Loneliness of PhD-ing: Migrant bodies of colour and Irish neo-liberal academia

Abstract

This paper will look at loneliness as both an affective and a political reality, rather than simply a subjective individual feeling. Using auto-ethnography, I will look at my own PhD experience as a migrant woman of colour in a largely white male dominated Irish academia. I situate this loneliness of PhDing by looking at (a) loneliness of a migrant body of colour and (b) how this loneliness is accentuated by neo-liberal academia. Irish university spaces provide an ideal context to understand the politics of loneliness of minorities because besides being white, these spaces are also extremely neo-liberal, with the country's austerity politics changing its higher educational spaces forever. While talking about loneliness of migrant PhD students of colour as structural and institutional violence, I also illustrate moments of ‘speaking up'. Finally, the paper understands how foregrounding and weaving care and community as ethics into the everyday can one aim to contend with such loneliness of migrant woman precarious academics of colour, particularly within Irish higher educational spaces.

My first memory of feeling lonely in the University is when I had to constantly repeat my name to everyone around me. I remember many people struggled to get it right while some simply nodded their head as I repeated my name for the third time. I remember this growing feeling of embarrassment for having a ‘difficult’ name but more importantly of being different. I felt an acute sense of disconnection from my colleagues and the surrounding environment. As a migrant woman of colour in a primarily white university and nation, I believe that such moments of loneliness are an accumulation of several instances of feeling lonely. My feeling lonely when I had to keep on repeating my name can be a result of everyday loneliness felt on a campus and in a country where I hardly found people who looked like me or maybe even sounded like me.

Thus, the stickiness of loneliness for a female PhD migrant coloured body is accentuated by the body's sticking out – too often and almost everywhere. Ozawa de-Silva and Parsons stated that, ‘loneliness must be understood as an affective and subjective reality ….’ (2020: 615). While I do understand loneliness as an affective reality, I go beyond it being simply a subjective reality. In this paper, I understand loneliness as primarily political. The politics of loneliness is revealed when I look at my PhD experience as a migrant woman of colour in a largely white male dominated academia. I situate this loneliness of PhD-ing by looking at (a) the loneliness of a migrant-coloured body and (b) how this loneliness is imposed/accentuated by a neo-liberal academia. In this combined context, a female PhD migrant student of colour is doubly disadvantaged and hence, the loneliness felt is that much stronger.

For this paper, I take an auto-ethnographic approach drawing primarily from my own experiences of pursuing my PhD in Irish academia. Irish academic spaces provide an ideal context to understand the politics of loneliness of minorities because besides being white, these spaces are also extremely neo-liberal (Hodgins and Mannix-McNamara, 2021; Ivancheva et al., 2019; Mahon and Bergin, 2018).

Adopting an auto-ethnographic approach is intentional. It aims to center-stage knowledge that comes from experience – experience of a PhD migrant woman researcher of colour in a largely white European academia. My experiential knowledge that comes from my specific location questions knowledge that is projected as objective and universal, while hiding the locus of the subject who produces that knowledge (Khoo et al., 2020; Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2013).

It is to forefront experiential knowledge that is neither much written about nor circulated in the global knowledge production economy. When traversing white university spaces, classrooms, curriculums etc., I used to hardly find my stories or stories of people of colour and their worlds. These stories and histories that back in India not only shaped my reality but also my relation to this reality now no longer existed. This erasure accentuated feelings of non-belongingness, creating disjuncture between my reality and a reality that was outside of me. Interestingly, I was aware of the histories and stories of Europe and North America since the curriculum, classrooms, newsrooms etc. in India did include them. Thus, the non-circulation of our knowledge had an impact on my sense of self – it made me, and my stories, feel less important and inferior. This epistemic vacuum is a kind of ‘colonial domination’ (Quijano, 2007: 169), and my autoethnographic account is to challenge such epistemic vacuum and dominance. This is similar to black feminists such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde who used their experiences of being a black woman to challenge the epistemic vacuum surrounding black women in the feminist movement in America.

My auto-ethnographic account of a migrant PhD woman of colour in Irish academia breaks colonial knowledge structures and traditions, where the ‘rational’ white European subjects studied the ‘non-rational’ non-white objects, by making the ‘object’ – the located subject. And in the process of doing this, it attempts to replace the relation of coloniality with a relation ‘of communication, of interchange of knowledge’ (Quijano, 2007: 174).

The methodology of auto-ethnography also allows my paper to contest colonial understanding of ‘rational knowledge’. As opposed to such understanding of ‘rational knowledge’ which is cognitive and depersonalised, my paper foregrounds personal stories and emotions, that is, how the neo-liberal and racist academic spaces were felt by me and those primarily have guided my reasonings in this paper. In this paper, emotions and reasons are intertwined with each other and hence, the paper challenges modern forms of rationality and rational knowledge which are constituted by European colonial forces (Quijano, 2007).

