Feminist reflection on academic life trajectories: The constant ‘becoming'

The pains and pangs of students, teachers, migrants, first-, second- and third-generation immigrants, trailing wives, or mothers, from the Global South to the Global North, are widely researched in sociolinguistics and sociology (Antia & Makoni, 2022; Makoni et al., 2022). Much has also been written about the epistemological violence against linguistically minoritised communities across the world. However, we found little research about the centralisation/peripheralisation and empowerment/disempowerment experienced by female educators, researchers and humane leaders from the Global South. In our collective autoethnographic study, we engage in ‘feminist reflection’ (McFadden, 2018), and look into the way we have experienced coloniality/decoloniality, while being educators, researchers and humane leaders in the postcolonial context of Bangladesh, as well as in Australia and Western Europe. The feminist reflection has allowed us to ‘lean back’ (McFadden, 2018) and provided us with reading and thinking spaces. We have had the opportunity to consider all the spaces and times we have traversed in our life trajectories and the impact these spaces and times have had on our ‘constant becoming’ – constant actions of familiarising oneself with new kinds of being, thinking, knowing, doing, living and practices (Walsh, 2020).