Symbolic inclusion and systemic exclusion: Exploring our precarious journeys to becoming black women academics at a South African university through the lens of fieldwork

abstract

This perspective piece surfaces financially vulnerable black (women) students as predominant fieldwork research assistants and precarious frontline workers of/in the university in marginalised and volatile communities, often with disabling consequences. Research is a time-consuming, indispensable site for knowledge production and empowerment. Yet, as ‘assistants’, black women’s contributions and capabilities remains in a constant phase of infancy and potentiality characterised by income inequality. Included in hard labour while excluded from recognition, we find tension in demands to meet neoliberal time while experiencing racialised and colonised embodiment, leading to temporal fragmentation. We contend through a Feminist Decoloniality as Care framework that fieldwork viscerally produces potential for epistemic disobedience in black students, and holds transformative and reparative potential for the university to recognise both the students and communities as knowers/collaborators in knowledge production privileging African/local epistemes. However, this potential is minimised and/or foreclosed as a competitive neoliberal university framework is sustained through exploitative labour conditions and extractive relationships with vulnerable students and communities. We conclude that individualised forms of care counter-intuitively sustain the status quo and call into question methods, terminologies, and the ethics of ethics as we unmask the in-built costs and risks associated with fieldwork that the university relegates to individual researchers.

keywords:

• black women
• research assistants
• fieldwork
• disabling
• neoliberal precarity

Notes

1 Here fieldwork entails in-person, in-depth interviews, focus group discussions and other methods for gathering stories/information/knowledge in social sciences from predominantly marginalised (in)formal black communities, clinics and rural and peripheral communities.

2 “Neoliberalism … a theory of political economic practices … proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to … guarantee, … by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets.” (Harvey 2005, p. 2). (Bold Italics ours.)

3 Not her real name. Her experience is recent, and she was not in a position to recount the gruesome details here.

4 Not her real name.

5 Although Tendai (not his real name) was a black male, his identity to an extent was feminised because he was kind and soft and abhorred confrontation, characteristics which defy hegemonic views of black masculinities and increased his vulnerability to exploitation.

6 During the pandemic, reports reiterated that black women and girls are overrepresented in precarious formal and informal work and the care industry, predominantly constitute essential and at-risk frontline workers and were the most affected by job losses (Casale & Shepherd 2021).

7 In student-to-senior male scholar grant recipient working relationships, support roles are open to sexual advances and in-built gendered allocation/expectations of labour.

8 In SA, according to Oxfam (2020), black women disproportionately carry the burden to reproduce others (and ourselves) both in private and public domains.

9 A “CEO takes home as much as 461 black women from the bottom ten percent of earners. Labour market inequality is a key driver to stubborn gender, race, income and wealth inequality in South Africa” (Oxfam, 2020).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mercy Mupavayenda

MERCY MUPAVAYENDA is completing her doctoral studies in International Development at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She is a researcher, writer, gender transformation trainer and policy analyst focused on women and girls in the Global South, and a 2022/23 Fellow of the Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa of the Social Science Research Council, New York. Email: [email protected]

Fikile Masikane

FIKILE MASIKANE is a social scientist and researcher. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Industrial Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand. She holds fellowships at the Next Generation Social Sciences in Africa of the Social Science Research Council 19/20, National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences 20/23 and Narrative Enquiry for Social Transformation 21/23. Her research interests include black thought, labour studies and religious studies. Email: [email protected]