Dina Zoe Belluigi

Prof Dina Zoe Belluigi

Twitter: @DZBelluigi

Research Interests

My interests are necessarily broad ranging, as fundamentally I am concerned about the role universities' and intellectuals' representations have/ will play in society. In addition to critique, I seek to understand and archive the ways of doing and being otherwise.

Thus my work falls within critical university studies, where I am intrigued by the formation of artists and academics in places of social conflict and division during/ since the Cold War. More broadly I am interested in resistence to oppression and the formation/ dulling of critical consciousness in academic citizens and artists, and how this is entangled in constructions of social categories, including ethnicity, racialisation, casteism, gender et cetera. Methodologically, I am moving more towards the evocative with consideration of the temporal (past, present, future), rather than those approaches which value measurement, narrative realism and the closure of certainty.

Teaching/Acheivements

I am pleased to learn from many amazing, wise and ethical people about ways in which to challenge/ study/ witness oppression, injustice and minoritisation within the university and, wider, within society. Below I list some of the organisations we have created/ from which I learn for those reading this to consider contributing too:

The Advancing Critical University Studies Across Africa network

African and Caribbean Support Organisation Northern Ireland (ACSONI)

The Migrant and Minority Ethnic ThinkTank (MMETT)

Scholars at Risk Ireland Committee The Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE)

Ongoing Projects

An ongoing concern is the question of 'intellectual authority' at the borderlands of the academy in contexts undergoing social transition. A current project 'Counter-narratives of author-ity in transition: Women in the Indian academy' is a collaboration with Dr Nandita Dhawan (Jadavpur University), Dr Asha Achuthan (Tata Institute of Social Sciences) and Dr Ulrike Vieten (Queen’s University Belfast). Through oral life histories and photo-talk, we are eliciting the recollections of intellectuals who have influenced change in Indian society, and who, because they were first-generation academics also weathered struggle within the university, through experiences of marginalisation due to systems of patriarchy, heteronormativity, religious supremacy and casteism. Interpretations will be enhanced through creative arts research practice by four artists, opening up our interpretations to those working within civil society organisations and formal educational institutions.

This is informed by a prior project 'Counter // Narratives of Higher Education' a collection of video artworks were created by artists interpreting, engaging and re-imaging first-generation academics' life experiences within the rapid changes to universities in South Africa, India, Syria and Zimbabwe since the end of the Cold War. See here for the artworks and more https://counternarrativefilm.wixsite.com/counter

Publications

Belluigi, D. Z. (Ed). Forthcoming. Being in Shadow and Light: Post/conflict academia. Open Book Publishers. Anticipated publication date: January 2025. https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0427
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0427

Belluigi, D.Z. and Keet, A. (eds). Forthcoming. Emancipatory Imaginations: Advancing Critical University Studies. Stellenbosch: African Sun Media. https://doi.org/10.52779/9781991260680

Related to Politics of Minoritisation in the Minority World

Belluigi, D. Z. 2024. Signs of dysconscious racism and xenophobiaism in knowledge production and the formation of academic researchers: A national study. Academic Ethics, online first. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-024-09545-4

Belluigi, D. Z., Arday, J. & O’Keeffe. 2024. The routes to intellectual authority in a prior colonial empire: Continued racialised, geopolitical inequalities in the academic staff composition and employment conditions of UK universities. Race, Ethnicity and Education,online first. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2024.2398491.

Belluigi, D. Z. & Joseph, E. 2023. Within the award funding gap: the im-possibility of an All Ireland Africanist network in 2020, African Identities, 21:4, 857-879, https://doi.org/10.1080/14725843.2021.1986367

Arday, J., Belluigi, D. Z., Thomas, D. 2021. Attempting to break the chain: Reimaging inclusive pedagogy and decolonising the curriculum within the academy. Educational Philosophy and Theory,53:3, 298-313 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1773257

Related to Politics of Minoritisation in the Majority World

Belluigi, D. Z. 2024. Transformative change in democratising South Africa's academic employment? Shifts in academic labour and its racialised labour force. In Stranchan, G. [Ed]. Research Handbook on academic labour markets. London, Edward Elgar, p.233-243. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803926865.00028

Belluigi, D. Z. 2023. De-idealising the problem of academic freedom and academic autonomy: Exploring alternative readings for scholarship of South African higher education. Fataar, A., Motala, S., & Keet. A. [Eds]. Special Issue: Critical University Studies in Techno-rational times, for the Southern African Review of Education, 28 (1) pp. 11-30. https://journals.co.za/doi/abs/10.10520/ejc-sare_v28_n1_a2 or Access here https://pure.qub.ac.uk/files/553663734/Deidealising_academic_freedom_FPV.pdf

Dhawan, N., Belluigi, D. Z., & Idahosa, G. 2023. “There is a hell and heaven difference among faculties who are from quota and those who are non-quota”: Under the veneer of the ‘New Middle Class’ production of Indian public universities. Higher Education 18, 271-296. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-022-00932-7.

Belluigi, D. Z. & Thondhlana, G. 2023. Transformation or ‘Training the Dog’? Approaches to Access Within an Historically White University in South Africa. In: Gutman, M., Jayusi, W., Beck, M., Bekerman, Z. (eds) To Be a Minority Teacher in a Foreign Culture. Springer, Cham. pp. 471-487. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25584-7_30

Belluigi, D. Z. & Thondhlana, G. 2022. “Your skin has to be elastic”: The politics of belonging as a selected Black academic at a ‘transforming’ South African university. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 35(2): 141-162. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2020.1783469

Belluigi, D. Z. & Meistre, B. A. 2021. Authoring author-ity in transition? The ‘Counter // Narratives of Higher Education’ Project. Video of paper for the conference Visualising Social Changes: Seen and Unseen of the International Visual Sociology Association Annual Conference. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10641677 watch on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnQIBiGM9Uc

Queen's University Belfast

Dina Zoe Belluigi

Queen's University Belfast