Epistemic modalities of racialised knowledge production in the Swedish academy

ABSTRACT

The central aim of this article is to examine the impact of racialization processes within the Swedish academic community in order to understand what kinds of knowledge productions and knowing subject positions are rendered (im)possible in everyday academic interactions. Through autoethnography as an alternative methodological entry point, we analyse our embodied racialised experiences of navigating through historically white universities within a geo-political context framed through a supposedly “colour blind” and “post-racial society”. Our analytical reasoning is presented through several steps. First, we discuss how academic habitus and affiliations maintained in various scientific forums is informed through established, racialised norms and if/whose knowledge is marginalized, devalued, or/and is included due to the reductive representation. Second, we discuss how an uncultivated sense of epistemic entitlement, within different academic settings and communities, constructs indisputable knowing subjects and generates (un)earned (un)comfortable zones. Third, we argue how managing the existing accent ceiling becomes a mode for navigating the norms of whiteness.

KEYWORDS:

• Racism
• exclusion
• academy
• Sweden
• knowledge-production
• privilege

Introduction

Through our professional and personal experiences within the Swedish academy as “non-Swedes” and our specific geopolitical positionalities, we craft a collaborative auto-ethnography (Farahani 2015; Koobak and Thapar-Björkert 2012; also see Diversi and Moreira 2016), to analyse how racializing and othering processes construct knowledge production and knowing subjects in academic institutions. Thapar-Björkert’s postcolonial positionality was shaped through the legacy of her parents’ anti-colonial activism during the 1940s, against British rule in India. The spatial-colonial contexts of academic institutions in the UK, together with the domestic genealogies as a daughter of a nationalist household, gave postcoloniality an emotional and political salience. She developed strong perceptions of “white privilege” which allows whites’ to ignore the ways in which their white racial identity has benefited them. In elitist institutions of higher education, some Chicano scholars have conceptualized this privilege as “academic colonialism”, referring to the monopolizing of resources for academic enterprise by white male dominated academia together with the imposition of their intellectual premises on subordinate groups (see Luz Reyes de la and Halcón 1988, 300). In the process of avoiding a form of “mental colonisation”, Suruchi came to question how the production of knowledge was infused with relations of power which rendered some experiences legitimate and some illegitimate. Farahani was raised in a traditional working class family in a specific political-historical Iranian setting and carried a suitcase filled with failed dreams of a miscarried revolution (1979 Iranian revolution), a pointless long war between Iran and Iraq (1980–1988) and several experiences of exile. Her entrance into western academia as a racialised “mature” and “different” student is characterized by first-hand experience of the variety of (post) colonial challenges of “adjustment” to different societies and academic milieus.

We consider our positions and positionings as a “space for theorising” (hooks 1989) and our theorizing as a “location for healing” (hooks 2005) to articulate multi-layered subject positions which locate us differently in different contexts. Emphasizing the empirical significance of intersectionality for transformative knowledge production, we aim to distance ourselves from the deployment of “ornamental intersectionality” which as Bilge (2013) argues, is an active disarticulation of radical politics of social justice and undermines intersectionality’s credibility as “an analytical and political tool elaborated by less powerful social actors facing multiple minoritizations (…)” (Bilge 2013, 410). By employing our personal – yet subjective and mediated—experiences, we pay particular attention to how we can use (our) experience as an analytical resource (also see Lazreg 1994). However, we want to avoid offering our experiences an exclusive privilege of definition since it might strengthen an epistemological standpoint approach that those who have “experience” know better and have somehow access to genuine knowledge, regardless of their intersecting subject positions, political ideologies and positionalities in relation to power and powerlessness. On the other hand, disregarding and disbelieving people’s lived experiences has always been a powerful approach to discredit the political views, writings or artistic expressions of women and racialized and sexualized minorities. In doing so, the experience of “unmarked” privilege (white, male, heterosexual, middle class) becomes the only dominant singular story. In addition, by merely categorizing accounts of people of colour and women in the category of “experiential”, we neglect their theoretical contributions. As a result, white (predominantly male) scholars are often seen as the only ones most equipped for theorizing and producing knowledge. In this schema, which constructs a disembodied theorist as the legitimate academic subject, drawing on one’s own experiences of racialization can be “dismissed as subjective and ‘confessional’” (Simmonds 1997, 52).

