TY - JOUR
T1 - Mapping Movements and Motivations
T2 - An Autoethnographic Analysis of Racial, Gendered, and Epistemic Violence in Academia
AU - Behl, Natasha
N1 - Funding Information:
Portions of this paper are derived in part from an article published in Politics, Groups, and Identities (Behl 2017) “Diasporic researcher: an autoethnographic analysis of gender and race in political science,” available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/21565503.2016.1141104. I would like to thank the editors of this special issue and the anonymous referees for their constructive and thoughtful comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Feminist Formations.
PY - 2019/3/1
Y1 - 2019/3/1
N2 - Why are women of color severely underrepresented in political science, despite signifi-cant efforts to diversify the profession? Why do women of color continue to experience political science as a hostile environment, despite the discipline’s decades-long commit-ment to advancing diversity and inclusion? I draw on an autoethnographic tradition of feminist truth telling and extend it into political science to open up new ways of seeing, being, and writing, which, in turn, can challenge dominant understandings of the discipline as apolitical. I share my family’s experience of racial violence in a post–September 11 environment to map my movements within and across academic institutions. I further explain my motivation to write and conduct ethnographic research, and explore the embodied lived experience of producing knowledge as a middle-class South Asian woman, as a child of authorized immigrants, and as a woman of color in political science. In mapping my movements and motivations, I reveal multiple forms of violence—racial, gendered, and epistemic—within political science, which provides some insight into the difficulty of diversifying the discipline.
AB - Why are women of color severely underrepresented in political science, despite signifi-cant efforts to diversify the profession? Why do women of color continue to experience political science as a hostile environment, despite the discipline’s decades-long commit-ment to advancing diversity and inclusion? I draw on an autoethnographic tradition of feminist truth telling and extend it into political science to open up new ways of seeing, being, and writing, which, in turn, can challenge dominant understandings of the discipline as apolitical. I share my family’s experience of racial violence in a post–September 11 environment to map my movements within and across academic institutions. I further explain my motivation to write and conduct ethnographic research, and explore the embodied lived experience of producing knowledge as a middle-class South Asian woman, as a child of authorized immigrants, and as a woman of color in political science. In mapping my movements and motivations, I reveal multiple forms of violence—racial, gendered, and epistemic—within political science, which provides some insight into the difficulty of diversifying the discipline.
KW - autoethnography
KW - diversity
KW - epistemic violence
KW - gender
KW - gendered violence
KW - political science
KW - race
KW - racial violence
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85088317975&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85088317975&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1353/ff.2019.0010
DO - 10.1353/ff.2019.0010
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85088317975
SN - 2151-7363
VL - 31
SP - 85
EP - 102
JO - Feminist Formations
JF - Feminist Formations
IS - 1
ER -