Choosing Marginality: Seeing Beauty in Defiant and Antiracist Scholarship

There is no paucity of literature on academia as a site of resistance. Universities can also be sites of transformation/reclamation while raising questions of epistemic Coloniality, racism, racialization, and Whiteness in academia. In this chapter, we highlight and discuss aspects of the challenges of this erasure while sharing some thoughts on how the emerging theory of racial dignity offers the possibilities of addressing the visible and invisible impacts of Coloniality and seeing the beauty and joy of engaging in the resistance of decolonial antiracist scholarship. As articulated in this chapter, our resistance espouses our intentional collaboration, which cushions against negative outcomes associated with the solitude of solitary, neoliberal workplaces. In imagining an antiracist future in Australian higher education institutions, we call for greater equality and a more sustained effort to decolonize Australian higher education institutions of their colonial legacy. We recognize the need for Australian higher education institutions to turbocharge their obligation as transformatory institutions that prioritize humanity and the ontological legitimacy and epistemic contributions of racially and culturally marginalized (RACM) academics.