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
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]).