Don’t be fooled with any naivety - universities exploit you with their eyes wide open and governments have been knowingly aiding them with their failure to intervene on the problem they began for decades. Get out quickly and use all of your amazing self to redefine what it means to be an academic.

Until you can see how bad it is, you cannot know how much fight you must put up. However small, how do you subvert universities and in doing so hold yourself to account?

Leaving academia was my act of radical self-care as an intersectional feminist, but I couldn’t see it at the time being clouded in deep grief of deep rejection by a system not designed to see the labour of women of colour. I’ve just read a workbook helping me reclaim who did the final rejecting, and with it restoration.

I taught students under the jacaranda tree to harness the power of nature as we learned together. I took my shoes off to resist the corporate image of what an academic is supposed to look like.

The very academic conceptual framework of “Bullshit”. Can’t argue that!

“Mindset is key” says Cynthia, but women of colour have barriers they can’t pretend away either and she knows this.