A Personal Attempt to Note Down Migrant Precarity in Flemish Belgium: The Other is (Always) Angry

The Other Is Always Angry is an interdisciplinary autoethnography situated within Flemish Belgium, charting the embodied realities of migrant precarity through personal narrative, reflexive ethnography, and artistic research. This pivot paper revolves around a lived encounter with institutional exclusion during an academic jury process—an experience that crystallizes the pervasive, often invisible, dynamics of Othering faced by non-European migrants navigating western academia. Drawing from a hybrid methodology that merges reflexive ethnography and a practice the author terms “artistic immersion,” the narrative excavates how everyday rhetoric and institutional actions produce affective and structural marginalization. Anchoring emotion—particularly anger—as a generative epistemological resource, the author reclaims this emotional truth not as an obstruction to scholarly inquiry but as a catalyst for critical reflection, artistic production, and sensitivity. Through the strategic use of archived email correspondences, theoretical analysis, and personal reflection, the paper interrogates the dichotomy between the “local” and “non-local”, highlighting how systemic imbalances of power manifest in mundane organizational decisions. The work resonates with and extends the scholarship of Lorde, Baldwin, and Ahmed by insisting on the legitimacy of migrant anger as both a symptom and a site of resistance. Ultimately, this article calls for an expansive view of scholarly knowledge-making—one that embraces situatedness, emotional truth, and radical accountability. It posits that institutions championing inclusion must grapple not only with policies and representation but also with the emotional economies that shape who feels welcome, and who must always explain their presence.