12 – Agenting Visibility and Oral History: Scholars of Colour and Critical Positioning in the European Academy
Scholars of Colour” (SoCs) is not an academically established term despite significant literature (Al-Taher and Younes 2023, Martin and Dandekar 2022, Gabriel 2017) on how SoCs, specially migration scholars navigate western academy, finding and losing their voices within intellectual discourses about their regions. The political visibility of SoCs from South Asia is relatively low in Europe, this vacuum exacerbated by the attenuation of migration scholars, including women from emerging economies like South Asia. The residual power of coloniality continues to reinforce obsolete and fragmented hegemonies that once had industrially-advanced societies objectify the cultures and societies of emerging economies. Within European academia, despite the resistance facilitated by reflexive storytelling, SoCs continue to struggle to make their voices heard, their work published and cited, and their research funded. The difference in the experience of SoCs in Europe is informed by “migratism” (Tudor 2017) that annotates the race of migrants to reified “good” and/ or “bad” images. Within the heuristics of decolonization, migratism offers research a lens to how SoCs increasingly agent tangible and intangible resources, making themselves visible in the European academic ecosystem. Using the oral histories of SoCs, some questions our panel asks are: can SoCs study their erstwhile colonies across racial divides and class regimes? Or should SoCs only study their “own”? Given the assembled-over-time, cumulative nature of upward social and economic mobility in Europe, what is the nature of knowledge production that takes place for both South Asia and Europe when carried out by SoCs?