On the move,yet never arriving: Slow deaths and racialised migrant academics in the Global North

Abstract

The post-race university claims to have transcended race. Instead, it has perfected the extraction of racialised migrant bodies under the guise of inclusion. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s ‘slow death’ and Patricia Hill Collins ‘outsider within’, we theorise attritional racism, the slow, cumulative erosion of racialised migrant academics through the ordinary operations of racial capitalism across time, space, and bodies. Positioned structurally inside yet symbolically outside, we show how racialised migrant academics endure chronic wearing-down through temporal governance, spatial displacement, and embodied erosion that diversity regimes are neither equipped to register nor motivated to notice. We employ collective biography as counter-practice to trace how three modalities of this attrition, namely racial surveillance at borders, exit demands in corridors, and corporeal violation at conferences, expose the post-race university as a site where attrition is the organising logic. This Speaking Out piece is a testimony and a refusal in which we write against the individualisation of structural harm and the slow death the institution dispenses in the name of belonging.