Contribution short abstract:

Many graduate students/early career academics have to contend with feeling "out of place" in the academy. Drawing on personal experiences, I will discuss some ways that people come to forge intellectual spaces that work to affirm a sense of belonging while undertaking academic work.

Contribution long abstract:

Even as calls to advance diversity in and of the academy increase, the actual experiences of people who feel "out of place" in academia are often attributed to intelligence (not knowing enough), commitment (not engaging enough), rigor (not being serious enough), "impostor syndrome" (self-doubt), and other constructs of individual personality. These are divorced from the realities of the social, economic, political and environmental world that shapes these experiences.

In the face of institutional indifference, or outright hostility, how can students/early career-academics forge spaces of belonging in the places that they study, work, and live? In this talk, I will discuss some things I learned through experiences of engaging in or generating intellectual spaces, spanning from within the academy to the neighbourly, and what they offered to navigate graduate school in precarious and disconnected times.