Women of Color Navigating Professional Power Through Dialog

ABSTRACT This paper offers a dialogic storying of how women of color navigate professional power across racialized institutional spaces. Written as a sustained dialog between two South African‐born women of Indian ancestry now working in Australia, the paper resists Eurocentric academic conventions that privilege linear argumentation, singular voice, and detached neutrality. Drawing on months of conversations conducted in person, via Zoom, and through joint conference and symposium engagements, the paper treats dialog not as illustrative data but as a mode of knowledge production. This dialogical approach is grounded in Freirean, Black feminist, and decolonizing traditions of dialog, which inform the paper's form, its ethical commitments, and its analytic process. Organized into five movements, the paper traces navigation as an embodied, relational, and ongoing practice. The movements attend to origin as analytic rather than nostalgic, learning the rules and limits of professional spaces, the accumulation of surveillance and disbelief, the bodily weight of cultural taxation and care labor, and refusal as self‐determination rather than triumph. Throughout, literature from Global South scholars and race advocates is brought into conversation as witness rather than frame, allowing theory to recognize lived navigation without containing it. Conceptually, the paper advances methodological reworlding by unsettling dominant academic forms and enacting a pluriversal approach to feminist inquiry. Rather than offering solutions or closure, the paper insists on continuity—foregrounding dialog, refusal, and care as essential to understanding how women of color move through, negotiate, and reconfigure professional power.