‘The surprise element’–the negotiation of racialized visibility and opacity in STEM

Abstract

This article investigates high achieving racialized and minoritized junior women scholars’ negotiations of (in)visibility in academia–more specifically within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) in Denmark. Some bodies by their mere presence become a source of surprise and disruption in the settings and spaces of academia. This article takes, as its point of departure, the question of what it means to become a surprise. Working from a conceptual framework of racialized differentiation as an affective and spatialized process and an empirical foundation of qualitative interviews with racialized minoritized women scholars in STEM, the analysis delves into the affective, spatial, and embodied experiences of standing out or passing as a racialized Other in academia with a focus on how it relates to structural and hegemonic orderings of the university as a space embodying some bodies and not others as naturally belonging. This entails a focus on the meritocracy of academia, the negotiation of (in)visibility and the right to stay opaque. The analysis points to how the women scholars’ narratives, experiences, and strategies can expand our knowledge on how processes of racialization, othering, and opacity take form in higher education in ways that fixate them in a state of perpetual arrival and as a source of potential surprise.