Translingual Practice(s) of Minoritized Identities for Promoting Epistemic Justice in German Academia

This autoethnography shows some reflections upon academic structures and focuses on one of the taboos, the minoritized identities in academia, and the efforts to cope with its forms of marginalization. The four pillars that intersect the author’s academic self: class, gender, body, and ethnicity are always and throughout every context written, translated, transported, and transformed through language(s). Therefore, language builds the fifth category, intersecting the other four. Moreover, language is here not only informational but carries emotions and vulnerability and transforms all these categories by conferring on them new practices. Yet meritocratic, patriarchal, naturalistic, and biologistic language(s) can reproduce and reinforce classism, femaleism, migrant racism, heteronormativism, and/or sexism, as shown in this paper on German academia. As an Eastern European scholar, at home in three languages, two of them being dominant in global linguistic use, the author applies translingual practice as a concept she draws from her practice(s) of resistance and transformation in this intersectional autoethnography. The ‘auto’ or the autobiographical data will be balanced by the ‘ethno’ in showing how dominant academic discourses emerge and influence spaces of knowledge, thus acting as hegemonic towards migrant, female, working-class, and non-native speakers’ identities in academia. Besides, the ‘graphic’ of her writing is interrupted as she alternates theory with biographic knowledge, intertwining different text features as the text is also supposed to mirror her multi-identical interrupted academic self and the contrasts it is made of.