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.