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

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• decolonisation
• intersectionality
• orientalisation
• race
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Giti Datt and Dr Shima Shahbazi for their input into my intellectual growth, and Dr Benjamin Hanckel for supporting my laments about race in academia.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shiva Chandra

Dr Shiva Chandra is a researcher at the Young and Resilient Research Centre, at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He uses creative and innovative methods to explore subjectivity, and how individuals relate to their social worlds. Shiva is interested in exploring how scholarship can sit at the intersection of academia and community development. His interests include the sociology of personal life, sexuality, gender, race, and decolonisation.