To be clear, not at SIPS probably never will be, but given you mentioned NAs... I personally have always been at least with one foot in the anglosphere and I struggle deeply with how harmful overrepresentation of NAs is in every facet of academic life both on and offline.
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I like to call this whole thing very vaguely Western privilege because North Americans might be at the epicenter but North and Central Europeans and Australians also are highly highly represented and understood, while people from outside this sphere are just not.
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I feel like every experience I have and every social-work interaction (like at conferences but also other events with similar networking components) I have to explain myself deeply including even giving a short history of my own country to have a full conversation with people.
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It might sound as not that bad, but imagine if every time you interacted with somebody about your research you also had to give a quick history of you & your homeland. It might seem like I'm exaggerating but I'm sadly not. I have to go through genocide, war, what ethnicity I am.
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This deeply taints my interactions with people and makes it much harder for me to have a chat with them. I feel respected often and listened to, but I also feel like a museum exhibit too.
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And I'm not that clueless or arrogant to assume this is just me, anybody who has roots outside the West (I have seen it) is expected to do this type of education to their academic peers. It's epistemic exploitation, see:https://philpapers.org/rec/NOREE-2
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Replying to @o_guest
Yup, pretty much. I kinda stopped thinking about it and have a relatively well practiced a) tourist board answer or b) short history lesson.
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I do feel how this outside gaze molded my own relationship to where I'm from - I kinda developed a reflex to orientalize my own heritage, a reflex I'm trying to consciously control now.
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Replying to @ivanflis
I like saying I'm from the Middle East or the Levant or Western Asia without saying which country. Just to avoid the specific stuff of "are you Greek or Turkish?" blah blah. It doesn't actually work but it helps with the inevitable geography lesson.
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Replying to @o_guest
Do you then get the "wait, you say Cyprus is levantine/middle eastern?"
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Certainly. Often people literally think it's 2 hours away, especially Germans for some reason.
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