Unruly legacies: Black male academics’ survivance, embodied refusal as praxis and pedagogical imaginaries in the UK higher education

Higher education institutions are sites for racialised subjectification that ‘enable only certain bodies’ to thrive and flourish whilst the racially minoritised body is marked as ‘Other’, out of place and subjected to scrutiny. Black male academics navigate discrepancies and racialised discrimination over their contracts, career progression, and opportunities available to them. They often experience overt and hidden forms racism, leading to vulnerability and employment fatigue. Through conversational intraviews and drawing on embodied intersectionality as an analytic framework, and the conceptual argumentation of survivance, posited by Vizenor, we tell the stories of five Black male academics’ beyond the contextual temporality of ‘survival’ to consider their embodied refusal, and strategic agency, innovation and imaginative continuity and presence in academia as ‘survivance’ in the context of persistent forms of colonial subjugation and marginalisation. This study highlights implications for higher education policy and practice, particularly how institutions might embrace an infinitude of ways of knowing and being, through a relational orientation that centres care, equality, and co-liberation where difference and plurality are not framed as problems to be fixed, hierarchised, or annihilated.