Loneliness of PhD-ing: Migrant bodies of colour and Irish neo-liberal academia

Abstract

This paper will look at loneliness as both an affective and a political reality, rather than simply a subjective individual feeling. Using auto-ethnography, I will look at my own PhD experience as a migrant woman of colour in a largely white male dominated Irish academia. I situate this loneliness of PhDing by looking at (a) loneliness of a migrant body of colour and (b) how this loneliness is accentuated by neo-liberal academia. Irish university spaces provide an ideal context to understand the politics of loneliness of minorities because besides being white, these spaces are also extremely neo-liberal, with the country's austerity politics changing its higher educational spaces forever. While talking about loneliness of migrant PhD students of colour as structural and institutional violence, I also illustrate moments of ‘speaking up'. Finally, the paper understands how foregrounding and weaving care and community as ethics into the everyday can one aim to contend with such loneliness of migrant woman precarious academics of colour, particularly within Irish higher educational spaces.