Why Do I Need to Talk About ‘Culture’? Realising you are ‘Brown’ in Academia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This reflexive piece explores racialised academic processes by grounding it firmly within the experiences of my researcher subjectivity. Often, research on people of colour uses culture as an analytic lens, which is not expected when writing or talking about White samples. This reproduces an orientalisation of other groups and reinforces the normativity of Whiteness within academic scholarship. However, my reflections illustrate that for scholars of colour these processes are deeply personal. When respondents are orientalised by colleagues and broader academic processes, this is also an orientalisation of one’s own subjectivity. The relationship between the academic and personal becomes obvious in these circumstances. Moreover, the colonial legacies of these scholarly processes echo the everyday experiences of racism and painful family histories of colonisation, which are a part of who we are as scholars of colour. This piece of writing is deliberately set out as a personal story as it best captures how these processes feel to people like me, and ultimately academia needs to grapple with our experiences.