Such experiential knowledge emerges when thinking is located in our bodies – when we do not bifurcate mind and body (as modern rationality does) but we reclaim our bodies (Rich, 1994). This paper has emerged out of my body's remembrance of pain, suffering, hard-found solidarities and loneliness. It is an expression of a knowing that is deeply inscribed in my (our) body(ies) through experience (Hooks, 1994).

The first part of this paper will evaluate the political reality of loneliness by understanding the loneliness of a migrant body of colour while the second part of the paper will look at how this loneliness is amplified and strengthened by the neo-liberal academic practices inside institutions, looking in detail experiences of harassment and how that leave migrant academics of colour lonely. I finally conclude the paper by looking at moments of ‘speaking up’, care and community as ideals that can counter this political loneliness of minorities in general or migrant bodies of colour in particular, inside neo-liberal academic institutions.

Understanding loneliness – Sticking to a migrant brown female

Questions of loneliness are intricately connected to ideas of ‘home’, belongingness and even familiarity. Scholars like Diken (1998) and Ahmed (2000) have shown how the immigrant is viewed as a ‘stranger’ within the context of nation-states and borders. The stranger for Diken becomes the figure who is excluded from forms of belonging to a nation-state. The estrangement for the migrant arises from a sense of finding oneself in an unfamiliar place, of ‘sticking out’ without feeling belonged, of not being ‘at-home’. ‘Belonging is about an emotional (or even ontological) attachment, about feeling “at home” …. “at home” does not necessarily only generate positive and warm feelings. It also allows the safety as well as the emotional engagement to be, at times, angry, resentful …’ (Yuval-Davis, 2011: 10). The immigrant's body hardly finds the safe harbour with visa regulations, requirement of residence permits, fear of falling sick without medical insurance, etc. and such regulatory practices that take away resources (money and time) from the objective of their stay, which in the case of this paper, is research and building one's scholarship. This also creates great inequities between migrant and non-migrant scholars.

Migrants also struggle to engage or express emotions like anger. A brown female migrant friend of mine had once confessed that she does not feel entitled even to feel angry in a ‘foreign’ land. She feels that a migrant non-white body (more so for a woman) in a ‘foreign’ land, is expected to only be grateful. This resonated with me. I had realised long back that since my arrival in Ireland in 2018, I had developed the habit of constantly apologising, even for situations that did not require an apology or when I was not at fault. Feminists like Lorde (1981), Srinivasan (2018) have shown how black women did not even have the privilege to be angry as their anger would be dismissed as irrational and counterproductive. A non-white body's inability to express emotions in turn make them feel estranged.

Being ‘at-home’ is a feeling rather than simply a residential status. This is well argued by Ahmed when she says that home is rather ‘sentimentalised as a space of belonging … being-at-home suggests that the subject and space leak into each other, inhabit each other’ (2000: 89). Thus, the subject shares a strong sense of familiarity with the space – in fact, she wears the space as a second skin. Migration is a disruption to that familiarity. That disruption of familiarity is felt in the everydayness of a migrant's life.

The estrangement is also produced relationally – particularly in the ways a white society reacts to a non-white body, her culture or maybe even her name. This should be seen in the context of how colonialism functioned on the repression of the colonised people's modes of knowledge, symbols, images, expression, etc. while imposing the European ruler's own patterns of beliefs, images and symbols. The former's culture and expressions were deprived of legitimacy and were confined to the category of ‘exotic’ (Quijano, 2007). Ireland being colonised itself shows an interesting complexity wherein while Irish identity and culture were either erased or shamed by the colonisers, seeds of colonial perspectives surrounding non-white, non-European bodies and cultures were planted in Irish society wherein such bodies were seen as ‘other’ and exotic.

My wearing a ‘bindi’ ¹ in white Irish public spaces evokes reactions (often elongated stares) from white people around me and though unintentionally, it is in those reactions that my body and culture is othered and exoticised. I am not saying that those reactions are embroiled in negativity (hatred, disgust, etc.) but the fact that it evokes reactions is enough to impose a sense of estrangement in me – a brown female migrant. Thus, the body struggles to engage or even identify with the space around. A migrant body struggles to make sense of the place that she inhabits or ‘feels out of place’ (Ahmed, 2000: 91).

The migrant's estrangement or ‘strangeness’ is also produced through what Ahmed calls the ‘colonial encounter’ (2000: 12). Colonial encounters embody the simultaneous presence of distance and proximity – ‘strange others’ are created when ‘distant cultures’ or ‘distant others’ come face-to-face through proximate encounters. Those moments when people around me could not pronounce my name or the turning of heads on my wearing of a ‘bindi’ are such colonial encounters when in the migrant's proximity, strangeness (distance) was produced.