While writing this piece, we are simultaneously unpacking contemporary components of social relations and drawing on the historical and political contexts, which have framed these relations, in this case, “Swedish exceptionalism”: the national identity that constructs Sweden as inherently gender equal, anti-racist and immune to racist beliefs and practices (Hübinette and Lundström 2014). This imagined self-image has its roots in the seventeenth century idea of the “hyperborea”, a Nordic version of eurocentrism, which enabled Sweden to have a double moral advantage in relation to colonialization. On the one hand, the Swedes could claim superiority vs a vs the colonized natives and on the other, as impartial explorers “in service of science and culture” (Schough 2008, 36–38, 52), they could distance themselves from “other” colonizers. This moral high ground has been reinforced through the social and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when Sweden emerged on the international scene as the “very model of solidarity and equality”, a frontrunner of decolonizing and anti-apartheid movements together with its strong welfare state identity (see Pred 2000, 6). Furthermore, within the Swedish national imaginary, the “conflation of race and ethnicity and the equivalence of Swedishness and whiteness” (Hübinette and Lundström 2011, 44) foregrounds whiteness as a central core of Swedishness, thus excluding those that do not conform to this national narrative.

This context becomes important to place our experiences, which we share, like many others, from the viewpoint of marginality rather than centrality, though we are not apologetic for our otherness. We demonstrate how the reiteration of racial norms within the academy, as elsewhere, through “the regulatory normative ideal of a compulsive Eurocentrism” establishes, as Stuart Hall explains, “the logic within which the racialized and ethnicized body is constituted discursively” (Hall 1996, 16). Though the racialized knowledge producer and their knowledge challenge the existing default epistemological accounts, they are only intelligible within this framework of “compulsive eurocentrism” and existing racialized hierarchies. In doing so, whiteness maintains its privilege and power through its invisibility, while the racialised “other” navigates the difficulty of being simultaneously “marked” yet invisible (Koobak and Thapar-Björkert 2012).

Drawing on debates within postcolonial and migration studies (Collet 2008; Farahani 2010; Kusow 2003; Narayan 1993; Nowicka and Cieslik 2013), feminist historiography and epistemology (Coloma 2008; Withers 2015), and studies on racial epistemology (Fricker 2007; Collins 1990; hooks 1995; Hunter 2002), we will outline how the process of knowledge production reflects and reproduces a default epistemology within the academy with its blind spots on the specific gendered and raced historical, political, and economic contexts, which legitimize certain knowledge claims and knowledge producers while marginalizing and excluding other epistemologies. In doing so, we observe epistemology not merely as a way of knowing but as a well-established system with a specific racial and gendered history that has a specific worldview and interest both for those within the academy and those who inhabit spaces outside of it (see Ladson-Billings 2000, 2003).

Research on racial inequality regimes in academia

While there are many quantitative and qualitative studies, narrative-based accounts, scholarly work on unequal opportunity in the academy and personal experiences of racialized academic subjects in USA, Canada, England, and Australia, (Fenton, Carter, and Modood 2000; Margolis 2001; Ross 2016; Poynting and Mason 2007; Palmer and Andrews 2016; Henry and Tator 2009; Bonner et al. 2015), the area is relatively new and highly contested in Sweden. The prevalent distress to talk about racism in general and refusal to recognize race as a category of/for discrimination in particular, undeniably, is one of the contributing factors that has resulted in this topic being empirically understudied, theoretically underdeveloped and politically contested in Sweden. This is further compounded by the fact that Sweden is heavily influenced by current discourses espoused by both liberal and conservative forces that assume that western societies have transcended problems of racism and sexism and moved to a post-racial and post-feminist phase (Bilge 2013; Ahmed 2012). This inadvertently sustains an understanding that you “should not pay attention to race” (Habel 2012, 111). Commenting on racial grammar, Bonilla-Silva argues, that it “is a distillate of racial ideology and, hence, of white supremacy” and shapes how “we see or don’t see race in social phenomena, how we frame matters as racial or not race-related, and even how we feel about race matters” (Bonilla-Silva 2012, 174). In fact, it is often the case, that a one dimensional view of power (i.e if you are from the middle class or have academic credits) often invalidates experiences of racism, for a racialised academic.

