The Blackened body and White governmentality: Managing the UK academy and the production of shame

Abstract

In this article, we conceptualize the production of shame in the Blackened body as a mechanism of White governmentality in UK academia. By identifying shame as a racist anti‐woman form of governmentality that is utilized by universities to silence, alienate and degrade women of colour, we conceive how shame is imposed on her body as a form of disciplining by the White academy. We term this governmentality of recoding her corporeal body and affectivity as pornographic in its capacity and quest to possess her body and manipulate her senses. This recoding occurs within a libidinal economy that structures psychic and emotional life. For management, disciplining the racialized woman derives both pleasure and shame. For the racialized subject, the shame is carried in her body and transformed from a pornography to a psychology of power in which she re‐narrates herself as a body in deficit; lacking networks, motivation, likeability and so on. We posit that understanding the production of shame as a mode of disciplining of the Blackened body in the White academy provides a means for recovery, agency and solidarity for the Blackened body.

Counting sleep: Ambiguity, aspirational control and the politics of digital self-tracking at work

“…Yet another group of employees was more sceptical and stressed the affordance opacity and lost control. This finding resonates with work on normative control, which stresses how the employees’ sense of agency and the ability to remain ‘autonomous’ is important for engaging with organisational values (Jenkins and Delbridge, 2014: 884), indeed, a lack of ability to respond may affect silence and frustration (see also Dar and Ibrahim, 2019). As our case shows, however, in relation to digital self-tracking, this discretionary control is not only in relation to organisational values but also in relation to the ability to shape action through the body visibilities afforded by the tracking.…”

Mentoring as affective governmentality: Shame, (un)happiness, and the (re)production of masculine leadership

“…Working in the organizational context of the school, Bjerg and Staunaes (2011) have, for instance, showed, that although affect is often seen as taking an autonomous, indeterminate, and prediscursive shape (e.g., Massumi, 2002;Thrift, 2000Thrift, , 2004, it still serves the same function as linguistic discourses in moving and transforming the behaviors of young students. Building on Staunaes andBjerg's (2011) argument, Dar andIbrahim (2019) have similarly demonstrated how the evocation of bodily discomfort governs "Blackened" women toward silence in the "White academy" (p. 1242) while thus sustaining a racialized-gendered hierarchy in the academy.…”

Braiding together student and supervisor aspirations in a struggle to decolonize

“…One strand of literature dedicated to decolonizing management knowledge has developed over recent decades. Many such contributions appear in special issues and literature reviews that reflect on the colonial and hegemonic position of particular management knowledge systems and practices (Alcadipani et al, 2012;Banerjee and Linstead, 2001;Ibarra-Colado, 2006;Jack et al, 2011;Jaya, 2001;Mir and Mir, 2012), exercised by notions of whiteness/patriarchy (Dar and Ibrahim, 2019) and the English language (Tietze and Dick, 2009). Much empirical research in this tradition focuses on decolonizing and critiquing aspects of management and organizational practices, for example, stakeholder engagement, accountability and development administration management (Banerjee, 2000(Banerjee, , 2008Cooke, 2004;Dar, 2018).…”