In fact, ‘foreign sounding’ first or last names (besides accent and nationality) have played a major role in non-white migrants’ facing discrimination in the European labour market (EU-MIDIS 11, 2016; McGinnity et al., 2017; Zschirnt and Ruedin, 2016). Talking about the Irish labour market, Joseph (n.d.) notes that race here operates through one's identity and experience of being a migrant – a non-white, non-Irish migrant. She shows that in Ireland, most people at the top in both public and private enterprises are white while large numbers of migrants of colour (particularly black migrants) are either unemployed or working in unpaid jobs (Joseph, n.d.). Labour market integration is vital for migrants’ inclusion and enhancement (Joseph, n.d.). Racism within the labour market contributes to a migrant's sense of estrangement and non-belongingness in a new country.

Additionally, racism within Ireland or its propensity to create ‘strangers’ (in this case of immigrants/ refugees) has been expressed in various policies and even in its Census (King-O’Riain, 2007: 526). This was reflected when in 2004 through a referendum, Irish citizenship laws were changed from Jus Solis ² to Jus Sanguinis ³ as a response to Irish media claiming that a flood of African (black) pregnant women were seeking asylum in Ireland in their final trimester as a tactic to gain Irish citizenship for their new-born infants (King-O’Riain, 2007: 526). These claims by the media were found to be completely baseless and was argued instead to be rooted in ‘Afrophobia’ of the white public against black Africans in Ireland (Michael, 2015).

Irish people who have historically faced racism are now being increasingly seen as perpetrators of racism against people or communities who do not look like them. King-O’Riain writes, ‘… the past racialization of the Irish people brought home a desire to racialize others, often identified and acted against based on their physical appearance, such as in the case of hate crimes’ (2007: 527). She writes how in 2006, Chinese takeaway drivers were called to deliver fake orders and were beaten up. NCCRI ⁴ has recorded these crimes as hate crimes against the Chinese community (King-O’Riain, 2007). Since 2022, Ireland has also seen huge ‘anti-refugee and anti-immigrant’ protests. Violence against ‘immigrants’ and mostly of colour have been on the rise in cities like Dublin (Gannon, 2023; Naughtie, 2023).

This can be traced back to Ireland's own colonial history. Though the Irish were themselves colonised, they also helped the British to administer their empire. And the fact that the Irish helped administer a colonial empire that was premised on racism, they inevitably imbibed beliefs of racial superiority versus inferiority (Fanning, 2007). Many Irish were promoted in the colonial British administrative systems in Africa, India etc. where they were involved as police personnels, civil servants and the army. Such Irish officers were equally oppressive towards the native population as any other colonial staff.

Many Irish missionaries answered the call of the empire to move across the colonies and spread Christianity amongst the native population. And while such missionaries did a lot of welfare work such as opening of schools and hospitals in ‘backward’ colonies, they engaged in conversations convincing the natives of the inferiority of their own cultures and religion as a tactic to make them adopt Christianity (Fanning, 2002).

Colonialism also forced many Irish to emigrate from Ireland and it is believed that the embodiment of whiteness by the Irish is also intricately related to their emigration history (Crowley et al., 2006). In fact, Ignatiev (2012) argues how Irish immigrants to the USA escaping the famine and the oppressive colonial system embodied whiteness by oppressing the African Americans. Irish immigrants actively collaborated with the dominant white culture not just to survive in a largely white Protestant country but also to prosper. In fact, many even opposed the abolition of slavery of African Americans. Interestingly, white Irish nationalists have continually used the figure of the ‘Irish slave in America’, conflating indentured servitude to chattel slavery to push forward white supremacist causes (Hogan, 2015, 2016).

In fact, whiteness was actively embodied by immigrants from many other countries of Eastern Europe to the States by oppressing the black Americans and promoting racism. Many received white privileges (and later became accepted as ‘whites’) due to their continued furthering of racial practices (Roediger, 2006). Thus, the embodiment of ‘whiteness’ by the Irish and oppressing the oppressed gave them not only a sense of power but also a sense of inclusion and belongingness with those in power.

However, for the longest time, discussions surrounding racism in Ireland used ‘xenophobia’ rather than racism. Xenophobia was preferred also because it justified and forwarded narratives of Ireland being a homogenous society and hence the responses to the ‘other’ though discriminatory, were considered natural of a society which knew no better (Fanning, 2002).

King-O’Riain (2007), Crowley et al. (2006) argue that while Ireland historically has been multi-cultural, it has been increasingly projected as homogenous and monocultural (read white) to further puritan racist narratives. This myth was constructed in the early nineteenth century by Catholic Irish nationalists who pushed forward the narrative of one ‘pure Irish race’, a race superior to the non-Irish. Characteristics such as love for one's country and complete devotion to Catholicism were used to construct the figure of the pure and superior Irish. Such constructions were made in opposition to the black, Asian, non-Catholic and indigenous minorities which resulted in their vilification. The vilification of communities like Travellers in Ireland by both the Irish state and the majoritarian settled society is rooted in such puritan Irish race narratives (Haynes et al., 2021). Nationalists’ construction of a pure Irish race was a response to colonial narratives in which the Irish were vilified and made inferior. Thus, racism in Ireland has its roots in response to colonialism while also imbibing ideologies of racial superiority and purity that were celebrated and justified by colonial powers. The Irish in that sense is both a victim and perpetrator of racism.

