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Inside the Ivory Tower: Narratives of Women of Colour Surviving and Thriving in British Academia, is a new collection of autoethnographies that highlights raced and gendered inequalities in higher education. It is edited by Dr Deborah Gabriel, Founder of Black British Academics and Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Media and Communication at Bournemouth University, and Shirley Anne Tate, Professor of Race and Education in the Carnegie School of Education at Leeds Beckett University.
Contributors to the book include: Prof Claudia Bernard, Dr Jenny Douglas, Dr Ima Jackson, Dr Josephine Khwali, Prof Heidi Safia Mirza, Dr Elizabeth Opara, Aisha Richards and Dr Marcia Wilson.
The book places the perspectives, experiences and career trajectories of women of colour in British academia at the centre of analysis. It positions academia as a space dominated by whiteness and patriarchy where women of colour must develop strategies for survival and success amid raced and gendered discrimination. The book uses Black feminist theory to examine how race and gender shapes the experiences of women of colour academics and reveals how racism manifests in day to day experiences within faculties and departments, from subtle microagressions to overt racialised and gendered abuse. It touches on common themes such as invisibility, hypervisibility, exclusion and belonging, highlighting intersectional experience.
Its origins lie in the Black Sister Network (BSN) – a dedicated platform within Black British Academics to empower women of colour – established by Dr Gabriel. The research was developed as a strategy to combine all the elements of BSN’s mission into a collective project. It focused on building solidarity and collective activism; developing strategies to address marginalisation; undertaking critical research on race and gender and exploring women of colour experiences through counter-narratives.
Inside the Ivory Tower is available from Trentham Books priced £24.99 but can currently be purchased with a 20% reduction through discount code IT17 until 31 December 2017. Excerpts of the book have been published by The Guardian and BBC radio features interviews with some of the contributors recorded at a VIP launch in London on 10 November – the date of publication.