Snow white, a mirror and whiteness: Entangling thoughts in metaphors

Abstract

This chapter is a creative exploration of the author's questioning of the meanings, for her, of being awhite, British, female academic.Writing as the fairy tale character, Snow White, she engages in conversations with The Mirror, sometimes entering the mirror to imagine worlds different from her own. The conversations are fictionalised to some extent, but they use vignettes based on events from her experiences of research and teaching in different contexts, several of which are former British colonies. Positioned firmly within narrative inquiry, autoethnography and fictionalisation, the chapter reveals how the author entangles her thoughts in metaphors as she, being both grave and light, acts upon them to enable greater insight and self-understanding.