It is in this historical context that contemporary racial encounters against immigrants of colour in Ireland should be seen. Such racial ‘colonial encounters’ reinforce the feeling of estrangement or ‘non-belongingness’ amongst the created ‘strange others’. Ahmed (2004) noted how emotions flow and ‘stick’ to bodies, creating boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Emotions of disgust, hatred, fear etc. are directed towards Muslim, queer, black, immigrant or refugee bodies amongst other minority bodies, and get stuck to them, creating feelings of estrangement. Loneliness arises out of such experiences of continued estrangement, of ‘sticking out’, of not feeling belonging. In fact, I would even say, that loneliness as a continued emotional experience contributes to the creation of boundaries of ‘us’ and ‘them’ – the migrant and the non-migrant/native. This, more often than not, leads to a change in the sense of self, including migrants of colour. My friend's inability to express anger or my constant need to apologise can be examples of that. Berg and Ramos-Zayas talk about how the racial post-colonial bureaucratic state produces ‘liable affect’ resulting in a ‘simplified, undermined subjectivity of populations racialized as Other and an “empowering affect” that creates a privileged subjectivity among racial elites’ (2015: 656). Feelings of estrangement and loneliness that continue to be experienced by migrant bodies of colour (particularly women) are ‘liable affect’ that produce a subjectivity of being inferior, which can further feed into feeling lonely.

It is in this context that I explore the loneliness of PhD-ing for a migrant woman of colour. I will explain how neo-liberal academic practices and spaces in the context of pursuing a PhD in an Irish academic institution reinforce or feed into the loneliness that is stuck to the migrant body of colour.

Accentuating loneliness – The neo-liberal academic institution

From the early 2000s, Ireland promoted neo-liberal managerial values in higher education. This has led to rapid marketisation of higher education wherein universities have become spaces that embody deep commercial values and education gets transformed into a commercial exchange with students being treated as consumers (Ivancheva et al., 2019: 449). Since 1990s, the Irish state has embraced the New Public Management (NPM) system, which embodies corporate values in public sector services like education. The hold on NPM was tightened post the economic crisis with staff reduction by 10% and pay cuts of 5–12%. Enrollment in third-level education in Ireland increased considerably – a 24% increase in Higher Education enrollment, one of the highest in Europe and by 2017, the OECD ⁵ average proportion of people entering higher education (bachelor's level) in Ireland was 69% as opposed to 53% in the rest of Europe (Hodgins and Mannix-McNamara, 2021: 4). Higher Education in Ireland has seen a massive intake with the infusion and strengthening of neo-liberal policies.

Post financial crisis 2008, when Ireland's national GDP decreased by 7% (Clarke et al., 2018), the state's response was austerity politics that deepened neo-liberal values in the country. From 2008 to 2013, state spending on the public sector reduced by 7.8 billion euros, which included the higher education sector. ‘Between 2008 to 2015, state grants to the sector declined by 38%’ (Clarke et al., 2018: 1051). The consequences of this are seen in removing permanent staff and a reduction in pay, as was mentioned before. The Employment Control Framework that was introduced in 2008 and still remains in place directly resulted in the reduction of permanent staff by 12% (Clarke et al., 2018). However, as mentioned before, the intake of students saw a massive growth. So how would this skewed ratio of increasing students and decreasing teachers be met?

The education restructuring following austerity politics in Ireland, along with the expansion of research funding through Irish (HEA, 2016; Locke, 2014) and European Union (EU) funding programmes (through Marie-Curie, European Research Council or the European Commission) have created a large market of mostly temporary, precarious workers doing research or replacing permanent staff on leave(Ivancheva et al., 2019: 457). Such policies have welcomed a vast pool of PhD students and post-doctoral fellows whose academic positions are precarious. They provide academic labour such as teaching, tutoring, grading, supervising, doing other administrative work at meagre rates and that which do not bring any academic recognition to them. They are hence, the ‘second class citizens’ of academia (O’Keefe and Courtois, 2019). And it is on the labour of such precarious ‘second class citizens’ that most neo-liberal universities are functioning. ‘In 2011, 80 per cent of all the 5202 researchers in Irish institutions of higher education were on temporary contracts’ (Ivancheva et al., 2019: 451; Also see Loxley et al., 2016: 128).

Thus, it is no surprise then that post austerity, Irish Higher Education has encouraged policies that could create a more research-rich higher education system (Clarke et al., 2018). Such policies were also influenced and encouraged by both the EU and the OECD. In 2004, the OECD published the Examiners’ Report on Irish higher education which underlined its desirable role to promote research that keeps in mind business or commercial prospects (Mercille and Murphy, 2017). Social science researchers were particularly asked to ‘get into bed with industry’ (Holden, 2011).

