Global South Scholars in the Western Academy

Harnessing Unique Experiences, Knowledges, and Positionality in the Third Space

Staci Martin, Deepra Dandekar, Staci B. Martin, Deepra Dandekar

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000479249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación superior

By foregrounding the voices and experiences of scholars from the Global South who have migrated to institutions in the Global North, this volume theorizes the "third space" as a unique, rich, and generative position in the Western academy.

Global South Scholars in the Western Academy engages a range of critical methodologies to explore the challenges that Global South scholars have faced in establishing themselves in academic settings in the Global North. The text identifies the unique position that scholars have come to adopt "in-between" North and South and theorizes this positionality as a "third space", which is carved out by academics negotiating personal, professional, and cultural belonging. This liminal subject position, enriched by experiences of migration, racialization, poverty, and difference, is shown to drive knowledge-production and justice-orientated approaches in the academy.

This book provides a new and overdue perspective on the experiences and contributions of Global South scholars in the academy. It will be of interest to academics, researchers, and scholars with an interest in critical theory, indigenous and multicultural education, the sociology of education, and higher education.

Part 1 Transformative Pedagogy and Scholarship

1 “Why Don’t You Study Your Own Country?” Situating the Semi-self, among Hybrid Identities

Julten Abdelhalim

DOI: 10.4324/9781003109808-3

Being Unwelcome and a Potential Enemy

It was an early summer day. We were 32 PhD candidates crammed in a room at a German University, each standing next to her/his poster, waiting for our turns to be interviewed. In the span of nine hours, I had been interviewed 13 times in three different languages (English, German, and Hindi), and none of these languages was my mother language. As I stood next to my poster on my proposed topic of Indian Muslims and citizenship, a German candidate standing next to me with a project on organic farming in India asked me where exactly in India I come from. When I told him I am Egyptian, he was startled and directly asked me why I wanted to work on India. He followed his question with a silly smile and another question: “Don’t you have enough problems in your country? Why don’t you study your own country?” I could not answer. It was my first encounter with European academic condescension and I did not know if I should answer and whether an answer would even make any sense. I chose silence. I was exhausted, thirsty, and hungry, and reluctant to leave my place to go and get some water, lest a professor came along and I lost my chance at self-presentation. I was told that the more I got interviewed the higher the chances I would get a scholarship. I could not afford to lose this opportunity. I had already lost my chance at a scholarship in Oxford University, and my green Egyptian passport was nonappealing to visa authorities in North America. Heidelberg in Germany was my best chance to get funding for a PhD. Eventually, I got the scholarship that allowed me to conduct the long aspired-for fieldwork in India and become a “South Asian-ist” by training.

The aim of this chapter is not to delve into a complex theoretical debate on essentialism, racism, and xenophobia. It is also not intended to be an autographic narrative of failure or academic disappointment. Instead, I posit the dilemma of replacing one reification with another, as Pnina Werbner (1997), in her critical article on essentialising essentialism, illustrates. As neither a European nor a South Asian, I was sometimes deemed unfit—as an outsider and an intruder—by not only some Western European academics but sometimes also by South Asians in the West. The hostility I encountered reflects the subtle politics of racism within the larger spectrum of representation within academia. This short article presents a modest autoethnographic narrative in which I grapple with some of the above-mentioned dilemmas. I combine autoethnography as a methodology with narrative politics, guided by postcolonial feminist approaches that emphasise affects and emotions in reflexive sociological inquiry. I am also guided by Naeem Inayatullah’s (2010) call for a breach of fictive distancing of the author’s self from her/his writing in a quest for objectivity:

The presumably absent scientist and the seemingly objective world he/she describes both derive from hidden commitments that often distort description and skew analysis. In addition, for many of us, fictive distancing disconnects our work from our daily life. It produces writing that often seems formal, abstruse, and lacking in practical purpose. Academic practice begets alienation.

p.6

For me, the significance of autoethnography is best outlined in Behl et al.’s (2018) words, “autoethnography is an act of survival and self-determination through which we recover conceptual and emotional resources—many of them hard won—that would be otherwise forgotten and inaccessible as ground for political consciousness” (p.31). Hence, despite the critical aspects highlighted throughout this paper, I hope that the autoethnographic tool sets a driving force towards improving and decolonising academic spaces, where the strengths and achievements acquired through studying in a liberal and free environment are not to be undervalued.

