of multiple identities reveals various sites of privilege and oppression, and inclusion and exclusion. Unsettling and dismantling binaries and identities reveal complex entanglements and connections that provide more nuanced understandings of IR. This article further discusses ways the discipline of IR has excluded diverse theoretical and empirical knowledges and regions, including critical approaches and the Global South. This disciplinary exclusion and erasure is reproduced in everyday academic practice and can serve as an entry point to understand why diverse communities are underrepresented in IR. Further, academia is not immune from the functions of power and social and economic hierarchies in society, and those hierarchies are manifested in various forms of asymmetry observable in academia, especially toward diverse communities and academics working in precarity.