The investment in research also led to the establishment of several funding bodies and consequently scholarships, which attracted (and continue to attract) several PhD researchers from outside Ireland (Pontikakis et al., 2006). However, as will be shown later, the scholarship amounts are not sufficient to cover the rising living costs in Ireland, pushing migrant PhD researchers to face a series of issues that not only continue to exploit them but also accentuate their estrangement and loneliness.

Besides, several funding schemes open to international (non-EU) PhD researchers are partial funding schemes. The Government of Ireland International Education Scholarships that are open to non-EU/EEA students fund only one year of a three/four-year PhD programme. The Irish Research Council's Postgraduate Scholarship covers 5750 euros per annum of a scholar's tuition fees – when most department's yearly tuition fees for International PhD students are 13,000 euros or above. Interestingly, international PhD students (as with other graduate and undergraduate international students) pay more than double the fees as compared to Irish or European students. After the state's cutbacks on public sector expenditures as part of austerity politics, international students’ fees serve as one of the major sources of funding for Irish higher educational institutes. This is also the reason why Irish higher educational institutes have so fiercely promoted ‘internationalisation’ in the post austerity era (Mercille and Murphy, 2017). The rapid internationalisation or ‘the new era of denationalization and transnationalization is also an era of open global competition’ (Mbembe, 2016: 38). In fact, competition as a principle is widely celebrated and promoted in the neo-liberal world.

The neo-liberal academic institution encourages fierce competition not just amongst universities but also between individuals through notions of individual productivity – the number of grants an academic has won, the number of ‘single-authored’ journal papers that one has published, the number of papers one has presented in conferences, the number of affiliations one has to various organisations, etc. indicate this. Performance records of individuals are strictly maintained, and an individual is rewarded or punished accordingly (Hodgins and Mannix-McNamara, 2021; Ivancheva et al., 2019; Morrissey, 2013). These measures of ‘productivity’ are guided by economic notions without considering the varied values that one brings to an academic learning space – such as political and social values.

This fierce emphasis on individuality – individual performance, successes and failures – cuts off connections and feelings of community that further impose feelings of loneliness. In addition, PhD programs structured by universities are inherently individual centric – PhD researchers engage mostly with their individual research and work towards it. It is, hence, not uncommon to hear fellow PhD researchers and other academics say that a PhD is often a lonely journey. On top of facing all the pressures of productivity in academia, PhD researchers are some of the most precarious academic labourers. PhD researchers in Ireland are paid 22% below minimum wage rate and are not considered as workers – meaning they enjoy no benefits such as paternity/maternity leave, sick leave and workers’ benefits. The spouse of a PhD researcher on visa cannot work (Casey, 2023; O Kelly, 2023). Hence, most PhD researchers do not bring their spouses along, considering he/she/they would only act as an added economic burden. This is particularly true for migrant PhD researchers. Such imposed disconnection further aggravates feelings of loneliness of migrant PhD researchers.

Estrangement and loneliness for migrant PhD researchers of colour is accentuated by the neo-liberal university, for whom it is doubly exploitative. For migrant PhD researchers, besides the mammoth tuition fees, there are additional costs of yearly expenditures on renewal of Irish Residence Permits, health insurances, visa fees, etc. For attending conferences/workshops/seminars abroad, besides the expenditures on travel and accommodation, migrant PhD researchers (mostly from ‘third world’ nations) need to spend on acquiring visas while also going through the arduous procedure of visa applications. This, along with the growing housing crisis (Hearne, 2020) wherein rents have seen a steep increase put migrant PhD researchers (or any migrant students for that matter) at a greater risk of being exploited or taken advantage of. Often, migrant PhD students lose out on getting better houses since they are not part of local information networks or even connections or friends through which vacancies are circulated.

This is particularly concerning at a time when Ireland has been ranked as the most expensive country in the EU with prices 46% above the average. This is according to figures published by the EU in June 2023 (Gazaniga, 2023). The Residential Tenancies Board recorded that the average rent paid in newly registered tenancies nationally rose to €1544, up by 9% on the same period last year (Burke-Kennedy, 2023). With growing expenditures and meagre income from PhD research, many migrant PhD students are consequently forced to engage in extra labour – working two or sometimes even three jobs. This over-working hardly leaves any time or energy for socialisation or making new connections, intimate partnerships or even friends imposing deep feelings of loneliness. Koelet and de Valk (2016) establish that it is difficult for migrants to establish local connections and even while local networks or connections are established, the closeness to such connections are weaker than the closeness they feel with connections from their places of emigration. This, they argue, can lead to social loneliness of migrants. Thus, while mobility entails loss of established relationships from which people often receive care, trust and support, the neo-liberal academic work conditions do not allow migrants to socialise and form new relationships. Migrant researchers are not just dealing with economic precarity but also ‘affective precarity’ (Ivancheva et al., 2019: 457). The inability to bring partners or even parents due to the underpayment of PhD researchers and mounting expenditures is an example of how the neo-liberal academia makes migrant PhD researchers ‘emotionally precarious’ – imposing a deep sense of continued estrangement, disconnection and loneliness.