In one of the pioneer studies on “ethnic” discrimination among students in the Swedish academy, Fazlhashemi (2002) underlines the existence of a normative notion of Swedishness as an invisible but significant factor that not only creates a monocultural and institutionally homogeneous environment but one sustained through low mobility within the state funded Swedish academy (between as well as within universities). Academics with a foreign background, more than others, must have knowledge, patience, skill and time in order to be able to cope with intersecting discriminatory practices, which according to de los Reyes (2007) is like sailing against the wind. Being determined to succeed and as a mode of social survival, the interviewees in de los Reyes's study, either deny, obscure or demonstrate reluctance to interpret events as discriminatory or alternatively adopt strategies to be better/best, in order to compensate for the lack of a head start, which more privileged individuals embody. Reflecting on different strategies for developing agency in academic identity formation by marginalized teachers and students, Nancy Mack (2019), discusses how fear of failure can manifest itself in “workaholic tendencies, perfectionism, saying yes to all opportunities, pleasing superiors, being overly affable, status seeking, gaining more awards and degrees, or applying for more prestigious positions” (Mack 2019, 152). Besides noting the emotional labour that marginalized students endure, Mack argues also how fear is a major barrier for those who do not feel entitled, “lead [ing] to self-doubt, procrastination, avoiding risk, attributing success to hard work and luck, refusing to share, avoiding attention, not applying for advancement, or dropping out” (Mack 2019, 152). On a similar tack, Saxonberg and Sawyer (2006:, 436) argue how a disproportionate emphasis on educational merits and teaching experiences (often experienced by ethnic-Swedish academics), besides the “arbitrariness” (with corresponding increase in discrimination) and lack of firm rules, gives “internal” ethnic Swedes an advantage, which is a part of the “cultural cloning” (our translation) process. This limits the employment opportunities for academics with a foreign background. More recently, with the publication of a report in the Times Higher Education (2017), “Swedish Academia is no Meritocracy”, the entrenched “culture of cronyism and academic inbreeding” (Warodell, Olsson, and Almäng 2017), together with a concern that Sweden’s position as a “knowledge nation” can be compromised (Alvesson and Olsson 2016), questions of academic discrepancies have been foregrounded. While “open” procedures for recruitment might well be in place, they questionably mask “real processes”, which are based on personal relationships and “insider” knowledge (Altbach, Yudkevich, and Rumbley 2015, 319).

Some scholars have shown the mutual constitution of gendered and racialised structures of inequality in higher education as well as in research policy in Sweden (Behtoui and Leivestad 2019; Hübinette et al. 2015; Andersson 2014; Mählck and Fellesson 2014). Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, Behtoui and Leivestad (2019, 223) point out that despite differences between the social sciences and the humanities and natural sciences and technology in the numbers and positions of migrant-origin academics in Swedish HE system, “subtle mechanisms” prevent individuals with immigrant background (in relation to those born in Sweden and with at least one Swedish born parent), to find employment, an appropriate career or wage parity. Focussing on academic women with a migrant background in Sweden, Mählck (2013:, 69) investigates how “embodied dimensions of processes of racialization” are integral for the construction of inequality regimes in academia. Through the notion of “embodied discursive geographies”, Mählck (2016) analyses how the processes of intersectional, gendered and racialised inequalities shift across different post-colonial work sites and create “contradictory positionalities of privilege and disadvantage” (Mählck 2016, 9–10).

In the following sections, we analyse the impact of racialization processes on the production of knowledge through several steps. First, we discuss how the academic habitus in various scientific forums validates some experiences and render others illegitimate through the differential processes of (non)selection within the academy. Furthermore, we question race based epistemologies which naturalize western (and white) ways of thinking. Second, we analyse how an uncultivated sense of epistemic entitlement, within different academic settings and communities, constructs indisputable knowing subjects and generates (un)earned (un)comfortable zones. The imperceptible embeddedness of the ideology of white privilege is reinforced through the epistemic practice of ignorance. The structural benefits of not-knowing results in the simultaneous (re)production of privilege and marginalization. Third, we argue how managing the existing accent ceiling becomes yet another mode for reassertion of the impeccable white knowledgeable subject.

