EDGE Talk

Global-South Scholars in Global-North Universities: Positionality, Gender and Ethnicity in Academia.

Of Knowledge and Power. Of Centre and Periphery: Dr. Olga Burlyuk (author) in conversation with Dr. Vjosa Musliu

A senior German professor of international relations, an older man I have never met, is a discussant on my panel. “I knew it! I knew it! You must have studied abroad! I saw from your name that you probably come from the east. But when I read your paper, so well-written and well-structured, I knew immediately that you must have studied abroad!” He is all smiling. I stand perplexed, confused on what to make of it.

Today’s EDGE Talk focuses on a personal story of what it means to be a scholar from the Global South working in Western academia. “This is a story of subtle, nearly invisible, structures in academia and the heavy day-to-day burden of fending off a triad of assumed, imposed and self-imposed inferiority complexes: in relation to the ‘center’ one arrives at and in relation to the ‘periphery’ one (never really) leaves behind.”

Dr. Olga Burlyuk (Centre for EU Studies, Ghent University), in conversation with Dr. Vjosa Musliu (Political Science Department, Vrije Universiteit Brussel), presents her recent work Fending off a triple inferiority complex in academia: an autoethnography.

Read the full article HERE.