Minoritised migrant women in academia as translocational outsiders within: an analysis of four structures of exhaustion

Amidst performative equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) policies, research on minoritised women academics’ experiences of higher education (HE) has revealed their “outsider within” status as conceptualised by Patricia Hill Collins. In parallel, new critical research on academic mobility also reveals the unique pressures faced by minoretised migrant women academics. This paper brings together diverse elements of minoretised migrant experience to signal the need for a further fundamental rethink of existing HE EDI policies. We extend Hill Collins Black feminist outsider-within framework using Akwugo Emejulu and Leah Bassel’s conception of politics of exhaustion, and Floya Anthias’s conception of translocational positionality to offer a new theoretical framework focused on migrant academic women as “translocational outsiders within”. Bringing the conceptualisation of “outsiders within” beyond the walls of academia and national borders, we argue that minoritised migrant women academics are translocational outsiders, not just within HE, but to an extent in their “sending” countries and kinship networks. This framework identifies four unique structures of exhaustion that characterise their experiences. These are: (a) misfit identity categories, (b) precarious academic freedom and intellectual minoritisation, (c) transnational care and (d) EDI and invisible emotional labour. The paper draws on a combination of collaborative autoethnographic accounts and focus group discussions as the empirical basis for this theorisation. In the context of UK HE’s global ambitions, reconceptualising EDI work as dismantling structures of exhaustion will enable HEIs to design policies that respond to the specific needs of minoritised academic migrant women.