As a method, autoethnography contributes to experiences and memory becoming data and acumen itself (Moss & Besio, 2019). My own positionality, as an Egyptian student and a researcher, emerges as a substantial analytical factor in this article. While I outline several reasons for embarking on this journey in the narratives below, it can be said that my identity was at times my sailing compass. This journey resulted from growing up in an authoritarian political system, which triggered an academic interest in questions about Muslim citizenship in secular democratic India. While these self-reflections had begun much earlier than the journey of fieldwork, they found expression and evolved into concrete ideas about my subject of doctoral research while applying for several academic worldwide programmes. The dynamics of self-representation, embodied in various motivation letters I wrote, marked the first struggles about power hierarchies of race and ethnicity in the academic world that I became embroiled in. I found myself compelled to explain why an Egyptian would want to venture into South Asian Studies, and I wondered how many European students had parallel experiences!

As I grew out of my student skin, venturing into the competitive race of the academic job-market in Germany, I discovered the unwritten rules of this game. Despite being fascinated by the freedom to choose my topic and the generally liberal academic environment in Germany, I realised how navigating through the complex German academic circles was not entirely smooth. In spite of the ample support students and researchers receive from their senior professors and the resourceful infrastructure at Western universities, achieving academic independence and securing future employment opportunities remains a puzzle. This situation is even more complicated for women, especially for foreign women unfamiliar with the twists and turns of this system, and their additional inability to develop the essential networks. This puts foreign women scholars in a significantly disadvantaged position.

Although there are numerous studies on gender disparities in German academia (Hüther & Krücken, 2018), empirical studies on foreign women scholars are scarce (Imani et al., 2014). In a study conducted by the “German Center of Excellence: Women and Science,” Bakshi-Hamm et al. (2008) demonstrate the absence of central strategies to encourage foreign academic staff and their support and integration in German universities. According to this study, although Germany aims to internationalise its academic and university profile through fostering an annual increase of foreign students, very little is done to integrate these foreign scholars into the academic system on a long-term basis. The interviews Bakshi-Hamm conducted with many experts and female foreign scholars have concluded that female scientists with a migration background have to struggle with stereotypical ascriptions so that their career paths are often stuck between prejudice-laden perceptions and discriminatory treatment by fellow students and superiors (Bakshi-Hamm, 2008, p.71). The official statistics on the number of foreign students and researchers in German institutions of higher education show a steady increase, reaching 12% in 2019 (Destatis, 2020). Nevertheless, there is an apparent disparity in the percentage between the number of scholars coming from developing countries (4.4%), least developed countries (0,2%) and their counterparts from North America and Europe in 2018 (ibid.). In my case, due to my foreignness as an Egyptian, I had to additionally struggle with the repercussions of being an outsider or intruder to both Western academia and South Asian studies. During my years of academic work in Germany, both as a doctoral student and a postdoctoral fellow, I faced repetitive questions about my presence in the discipline that devalued my qualifications and expertise. These encounters ranged from comments like, “Oh, you got a scholarship for three years, you are indeed lucky; but you surely do not know any South Asian languages, do you?” to honest advice about what my future career would be like: “but you are in the wrong place here; you won’t survive here unless you have the right contacts.”

