In their presentation, dr. Zakia Essanhaji en prof. dr. Dounia Borabain explore joy as a critical methodological and political practice within academia. Building on the “Joy in Academia” podcast project with racialized and marginalised scholars, they examine how joy can function not as a superficial or individualised affect, but as a collective praxis of freedom, refusal, and epistemic resistance.
Against the backdrop of academic systems that often reproduce extractive, deficit-oriented, and harmful knowledge-production practices, the Zakia and Dounia ask what it means to centre joy as a serious mode of inquiry and relationality. They reflect on the podcast as a collaborative space where storytelling, care, humour, and vulnerability disrupt dominant academic norms and open up alternative ways of knowing and being in academia.
After their presentation, a panel of marginalized academics will critically engage with the tensions and possibilities of working with joy as methodology. They will discuss non-exploitative and sustaining research practices, and collectively imagine how joy might reconfigure academic labour, collaboration, and resistance in ways that are accountable to the communities we work with and within.
Dr. Zakia Essanhaji is an assistant professor in the Department of Organization Sciences at VU Amsterdam. Her research focuses on diversity and/as whiteness in academia and possibilities for reimagining and being in academia otherwise. She has published about embodying a diversity problem, white time politics in diversity policies and diversity as complaint work.
Prof. dr. Dounia Bourabain is professor of Sociology at the School of Social Sciences at Hasselt University. Her work centers on sexism and racism in academia investigating the struggles and resistance of minoritized academics in the European context. She has published in Gender, Work and Organization, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the DuBois Review, and Race Ethnicity and Education among others.
Registration
This event is part of the master programme Intersectional Gender Studies.
If you are in anyway working in the field of gender and diversity studies, you are cordially invited to attend and meet the first students in this programme.
