When the Personal is Political: Sharing – as Insight – our Lived Experiences as Women of Colour in Accounting Academia

ABSTRACT

How can our research give voice to the marginalised, and emancipation for the disempowered in accounting practice? We propose that we must first reflect on our identities as researchers; our lived experiences in the academic environment – both individually and together as colleagues, friends, and mentors. We share our stories of personal and intertwined journeys in academia as academics from diverse cultural backgrounds and emerging economies. We illuminate our lived experiences of successes, struggles, discriminatory barriers, and relationships with colleagues and with each other – all of which we argue have both supported and hindered our abilities to ‘give voice to the marginalised’ and ‘emancipation for the disempowered’. Drawing on the guidance of Vinnari (2021), who encourages academics to be ‘more open about the intellectual challenges involved in undertaking research’, we consider challenges beyond the ‘intellectual’. While we agree that intellectual challenges arise and are important, given our collective experiences as ‘women of colour’, we focus on portraying other challenges beyond those which may fit neatly into this category. We argue, that the personal is political in research, and situate our stories within Carnegie et al. (2021)'s framework for accounting as a multidimensional technical, social, and moral practice.

KEYWORDS:

• women of colour; personal is political; social account; moral account; accounting academia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We use this term to symbolise a concealed and important agenda which revealed itself to us overtime.

2 This programme is no longer offered at the School level at our alma mater institution but rather at the faculty level and is now concerned with teaching quantitative versus qualitative research methods, rather than research paradigms.

3 Pauline Hanson is an Australian politician who is the founder and leader of One Nation, a right-wing populist political party.