Abstract
In an era where higher education institutions appear increasingly committed to what Sara Ahmed calls ‘speech acts’ whereby declared goodwill, through stated commitments to diversity, equity, and increasing Indigenous student enrolment and completion have been made; it is undeniable that Indigenous academics are in high demand. With fewer than 430 Indigenous academics currently employed here on the continent now commonly referred to as ‘Australia’, and 69% of that cohort identifying as female, what does it look like to experience this demand as an Indigenous academic woman? Drawing on data collected from a Nation-wide study in 2019 of 17 one-on-one, face-to-face interviews with Indigenous academic women, using Indigenous research methodologies and poetic transcription, this paper explores the experiences and relational aspects of Indigenous academic women’s roles in Australian higher education.
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Notes
The existing employment data from many universities does not allow for academics to formally identify outside of the Eurocentric gender binary of ‘male’ and ‘female’. As such, while this table does accurately capture the number of Indigenous staff, it does not necessarily represent a true scale of gender diversity across Indigenous academics in Australia. It is important to note that within this study, participants who ‘identify as female’ were invited to participate, reflecting their identified gender rather than the gender assigned to them at birth.
The term ‘participants’ has been placed in quotations, as Indigenous people on this continent have never ceded sovereignty, are structurally oppressed by systems built on the theft of Indigenous lands, children, and labour, and thus more likely to rely on social security schemes to survive, and in this way participation in the CDP as a scheme is not truly voluntary.
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Thunig, A., Jones, T. ‘Don’t make me play house-n***er’: Indigenous academic women treated as ‘black performer’ within higher education. Aust. Educ. Res. 48, 397–417 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-020-00405-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-020-00405-9