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TASA Thursday: Decentring migration scholars, centring paradoxes: Autoethnography as resistance

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About this event

Join us at 12:30pm (AEDT) on 25th September 2025 for this month's TASA Thursday Session which will explore 'Decentring migration scholars, centring paradoxes: Autoethnography as resistance.'

Studies aimed at ‘decolonising’ or decentering the academy have been growing rapidly and attention has been increasingly paid to the role of scholars. However, migration scholars have been relatively reluctant to place their positionality as migrants (and often as native
intellectuals) under the microscope. To decenter migration studies, migration scholars must first decenter themselves.

This session argues that autoethnographies that celebrate paradoxes is a method that could disrupt colonial paradigms of binaries. I approach this argument through using autoethnography to decentre myself as first, a ‘migrant’ through thinking about diaspora and hybridity, and second, as a ‘scholar’ through thinking of myself as part of the white academy. I introduce the framework of paradoxical integration to suggest it can help
us to reject colonial binaries: opposites (such as “colonizer” and “native”) need not be in tension, but can interact to form a state of wholeness. Drawing also from this framework, I conclude that autoethnography, with its ‘softness’ -affect, emotions and stories - can be a strategy to overcome ‘hardness’ or the violence of colonisation.

Event Details:

Date: Thursday 25th April 2025
Time: 12:30pm - 13:30pm (AEDT)
Format: Zoom Webinar
Cost: complimentary

Your Speakers:

Dr Sylvia Ang

Dr Sylvia Ang is Lecturer in Sociology at Monash University. Her research with migrants is interested in the production and experiences of inequalities, with a focus on ethnic relations, class, gender, postcolonialism and decolonisation. She has published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Mobilities, and Ethnic and Racial Studies, among others. Her book Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese migrants (Amsterdam University Press) was awarded the Raewyn Connell prize in 2024.