Reconstructing resilience through metaphors from underrepresented higher education academics

This paper contributes to and expands existing scholarship on academic resilience in higher education in times of global crises. This work is vital as the rise in underrepresented academics in higher education coincides with persistent equity and inclusion challenges, requiring urgent and responsive initiatives across the sector. This paper offers critical insights into underrepresented academics’ conceptualisations of resilience through metaphors, revealing powerful strategies for navigating crises of global magnitude such as the COVID-19 Pandemic and future ones. By using metaphors, this paper generates novel conceptualisations of resilience that challenge normative notions, such as grit and perseverance. The participants’ metaphors, which characterised resilience in terms of space (e.g., volume, distance, location), body (e.g., punishment and constraint), and mobility (e.g., escape, crossing an ocean, hamster on a wheel), reveal powerful, context-specific understandings of resilience among underrepresented academics during crises. Highlighting the affective and sensory dimensions of resilience, this paper humanises the labour and trauma that underrepresented academics experience in fulfilling higher education teaching, scholarship, and service responsibilities. Based on our findings, we propose implications for higher education institutions to foster resilience and support the well-being of underrepresented academics, particularly during times of crisis.