Nirmal Puwar (2004), in her book, Space Invaders, cleverly coins the status of individuals like me who are continually reminded of their vulnerable position. In her own words,

[s]ome bodies are deemed as having the right to belong, while others are marked out as trespassers, who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually), circumscribed as being ‘out of place’. Not being the somatic norm, they are space invaders.

p.8

This discussion on place and belonging takes us to Simmel’s (1908) and Bauman’s (1991) treatment of the concept of “the stranger,” who “represents an incongruous and hence resented ‘synthesis of nearness and remoteness’. The stranger’s presence is a challenge to the reliability of orthodox landmarks and the universal tools of order-making” (Bauman, 1991, p.60). Theoretically speaking, while the hybridisation of identity could be featured as a positive, empowering factor, we cannot fail to address that it is an outcome of hierarchical power relations of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and affluence. It gets disparately manifested, studied, and analysed and experienced, depending on the self’s position along this hierarchy. This chimes with Bhabha’s (1994) distinctive regard of hybridity as an arena in which hegemonic discourses interplay and as a subtle reflection of discriminatory practices and a reversal of domination through disavowal in which the oppressive authority gets invisible (pp.159–167).

For Simmel (1908), the stranger is the one who arrives and stays but has the potential to leave. By choosing to stay, the stranger disrupts the monotonous social order. While Smith (2008) duly argues that “hybridity encompasses partial identities, multiple roles, and pluralistic selves” (p.5), I could not find the chance, as a foreigner, to embody a pluralistic sense of self in Germany. There were always one or more of my identities that disadvantaged me at certain levels, either being a woman, being Muslim, being Arab, liberal, multilingual, young and single, and later the mother, the foreigner, and the non-German. In other words, the “pluralistic self” had to be in a continual process of self-denial in order to get things done. This is what I mean by the “semi-self”—the constant struggle not to employ all the facets of my identity or to try as much as possible to hide some aspects in a battle to survive in German academia.

To give an example, I would like to recall an experience from the early period of my postdoctoral research. I was sitting in a seminar in which I was the only Arab participant. The German professor, who was presenting a paper, claimed she could not read the Arabic script on which some of her analysis was based (and she showed us the text she was referring to as part of her presentation). Being a native speaker of Arabic, who grew up with Arabic penmanship as one of my school subjects, I was able to read the entire text with ease. Instead of confronting her publicly with this, I chose to remain silent, lest my actions be automatically interpreted as academically hostile. Since the power dynamics in this context were not in my favour, I employed an act of self-marginalisation. Later, a heated debate ensued during a lunch break with the same professor, in which I complained of the lack of methodological training for students in Germany who wish to embark on fieldwork in risky areas. She contested my point and insisted that the students she taught had been well-trained. After this discussion, I was outcasted from her network circles.

Besides self-marginalisation or self-silencing, self-censorship emerged as another dilemma that shaped my positionality. There are a lot of physical and normative restraints on Arab Muslim scholars that have to do with the geopolitical contexts of origin. Navigating these restraints on a daily basis constituted a psychological burden that could not be eliminated from my research. Even after overcoming all the hurdles, the moment I obtained my doctoral degree, I was confronted with how insignificant this achievement really was when a professor honestly advised me to leave academia. He clearly stated that there was no space in Germany for foreigners if I were seeking to build a long-term career plan. He insisted that I search for a career in North America, where English-speaking academics were more welcome. This is a recurrent global experience of many scholars from the developing world. It seems that hybridity does not always stand the power dynamics at play. Difference, especially when coupled with a weak passport, is still unwelcome regardless of the linguistic and racial factors.

In the Land of Welcoming Strangers

The ‘stranger’ cannot be simply used as a word to describe the one who is distant, the one whom I do not yet know. To name some-body as a stranger is already to recognise them, to know them again: the stranger becomes a commodity fetish that is circulated and exchanged in order to define the borders and boundaries of given communities. To welcome an other as a Stranger is to assimilate that which cannot be assimilated: it is to establish a community based on a principle of uncommonality in which their difference becomes ‘our own’.

Sarah Ahmed (2000; p.1...