Black Women Experiencing the (European) Academy: Weaving Stories of the Visibly Invisible

In the aftermath of George Floyd as in other domains, there was a reckoning within and amongst institutions of higher education, globally. Even as the disciplines most attuned to exposing and tackling inequalities became even more vocal about the racism underpinning our academic fields of study, these realisations did not unseat the underlying racisms of educational ecosystem of the Global North. In the UK and other parts of Europe, Black academics were drawing attention to the nature of multiple crises and how they have had a disproportionate impact on people of colour, and especially Black women. Yet, most institutional interventions in the context of the fight for racial justice do not seek to challenge the status quo, to the detriment of minoritized folks in the academy. The essay seeks to answer the question: how do Black women survive (in the academy)? Weaving together autoethnographic and collective biographical accounts of the experiences of Black academic women, the essay draws on decolonial feminist engagements and CRT’s counter storytelling to interrogate the production of harmful hierarchies within the academy. In so doing, the essay seeks to articulate entry points for reshaping institutions so that Black women not only survive, but thrive in higher education.