Black women scientists are living in an important time in South Africa as the sociopolitical landscape is changing rapidly, effecting changes in many dimensions of identification, particularly, "race", gender and class. This paper draws data from in-depth interviews with a cohort (n=10) of Science scholarship students to explore experiences of alienation and belonging at university. Although these young women are, by definition, "high performers", selected from the top five percentile of their secondary schools, they may still enter university study with limited access to dominant forms of cultural capital, including English proficiency and scientific terminology, and other forms of less tangible knowledges. The participants recount multiple experiences of non-belonging in the university context, both in and outside of classrooms, and a sense of alienation from their chosen fields of study. However, the findings also suggest that the establishment of affective bonds with particular institutional spaces and people, stabilises their sense of self and belonging. Perhaps simultaneous membership of two outlier groups, a marginal and an elite group, which creates alternating senses of alienation and belonging, may provoke new modes of academic life and ways of doing science.
This article argues that the life histories of Black South African women scientists provide a telling story of psychosocial trans-formations because they experience the world as outliers; paradoxically positioned within an interstitial space of (non)being between their dual sense of inclusion in and exclusion from marginal and dominant groups. Using a narrative method to enquire into the lives of fourteen scholarship students in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields at a historically white South African university (HWU), this article proposes an infinity model to illustrate how these young women locate their-selves in the field of higher education through recognition, dislocate their-selves from the field through misrecognition and infinitely recreate new subjectivities and epistemic communities at the intersecting space in between inclusion-exclusion.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.