“I Don’t Belong Here”: Understanding Hostile Spaces

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Malaklou and Willoughby-Herard (2018) and publications by Nadia E. Brown for references to this concept.

2. See Malaklou and Willoughby-Herard (2018).

3. Two important works offer insightful confirmation of this phenomenon: Noer (1978) and Rich (1984).

4. Writing about the tragic caricature of philosopher, anthropologist, and author of six books Archie Mafeje by his Cambridge dissertation advisor as having inferior “intellectual abilities, especially in dealing with theoretical issues, proper reading and analyses of text” sociologist and intellectual historian, Lungisile Ntsebeza (2016) explains that this kind of sabotage has been critical to the maintaining of a nearly white higher education faculty in South Africa. Lest we make the mistake of believing that this is something exclusive to scholars from Africa and of African descent, intellectual historians have written for decades about how knowledge production in the social sciences views minoritized scholars as good for data collection and as “native informants” but views them with suspicion and as a menacing threat when they become contributors to knowledge production and offer methodological interventions that change the outcomes of accepted norms in the social sciences. Key works that foreground intersecting the gendered-minoritized experiences in the social sciences include Magubane (1987), Yu (1992) and Cotera (2010).

5. See UCLA Department of Political Science Graduate Handbook (2007–2008). https://web.archive.org/web/20081013045459/http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/Program/handbook_0708.pdf Retrieved October 1, 2018. Personal conversation by Tiffany J. Willoughby-Herard with informant, September 30 and October 1, 2018.