Besides, the deep-seated racism within the Irish labour market (Joseph, n.d.) makes it that much more difficult for migrant PhD students of colour to either get employment or survive in the job market once they have finished their doctoral work. This not only adds to our anxieties but also makes us vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation and harassment.

Harassment and loneliness

Migrant PhD students, often women of colour, are also at a greater risk of being harassed within academic institutions. In 2021, in a study (MacNeela et al., 2021) by the Higher Education Authority, Ireland that documented experiences of sexual harassment and violence faced by students and staff in higher educational institutes, 31% of postgraduate students in Irish higher academic institutions responded that they faced some kind of harassment by mostly members of staff while 35% of postgraduates replied that most cases of harassment occurred within campus premises. Though the study does not bifurcate the respondent students into migrants/non-migrants or EU/non-EU citizens, there are enough grounds to believe why a migrant student (mostly women of colour) will be far more susceptible to getting harassed and one of the grounds can be lack of networks and support-systems which again is actively perpetuated by the neo-liberal academic institution itself.

The Sexual Experiences Survey, 2020, that recorded sexual harassment in colleges and university spaces in Ireland showed that amongst postgraduate students, the disclosing of harassment incidents was mostly to a close friend, romantic partner(s) and family members. Such a network of intimate and trusted support-system often does not exist for a migrant student. Thus, the ‘affective precarity’ promoted by the neo-liberal institution makes migrant students more vulnerable to silencing and trauma. The Survey also revealed that 35.4% of postgraduate students (40% amongst Postgraduate-Research students) experienced unwanted sexual touching or penetration. The survey once again did not look at differential experience of harassment by migrant and non-migrant students. However, based on ethnicities, it noted that 36.5% of Black students, 26.1% of Asian students and 40.7% of Other ethnic students (this can include brown students amongst others) in third-level educational spaces experienced sexual harassment.

And while neo-liberal academia isolates and disconnects migrant PhD researchers (including any other migrant student for that matter) making them greater targets of harassment within neo-liberal academic spaces, the traumatic experience of harassment and the afterlife of living with it itself impose feelings of estrangement and loneliness on the migrant body.

Complaint processes carried out by neo-liberal universities can be extremely exhausting and lonely for the complainant. The complaint process can leave one feel extremely lonely as harassment complaints are treated (or even brushed aside) by neo-liberal institutions as ‘individual problems’ rather than structural issues. When it comes to filing joint or collective complaints (Ahmed, 2021), it is notable that in the Irish university system, no such provisions exist. Consequently, it becomes easier for the system to frame complainants as ‘unhappy’, ‘complaining’ and ‘killjoys’. The complaint process itself can take a long time before the investigative committee can come to some conclusion. I am currently in the initial stages of pursuing and putting together a complaint against harassment that I experienced within the university. The university officer I approached to discuss my case of harassment had warned me that it might at least take nine months, if not more, to arrive at findings. The university employs an outside consultant to investigate the complaint who takes months to reach a conclusion. Complainants have confessed to feeling ‘isolated’ and truncated by the entire process (McGuire, 2016).

Ahmed calls this ‘blanking’ which is a kind of ‘institutional ghosting’ (Ahmed in Dey, 2022: 23) when the University drags the process on without taking accountability or providing care. ‘I think blanking is related to ghosting. There are so many ways you can be made to disappear. To complain is often to encounter your own disappearance. It can be uncanny. That blanking and ghosting can happen in interpersonal and institutional encounters has something to tell us’ (Ahmed in Dey, 2022: 23). Thus, it is no surprise that complaint processes leave complainants abandoned, invisibilised and consequently, lonely. For migrant students who depend on the university for getting access to letters that they need to submit for renewal of residence permits, hesitance in even reporting harassment might arise from the fear of the university's power to create road-blacks in providing these letters.

It took me months to simply bring myself to make that first knock at the door. As a migrant woman of colour, I, just like many migrant people, try to avoid any kind of legal hassles that might put my residence status in Ireland at jeopardy. This has been one of the primary reasons why I delayed taking any steps to address my experience of harassment within the university. Any risk to my residence status would have jeopardised my chance of completing a PhD degree. Many migrant PhD researchers (often women of colour) also cannot afford to lose jobs or bring the spotlight on them with neo-liberal academia already under-paying them and living costs rising at such an enormous rate.

Complaint processes can be extremely exhausting. One of the respondents in Sara Ahmed's book ‘Complaint!’ (2021) equates the complainer to a ‘problem child’.

