‘Othered’ early careering: What is it like not to be born at the finish line?

From Audry Laurde’s ‘your silence will not protect you’, we learn that if we are to mobilise words towards action, we must first speak of stories that remain hidden under the name of fear: fear of judgement, fear of not being heard, or welcomed. In this provocative autoethnographic text, we interrogate taken for granted assumptions about privileges and disadvantages. We unpack the multifaceted meaning of ‘early careering’ to reveal, and question intertwined power dynamics that reproduce otherness and silence. We share our early career experiences as Egyptian and Vietnamese immigrant academics in Business Schools, foreigners, single parents, and women of colour in the UK to problematise the assumed career linearity and gender and racial neutrality that marginalise the lived experiences of the Other. In vocalising our embodied struggles and frustrations, we write for/with/to each other and those who look or experience the world like us. Our hope is that in reading our shared provocation you feel seen, encouraged and empowered, as we did, to claim agency over writing spaces as markers of resistance to expose systemic marginalisation and exclusion in the neoliberal academy that was not created for people like us.