Habitus and entitlements

So what happens when gender, race, class background, ethnicity, civil status and religious and cultural (un)attachments, among other factors, places us outside normative academic domains and with doubts about whether we rightfully occupy (or are not allowed to occupy) certain spaces and positions? Who feels “at home” within the academy and who feels (un)comfortable in those settings? This troubling sense of feeling like an invader occupant, (also see Ahmed 2012), is often constructed through intersecting and shifting power relations that position us in specific ways in different settings. Thus,“while all can, in theory, enter, it is certain types of bodies that are tacitly designated as being the ‘natural’ occupants” and who have the right to belong. Others, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically, conceptually), are marked out as trespassers – circumscribed as being “out of place” (Puwar 2004, 8). Similarly, Edward Said, in his memoir, tellingly entitled Out of Place (1999), shows how the epistemological and ontological distinction between the Western subject and racialized othered oriental subject has been tangible for him in daily practices (Said 1999, 19). This sense of “out of place”-ness and marginality, which takes the white (male) as the universal knower, blocks one to reason and present her/his knowledge on an equal platform. Moreover, while the racialized other is marginalized, is spoken about, s/he is as Almeida argues, “also a necessary condition for the continuation of colonial and epistemic violence in mainstreams institutions” (Almeida 2015, 81). The white, western knower (male) embodies the universality of western epistemologies but who needs to “invent” the racialised Other for re-affirming his/her superiority as much as an anti-Semite would invent a Jew if it did not exist (Sartre 1962).

As individuals working within the academy, our perception of the social world is a product of internalization of the “objective structures of social space” which also entails a “tacit acceptance of one’s place, a sense of limits (…) a sense of distances, to be marked and kept, respected or expected.” (Bourdieu 1985, 728). Our habitus, understood as “systems of durable, transposable dispositions” is as Bourdieu argues (Bourdieu 1990, 53), both an opus operatum (result of practices) and modus operandi (mode of practices) and when “habitus encounters a social world of which it is the product, it is like a ‘fish in water’: it does not feel the weight of the water, and it takes the world about itself for granted” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 127; also see Bourdieu 1977). Thus the habitus as a “structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a structured structure” (Bourdieu 1986, 170), enables spaces of creativity and progress for some and constraint for others. Extending Bourdieu’s class-inspired idea of habitus to race, Bonilla- Silva (2014, 152, 171) argues that “whites live a white habitus” that “conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings and emotions and their views on racial matters.” The “socialised subjectivity” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 126), of this (white) habitus is to be seen as both producing and being produced by the social world –“the dialectic of the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality” (Bourdieu 1977, 72). Thus, though individuals may bring their own unique subjective experiences (individual habitus), they have a shared orientation with others of the same class, gender, race and ethnicity, i.e. shared social structures. This promotes a “sense of group belonging” and an epistemic community for some, while other bodies have to be constantly aware of their environments, thus self-policing themselves. (Bonilla-Silva 2014, 152).

