Udah, Hyacinth (2025) Academic freedom and the politics of silencing: a critical autoethnography of race and belonging in Australia. Social Identities Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. (In Press)

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Abstract

Critical engagement with race, coloniality, and belonging remains deeply contested across the globe. In the Australian context, scholars who challenge the nation’s colonial legacies are often branded as divisive and, accused of engaging in academic terrorism. Using a critical autoethnographic approach, this article examines how academic freedom is differentially constrained for racialised scholars. Drawing on lived experience, it interrogates how whiteness and coloniality shape national identity, institutional cultures, curricula, and research priorities, producing subtle yet persistent forms of exclusion and silencing. The analysis situates these experiences within broader global currents of McCarthyism and epistemic control, highlighting how discomfort with critical race scholarship is reframed as danger. The article argues that resisting historical amnesia is not divisive but an ethical and intellectual imperative for racial and social justice. By positioning critical scholarship as an act of resistance and reclamation, this article contributes to ongoing debates on academic freedom, decolonisation, and the politics of knowledge production in settler-colonial contexts.

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