Being in Shadow and Light: Academics in Post/Conflict Higher Education - cover image

Copyright

Dina Zoe Belluigi. Copyright of individual chapters are maintained by the chapter author(s).

Published On

2025-01-06

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-404-8
Hardback978-1-80511-405-5
PDF978-1-80511-406-2
HTML978-1-80511-408-6
EPUB978-1-80511-407-9

Language

  • English

Print Length

372 pages (xx+352)

Dimensions

Paperback156 x 26 x 234 mm(6.14" x 1.02" x 9.21")
Hardback156 x 30 x 234 mm(6.14" x 1.18" x 9.21")

Weight

Paperback706g (24.90oz)
Hardback886g (31.25oz)

Media

Illustrations18
Tables3

BIC

  • JNM
  • JNF
  • NHTX
  • GTU
  • JBS
  • JBFG

BISAC

  • EDU015000
  • EDU034000
  • SOC051000
  • SOC066000
  • POL034000
  • HIS054000

Keywords

  • Academia in conflict
  • Academic identity
  • Political violence and education
  • Academic freedom
  • Post-conflict reconstruction
  • Higher education and social change

Being in Shadow and Light

Academics in Post/Conflict Higher Education

Academia and its citizens, during periods of political violence and social conflict, are often overlooked. When attention is given, the focus tends to be on student activism, access to higher education, or curriculum development. The experiences of academics affected by conflict remain under-researched, despite the crucial role they play as educators and in generating, documenting, preserving and challenging knowledges. This is particularly concerning given that academics have−and continue to be−at risk as targets of sanction, persecution and oppression.

This edited volume seeks to address this gap by exploring, and evoking, the complexities of academic subjectivity, place and practice in contexts where intellectual and state authority are contested or in transition. It features contributions by academics, artists and memory activists who have stepped bravely outside of the parameters of their disciplines, with modes of enquiry and representation that include conversations, vignettes and case studies, critical ethnographies, oral life histories, interviews, poetry and collage. Within the ten chapters are consideration of conflicts within Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, England, Mexico, Nigeria, Northern Ireland, Palestine, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Syria and Venezuela.

Being in Shadow and Light encourages a deeper understanding of academics’ navigation of these difficult conditions. The authors’ insider-outsider positioning brings forth the richness of ways through dilemmas−of omission, trauma, displacement, inheritance, injustice, distortion, desire. Grounding the many social, cultural, economic, and epistemic politics within academia, troubles the enclosure of ‘conflict’ in politics at the grand level, as if only within the realm of interest for state and international actors. Against sanitising the uncertainties and particularities of being an academic figure, the authors reflect on the states and sites of conflict as spaces which shape living.

This work is a call to recognize, document and study the often-overlooked subjectivities and contributions of academics thinking and practicing within societies undergoing conflict(s) and in their aftermath. As such, it will be of interest to academics, students and staff working within universities, as well audiences interested in intellectuals and institutions in contexts undergoing change.

Endorsements

Professor Dina Belluigi continues to build hope across universities, pushing from the boundaries, always with an eye towards artistic expression and voice as foundations of resistance to structured knowledge oppression. Being in Shadow and Light presents an engaging, multi-disciplinary collection of scholar-practitioners from across the globe, laying bare the struggles, tensions, and imaginations required to cultivate healing and presence amidst historic and ongoing contexts of racial, gender, religious-based violences. Indeed, Prof Belluigi questions the very formation of "academics" and "conflict", challenging survivance as a permanent way of being within knowledge structures that are most-often used politically, intellectually, and artistically to deny existences, dismiss memories, and format oppressions. This collection from 21 memory activists, artists and academics illustrates commonalities within distinct oppressive regimes and the normal-ness of academic silencing. Being in Shadow and Light is a must read for its continual critique of the everyday, for its elevation of artist academics who centre survival as purpose in their work, and who share stories of hope within the direness of academic humanity.

Christopher B. Knaus

University of Washington Tacoma and University of South Africa

Contents

Foreword

(pp. xix–xx)
  • Takyiwaa Manuh
  • Natalia Maya Llano
  • Juan Camilo Domínguez Cardona
  • Juan Sebastián Flórez Herrera
  • Catalina Puerta Henao
  • Adriana Rudling
  • Nissa Yaing Torres Soto
  • María Alejandra Aray Roa
  • Guillermo López Franco
  • Paulette Joseph
  • Richard Hudson-Miles

Contributors

Dina Zoe Belluigi

(editor)
Professor of Authorship, Representation and Transformation in Academia at Queen's University Belfast
Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen's University Belfast

Dina Zoe Belluigi is Professor of Authorship, Representation and Transformation in Academia and a Fellow of the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast (Northern Ireland). She is a Visiting Professor at the Chair for the Critical Studies of Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University (South Africa). Her scholarship and practice revolve around comprehending oppression and inequalities within, and by, the university, and the ways in which these are negotiated by intellectuals (specifically academics and artists) of the Majority World. She is fortunate to have learnt from collaborations—particularly in South Africa, India and Northern Ireland—utilising a range of research methodologies, including the creative arts. She was also fortunate to have her intellectual formation—as an academic and artist—informed by commitments to transformative justice prevalent in post-Apartheid South Africa. Dina serves in editorial roles of journals and councils of learned societies in Higher Education Studies, the Social Sciences and Humanities, and Creative Arts Education. She contributes to the work of the Scholars at Risk Ireland Committee, as she did the Council for At-Risk Academics (UK) Syrian programme. She is co-editor of Emancipatory Imaginations: Advancing Critical University Studies (African Sun Media, 2024 [in press]).