Furthermore, the “double historicity” of habitus builds upon the specific socialized trajectory of the individual, on the one hand, and on the other, on the “historical work of succeeding generations” on the cognitive structures that are embodied by the individual, thus “reproduce[ing] the structure of which their habitus is the product” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 139, 140; also see Bourdieu and Wacquant 2001). This “present-past” is important for understanding not only the mechanisms of disparities within the academy but also the (re)production and maintenance of racialized hierarchies of political and social entitlement. The “hidden” curriculum of embedded norms and values of our formal and informal academic settings (such as seminars, conferences, lunchrooms, and academic corridors), while not explicitly stated, follows its own rhythm of inclusion and exclusion through discursive practices that validates some experiences and render others illegitimate (also see Margolis 2001). Ball (1990) states that educational sites socially appropriate and disseminate specific discourses in which “certain modern validations of, and exclusions from, the ‘right to speak’ are generated.” (Ball 1990, 3). Arguably, even when knowledge is produced “outside” of the compulsory eurocentrism as a counter-discourse (such as majority of postcolonial theories), they are often bounded by the limits imposed by the eurocentrism. For instance, when Farahani was asked to contribute a “pedagogical easily accessible” chapter on feminist movements/feminist theory for undergraduate students, she realized that in order to fulfil the criteria she had to (re)produce the highly problematic historiography of feminist genealogy based exclusively on experiences of (white heterosexual) women in England and USA (not even Europe as a whole), while excluding other women’s movements and their struggle for gender equality. These “epistemic habits” (Stoler 2010, 39) tend to create temporally and spatially non-specific uniform accounts of feminism's emergence based on the Anglo-American feminist history (Hemmings 2011), for example the limited and exclusive wave-based representations of the history of feminism (Withers 2015; Batra 2010; Caughie 2010; Graff 2007) or the “feminist homogenous empty time” (the assumed temporality of global women’s movements) as a dominant periodization which erases or frames as a time lag all experiences that “do not line up” with it (Suchland 2015, 86), which disallowed Farahani to tell a different story. Thus, for us as people of colour, these Eurocentric epistemologies leads to an “apartheid of knowledge” (Bernal and Villalpando 2002, 169) where we are expected to consume knowledge, which directly concerns us but which lacks our voices, social realities and our colonial genealogies. This is best captured in the analysis of Beninese philosopher, Paulin Hountondji (2002) where scholarship remains “extraverted”- the universality and hegemony of the North (centre) in global knowledge economy against which all other (margins) forms of knowledge fall short. Perhaps, rather than address the question why Western feminist theory does not embrace Southern feminist theory, we need to ask why people insist that feminist theory is by default Western? Cultivating a critical distance from the story of feminism as intrinsically Western and claiming space for a dialogic praxis demands developing new analytical tools to disrupt dominant logics and imaginaries in knowledge production (see Tlostanova, Thapar-Björkert, and Koobak 2016).

Furthermore, we need to be attentive to the earned strength of unprivileged subjects and the unearned power of privileged subjects exemplified in the differential processes of (non)selection within the academy. Non-natives have to conciliate between being positioned as “experts” on work that carries little academic capital (such as Bachelor and MSc supervisions) but as “non-experts” on work (such as PhD supervision) that carries rewards, accolades, international appreciation and which the dominant white community claims to be their right. In many universities, promotion to Professorships are tied up with being “principal” supervisors to PhD candidates, and while non-natives are often called upon to participate in informal processes of knowledge-sharing (commenting on PhD drafts, “green light” committees, participation in PhD seminars), these rarely materialize into formal processes such as being “opponents” or examiners to PhD candidates, responsibilities that carry academic currency. These spaces are often/at the first place secured for the white establishment, no matter how inexperienced or inappropriate their area of specialization, in relation to their PhD subjects. When we do get asked by our white colleagues, it’s as second best; as stand-ins or to fill in the last minute void created when “their” priority candidate declines at the last minute. Thus, while our knowledge is seemingly appropriated to improve candidates’ PhD drafts, we are nonetheless relegated as (non)-knowledgeable subjects when the purpose is served. Furthermore, a relatively new academic subject (such as a PhD student) “come[s] into being by being appropriated by, and by appropriating, available enactments and desires that are recognizable as ‘academic’”. (Petersen 2007, 478). To perform “inappropriate academicity” carries too heavy a risk of not being recognized as a “legitimate subject”. Those keen on an appropriate academic identity, in our experience, tacitly come to embody the same habitus as the white establishment and in the hope of gaining recognition as academics, doctoral students, therefore, see appropriate academic identity as coming from “western” (and white) supervisors rather than non-natives, even though the latter might be more equipped to provide the guidance.

