Questioning the disconnect: UNIDPAD and academic knowledge-making about racialised minorities in Northern Ireland

Normative frames, such as the SDGs and UNIDPAD, created hope for addressing global injustices, indignities and misrecognition. However, the targets of such frames are often disconnected from and unconscious about the politics of representation and authorship in academia.
This presentation shares findings from a mixed-method study which sought to comprehend factors (in)forming academic research practice about, and with, locally under-represented populations in Northern Ireland – specifically ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘migrants’.
The repositories of Northern Ireland’s research-intensive institutions have recorded only 209 relevant outputs (including reports, journal articles, books, blogs et cetera) published between 1994-2022. These were systematically reviewed and mapped by author, methodology, subject matter, funding, recommendations and so on. Drawing from a Critical Discourse Analysis of this mapping, insights will be shared about the ways in which ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘migrants’, including ‘Africans’, are constructed and positioned therein. This will include consideration of the relations to various minoritised and racialised groups, identities, discourses; including to the dominant ‘communities’. It will also include mapping of participation to explore the relation between the authoring of knowledge, its authorisation, and those studied. These indicate the possibly that, for local people of colour, there is a broken pipeline to powerful positions of intellectual leadership.
Insights about the agency, experiences and sustainability of the practices of academic authors (n=32) who published about ‘ethnic minorities’ and ‘migrants’ of Northern Ireland were generated via semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. While the findings indicate that academic citizenry was generally shaped by a hidden curriculum of race unconsciousness and coloniality within that context; solidaristic academic practices, including the significant contributions of women academics and migrant academics, offer a counter-archive of possibility.

Acknowledgements
Research Assistant: Yvonne Moynihan
Partner: The Migrant and Minority Ethnic Thinktank of Northern Ireland
Funding: British Academy and Leverhulme Trust