‘A complaint becomes a part of you, part of who you become, that problem child, you can’t shed it; you can’t shed her, having done it, made it, that complaint, “you cannot go back” … That a complaint can take over your life, become your life, even become you, can be what makes complaint so exhausting.’ (Ahmed, 2021: 19).

Complaint processes are designed to produce such exhausted bodies so that they can act as a deterrent for others from engaging in complaint mechanisms.

Pamela Moss, a senior academic at the University of Victoria, writes about her struggles of creating academic spaces which are inclusive and how those struggles of creating a ‘Communiversity’ ⁶ have left her tired, stuck and exhausted. ‘Exhausted bodies cannot possibilize … I think maybe we need strategies and tactics to pull academic labourers away from the abyss of exhaustion, toward a temporalized and spatialized space where tired ones can act, too’ (Moss, 2012: 4). In fact, the neo-liberal academia is designed to create exhausted bodies – overworked, underpaid, productivity and efficiency chasing bodies with no time, energy or in case of migrant academics (often of colour) the privilege to unionise or collectivise.

The loneliness enveloped around migrant PhD women of colour like me who have faced harassment in white academic spaces is also because we come from patriarchal families. My past experiences of sharing harassment incidents with my family have turned into events where I have been shamed instead. Thus, true support systems that can sustain a migrant woman academic of colour throughout a lengthy complaint process are extremely limited.

Ahmed (2021) also notes how complains made by women of colour do not go anywhere (are not heard) because they are not deemed to have come ‘from the right people; right can be white’ (Ahmed, 2021: 4). Loneliness sticks to such bodies who are considered not important enough – for their voices find no ear and eventually simply die out. This loneliness then is tied to the history of dismissal of women of colour and to the history of how they are perceived – black women as always complaining, Asian women as ‘uncivilized’, etc. (Ahmed, 2021: 2; 3).

Conclusion: ‘Speaking up’, care and community

Loneliness that is structurally produced and actively imposed or gets stuck on migrant academics of colour can be termed as what Ahmed (2021) calls ‘institutional violence’. She understands that ‘institutional violence’ is often exercising itself in silent hidden ways. But there can be responses to such violence – one of which is when we ‘speak up’. ‘Speaking up’ is a political moment of disruption of established power structures, of shaking the grounds that perpetuate institutional violence.

I look at my conceptualisation and finally the organisation of the ‘Decolonizing Academia’ Symposium as one such moment of ‘speaking up’, as an ‘event’ to disrupt the neo-liberal academia's continuous efforts of turning migrant academics of colour (also women) lonely, disconnected and exhausted. It is a moment of ‘snapping’ (Ahmed, 2021: 8), of declaring intentions to break bonds or connections with the interests of a neo-liberal academic institution and making newer connections with others who have ‘snapped’ too. The symposium brought such newer connections and conversations to my life – where our continued loneliness and exhaustion found reflection and company.

The symposium can also be seen as a ‘collective complaint’, a ‘collective speaking up’. As opposed to individual complaints that leave the complainant (more so a migrant woman academic of colour) lonely and truncated, collective complaints lead to the inauguration of spaces of collectivity and support. Talking about the collective complaint made by students at Goldsmiths, Ahmed writes that ‘To submit a collective complaint is to become a collective’ (Ahmed in Dey, 2022: 29). She floats the concept of a ‘Complaint Collective’ which encompasses not just the idea of a ‘collective complaint’ but also the entire process of collectively listening to stories of pain and trauma, of collating them and combining them. This is a radical resistance to neo-liberal institutions’ attempts of looking at complaints individually and isolating the complainers – a process that only reinforces loneliness. ‘Complaint collectives become a shared conclusion … We are louder when we are heard together’ (Ahmed in Dey, 2022: 29).

This also indicates that to counter loneliness imposed by the neo-liberal academia on migrant women academics of colour, we have to foreground ideals of care and community in the everyday existence or lifeworld of academic institutions, practices and cultures. Askins and Blazek (2017) argue for ‘caring with’ as a counter to neo-liberal academia. As opposed to a neo-liberal academia that invisibilises or discourages care as a principle, they seek to make ‘care visible, valuing care as essential to human relations and communities rather than ‘rewarding’ it individually. That is, ‘unhiding’ care to disrupt the rationale of capital’ (Askins and Blazek, 2017: 1097).

Caring as an academic culture inherently creates community. Conradson argues that caring holds the potential ‘of facilitating new ways of being together’ (2011: 454). And care as an everyday ethic can be practiced by building alternative communities together. For migrant women academics of colour, such communities can be created by seeking out other people who share similar positionalities and politics. Ahmed writes that the feelings of ‘estrangement of migration itself that allows migrants to remake what it is they might yet have in common’ (2000: 94) can help create new communities and connections. Such communities can even provide the enabling environment for migrant academics of colour (more so women) to produce particular kinds of knowledge together – knowledge that comes from sharing similar locations and grounds. And while organisation of symposiums or seminars do bring together precarious migrant academics of colour, for a sustained and a consistent presence of care to counter the violence of institutional loneliness, one needs to join or actively build communities of care.