Epistemic entitlement

The academic labour that non-Westerners, minority or racialised scholars have to perform as a “native” seemingly carries advantages for the white establishment who either cast them as “experiential” experts on cultural practices (ex. honour culture expert); insider(s)’, regardless of the heterogeneity of each and every culture or expect them to translate their cultures (see Khan 2005), while the establishment maintains the privilege of ignorance or in many cases seen to embody theoretical and unbiased knowledge. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007), Shannon Sullivan understands ignorance not “as a simple lack of knowledge” but “as an active production of particular kinds of knowledges for various social and political purposes” and “places under suspicion, the purported self-mastery and self-transparency of knowledge” (Sullivan 2007, 154; also see Proctor and Schiebinger 2008). Thus ignorance has to be understood not “as a feature of neglectful epistemic practice but as a substantive epistemic practice in itself (…) produced by structural social conditions of a variety of sorts, that are in some cases epistemically disadvantaged or defective” (Alcoff 2007, 39–40). This sanctioned opacity, as we call it, arises from “white cognitive dysfunction” (Alcoff 2007, 55), which enables the “whites” to consistently “act wrongly while thinking they are acting rightly” (Bailey 2007, 81). Essed (2000), illustrates how academic women of colour in the academy are expected to draw from cultural experience in catering to students of colour, or fulfilling institutional needs such as bringing “colour” to all-white committees, pressures to participate in community events, and a commitment to supporting students of colour (and critical students in general), “requiring among other things understanding, availability, sharing and giving” (Essed 2000, 890; also see Patton 2004). Similarly, Thapar-Björkert realized how the expected familiarity with her home country has often made her feel like an Indian ambassador at university sites and to share her knowledge and cultural capital with those from the dominant country. Nonetheless, such engagements are unaccompanied by any sustainable academic credit and we are expected to create our “own space” rather than to “join those in power on an equal basis” (Lund 2010, 20). Furthermore, many white colleagues derive pleasure from the first authors’ culture, expressed in statements such as “I love Indian food” or “I love Bollywood movies” or “my best friend is an Indian”. Exploring the cultural constructions of the “Other”, hooks (1995) notes that while “white folks hang out with black people and express pleasure in black culture” this “desire for contact with the Other” (hooks 2006, 367) is seldom linked to “unlearning racism” or relinquishing one’s mainstream positionality of their racial group. Indeed, there is often the desire to enhance one's status in the context of “whiteness” even as one “appropriates black culture” (hooks 1995, 157). Thus in the course where race and ethnicity become commodified as consumerable resources, “the blank landscape of whiteness” is enhanced by the desire for “a bit of the Other” (hooks 2006, 372)- leaving behind “white innocence” to gain access to the world of “experience” (hooks 2006, 368).

The normative and unmarked nature of “privilege” sustains the sense of entitlement through which members of non-stigmatised statuses make epistemic claims; which may result in the continuation or (re)production of privilege and marginalization. By enjoying the privilege of speech, subjects can (mis)represent others (unprivileged subjects) who go unheard in an overwhelming cacophony of privileged voices (Alcoff 1991, 6–7). For example, Thapar-Björkert was implicitly accused by a (white) Master’s student to have treated her unfairly as Thapar-Björkert asked her to integrate the methodological consideration of her positionality as a white/privileged researcher when researching refugees in Sweden, in her Master's thesis. The student complained and inadvertently questioned the grade she received from Thapar-Björkert. A senior professor in the department, who was co-ordinating the Masters dissertation examination contacted Thapar-Björkert via email stating:

One of the master's students, whose thesis you have recently examined, has turned to me and expressed concerns about parts of the exchange during the seminar and its possible implications for the way the thesis has been graded (i.e. with regard to the choice between G [pass] and VG [pass with distinction]). These concerns primarily relate to the criticism you put forth, according to her, about not sufficiently following ethical guidelines when collecting the data and not sufficiently reflecting on her own privileged position and its impact on the respondents when designing the interviews. Please note that the fact that I find it proper to appoint a second reader in this case does not imply any criticism on my part of your conduct. Since I have neither read the thesis nor witnessed the seminar, I am in no position to pass judgment about what has happened or its appropriateness. Rather, my suggestion is made in an effort to ensure that we follow procedures that, under the circumstances, are seen as sufficiently legitimate by the students themselves as well as the party to which they can turn (‘studentombudsmannen’) for help when they consider themselves treated in a less than perfectly fair manner.

