When Home Is the Mouth of a Shark: Navigating the Academy as the Self in Black and Brown Skin

Abstract

As transnational women living in Jamaica and South Africa, we came together in Brazil to employ collaborative autoethnography to deconstruct and make sense of our experiences in academia. In this article, we compare our identities in the academy with that of refugees and juxtapose Warsan Shire’s poem Home, where she describes the forced reasons why people leave their country of birth and the psycho-emotional labor of the refugee crisis. Borrowing from an autoethnographic ontology, we recognize ourselves as the unit of measure, and the concerted effort to continuously interrogate the self and each other’s lived experiences. This article challenges the colonial epistemologies of knowing and knowledge as we interweave our individual narratives throughout the article, grappling with our search for an elusive home in the academy, and a sense of belonging within postcolonial, onto epistemological frames of the academy.