Personally, for me, joining communities like ‘PrecAnthro’, that is actively bringing together precarious anthropologists in the face of rising neo-liberalism within academia, has provided a sense of care and collectivity that is critical to counter the everyday institutional violence of loneliness. ‘PrecAnthro’ was also critical in bringing out a report on precarity within European academia (Fotta et al., 2020). The existence of such reports alone is critical, particularly in a neo-liberal academic world where conversations surrounding precarity are invisibilised.

In the process of writing this paper, when I searched for reports that covered issues such as housing, stipend, working conditions and racial and sexual harassment on PhD students within Irish higher academic institutions, I was vastly disappointed. I could hardly find any reports that have been annually collected or updated by the Irish state that focused on such critical issues surrounding PhD researchers. The information focusing on migrant (international/non-EU) PhD researchers is non-existent. This systemic lack of data reinforced my feelings of estrangement or loneliness and is in itself a kind of institutional violence. Such violence shows how neo-liberal institutions are forwarding coloniality. The complete lack of collection or circulation of non-white, migrant researchers’ data is the kind of epistemic injustice that colonial knowledge production structures perpetuate. Such lack not only erases non-white, migrant students’ histories, struggles and stories for their European fellows – making the category of the PhD researcher as non-differentiated and universal but such lack can sincerely damage a migrant PhD student's sense of self. The feelings of estrangement or loneliness experienced by a migrant academic of colour due to the absence of data come from a place where she believes that loneliness faced by her is an individual or a subjective feeling instead of it being structural or political. This also then prevents migrant academics of colour to question the neo-liberal racist academia and seek alternative communities.

Collectivisation is critical for the fostering of care as a principle. Exploitation and loneliness are perpetuated by the principle of individualisation celebrated by neo-liberal policies and spaces. The Participatory Geographies Research Group (2012) produced a document called ‘Communifesto’ which called for refusal to fall back on individualised reactions and instead find common grounds with ‘colleagues and others within and beyond the university who share our struggle, frustration and insecurities’ (2012: 2).

The steady growth and presence of unions of PhD researchers such as The Postgraduate Workers’ Organisation of Ireland (PWO) is a radical turn towards creating a culture of visibilisation of care and community within Irish academia. The PWO has taken up issues such as livable wages, specific benefits for non-EU researchers (allowance of work for spouses of PhD researchers, health insurance subsidies, etc.) and recognition of PhD researchers in Ireland as workers and providing them rights and benefits of workers. Their sustained protests and backend negotiations have resulted in some concessions such as an independent review being commissioned by the Department of Further and Higher Education to review the current state supports for PhD researchers which was published by the Department's Minister Simon Harris in June 2023. The review that was co-chaired by Dr Andrea Johnson and David Cagney particularly highlighted the challenges specifically faced by non-EU PhD researchers and suggested that state support as stipend for PhD researchers be increased to 25,000 euros (Johnson and Cagney, 2023). These have been demands that have been listed in the Fair Postgraduate Research Agreement (PhDs’ Collective Action Union, 2022: 1–8) that was prepared by the PhDs’ Collective Action Union that is currently merged into the PWO.

The very presence of such collectives is a counter to institutional violence. These are collectives that are critical for forwarding narratives of care and community that can actively counter the atomisation of neo-liberal academia that promotes feelings of estrangement and loneliness. Feelings that migrant academics of colour (often women) face within white neo-liberal academia and white nation-states. Such alternative collectives of care are like building feminist shoulders, where tired, exhausted and lonely bodies are uplifted, supported and listened. This is particularly critical for migrant bodies of colour as migration as a process itself is about disconnections and experiences of discrimination (racial harassment, sexual harassment or both) that can leave one feeling estranged and further lonely. The neo-liberal academia accentuates or actively perpetuates such disconnections and loneliness of a migrant academic of colour. Thus, we need such collectives where not only migrant researchers of colour are made part of the community but they are also actively leading such communities.

The story about loneliness of a migrant woman academic of colour is of course the story of colonial pasts and presents, neo-liberal structures that sustain such loneliness but most importantly, it is the story of belongingness and home, or maybe homes. The continued pursuit of where it is. bell hooks writes, ‘the very meaning of “home” changes with the experience of decolonisation, of radicalisation. At times home is nowhere. At times, one knows only extreme estrangement and alienation. Then home is no longer just one place. It is locations. Home is that place which enables and promotes varied and everchanging perspectives, a place where one discovers new ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference’ (1989: 19). I see these collectives and communities of care that have (and will) emerge from our collective loneliness as such homes – as spaces to feel belonged. Homes at the margins. Our margins – sites of creativity and power, where we recover, rage, heal and celebrate together (hooks, 1989).