Thapar-Björkert’s response to the Professor was as follows:

What you have heard is right but slightly out of context. I did discuss these issues with [L] in order to explain what positionality means in methodological terms [which] in her case is being white, privileged (as she was researching Syrian asylum seekers), educated and equipped with the language. So I advised her to be self reflexive about these issues in her future research. There is a large body of literature that exists on this, so what I said to her should not be so surprising.

Nonetheless, the Professor appointed another examiner to review the grade again.

While it is perfectly fine for students to question their teachers’ grading and evaluation, Thapar-Björkert believed that the student’s structural advantage as a native Swede, enabled her to make epistemic claims, thus extending her white privilege to claim departmental support (from another white colleague) and a subsequent new evaluation. Even though the second examiner came with the same evaluation, the incident in itself is indicative of the following: a) socialized, (as we discussed earlier in relation to habitus) into a deeply entrenched sense of superiority and entitlement, whites become “fragile” “in conversations about race (for ex, self-reflexivity on one’s positionality). Thus when they encounter “racial discomfort” it triggers a response of blaming the racialised examiner (who happened to trigger the discomfort) but without critically engaging with their own subject positions. The discomfort was triggered because what the student heard did not align well with her racial worldview, i.e. that she had conducted her research in a morally appropriate way; b) White persons may position themselves as victimized (for example, an unexpected low grade) but strategically use their vulnerability as political capital, as it simultaneously acts to normalize whiteness, pushes race further into the background and reinstates the “white racial equilibrium” (DiAngelo 2011, 54; DiAngelo 2018).

Comfort and dis(comfort) zones and everything in between

In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional life, Sara Ahmed (2012) discusses how the word comfort “suggests well-being and satisfaction, but it can also suggest an ease and easiness” (…) and “if white bodies are comfortable it is because they can sink into spaces that extend their shape” (Ahmed 2012, 40, emphasis in the original). This is facilitated by the freedom whites have of not having to bear the social burden of race, as race is something that happens to “them”- the people of colour (DiAngelo 2011). “If we think of institutional norms as somatic”, Ahmed argues, “then we can show how by assuming a body, institutions can generate an idea of appropriate conduct without making this explicit. The institute ‘institutes’ the body that is instituting” (2012, 38). Thus when one's body, intellectual interests and experiences are confirmed and extended through the given institutional norms, one can feel “at home”. In so doing, one's feelings of at-home-ness can even enhance the physical, social, intellectual and emotional spaces that s/he inhabits. The (un)comfortable subject, on the other hand, arguably becomes more (un)comfortable by being (dis)acknowledged as one who does (not) fit and one who is (not) at home. “Bodies stick out when they are out of place”, Ahmed states (2012, 41), and the very “sticking out-ness” from the norm reconfirms the prevailing norms. In such circumstances, even being “welcomed” is to actually be positioned as one who is not at home (Ahmed 2012, 43) since the very “inclusion” and “hospitable acceptance” of bodies who do not appear white (able bodied, middle-class, heterosexual, etc.) are in fact for the purpose of (re)establishing the whiteness (or other given norms) of the given institutions. Remarkably, in these circumstances any “achievement” of those subjects who are not perceived as embodying the normative subject, is not only understood as a sign of overcoming “institutional whiteness” (see e.g. Ahmed 2012), but is also instrumentalized as a comforting argument for denying institutional racism, sexism and homophobia. The simple rationale behind this denial – oddly enough – is: “You are here. Therefore, there is no racism.”. Thus processes of inclusion, instead of empowering the minority arguably sustain White privilege, as the “White” body continues to be the unmarked norm. Even after eight years as a tenured senior lecturer at her department, nearly every teaching semester, Thapar-Björkert often gets asked by students, colleagues in other departments (including visiting scholars from other Swedish universities) “how long is your contract at Uppsala university” or “will you be here next semester?” Colleagues from other universities in Sweden who happen to meet her after a stretch of time also add, “are you still working at Uppsala?”. While this could be interpreted as a lack of knowledge about her job-status at Uppsala, it also masks an inherent assumption that racialised scholars have temporary contractual positions and could not possibly be in tenured positions. Thus racialised bodies fall outside the spectrum of recognition as epistemological subjects within the white institutional spaces.

Accent ceiling

Different conditions for knowledge production and knowledge (de)valuation has an impact on bodies who are constructed as impeccable knowledgeable subjects and those who will never be quite as impeccably knowledgeable. Drawing on her framework of “testimonial injustice” within institutional spaces, Fricker (2007) suggests that some speakers receive more credibility than they otherwise would have or less credibility than what they should have. Academic subjects with undesired racialised accents are not only constantly disqualified due to their accents, but their accents also often reaffirm the “quality” and qualification of those who are constructed as native-speakers or have desirable accents. The metaphor of “accent ceiling” (Collins and Low 2010) envisages clearly how racialized practices are expressed differently by institutional gatekeepers. Like the established concept of “glass ceiling”, which refers to invisible, though tangible barriers that prevent one from achieving further success, the accent ceiling has an impact on the (un)recognition of one’s qualifications. According to our experiences, while we find the height of this ceiling being considerably lower in Sweden than English speaking countries, the purpose remains the same. Modifying and clarifying other people’s accents—although it happens in different ways and extents– fulfils different purposes. It often offers the native-speakers the authority to first correct you (thereby reaffirming themselves as a knowable subject) and sometimes in correcting you, also appropriate your ideas as her/his own. Thus, our own words often get recycled by those with the correct diction and command over the language. Farahani recalls how while giving a guest lecture, her colleague (who had invited her) decided to stay in the classroom and listen to Farahani in order to be able to follow students’ reflections during the subsequent seminars. After the first part of the lecture and during the break, the colleague walked towards the whiteboard and corrected Farahani’s two spelling mistakes. This is a reminder of how the “epistemic levels of symbolic violence” in the production of knowledge are inseparable from structures of power and oppression (Guhin and Wyrtzen 2013, 234).

It is thus not surprising as Thapar-Björkert has often observed that native Indians often endeavour to “fit in” rather than claim a voice from a position of marginality- to the extent that they jettison their own mother tongue and embrace the Swedish language together with actively seeking Swedish friends and culturally associating themselves with mainstream Swedish culture. This internalization of the “racial contract” is in itself very problematic as non-natives see their past as a, “wasteland of non-achievement”, which makes them, distance themselves from their culture (Mills 1997, 89–109). Instead of realizing that the “logic of white supremacy” could be challenged if people were to trust their own thinking and identify with their own culture, they get locked in processes of “internalised oppression”.

Conclusion

In this article, we draw on the epistemological centrality and legitimacy of experiential knowledge to identify the multiple modalities of racism in institutions for higher education. We place our experiences of navigating through historically white universities within a geo-political context framed through a supposedly “colour blind” and “post-racial society”. The importance of race-based epistemologies, in our chapter, is not to “color” Western scholarship, but to de-center and decolonize epistemological practices and activities that naturalize western ways of thinking. We highlight the impact of racialization processes on the production of knowledge and how the “normative absence/pathological presence” of certain bodies legitimates certain knowledge(s) and devalues others. By discussing the epistemic consequences of racialization, we demonstrate not only what is considered as knowledge but also who is perceived as a knowing subject. While placing our analysis in line with postcolonial studies that have confronted scientific racism and racialized and colonial classifications, we demonstrate how and in what ways epistemological hegemony enacts, sustains and reproduces through racialized and gendered hierarchies. On a personal but equally academic and political levels, the examination of knowledge production through the intersecting lens of our gendered and race experiences has allowed us to rethink our epistemological commitment. By thinking through our own epistemic practices (including teaching, writing, speaking, citing, among other practices) as well as institutions in which we are located, we contribute to destabilizing the established canon and regenerating academic freedom. We consider the negation, devaluation and experiential classification of racialized scholars’ production and/or instrumental use of their racialized bodies as an inherent part of western knowledge production, that preserves not only white epistemological hegemony but also hinders to diminish the disproportionate legacy of colonial thoughts and practices.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.