WOPE Seminar Series. "From resisting to rejecting: Rehearsing refusal-in/as-action
Published: 8 October 2025
19 November 2025.Dr Amal Abdellatif, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University
Dr Amal Abdellatif, Newcastle Business School, Northumbria Univversity, UK
"From resisting to rejecting: Rehearsing refusals-in/as-action"
Wednesday, 19 November 2025. 15:00-16:30
Room 101AB, Sir Charles Wilson Building
Abstract
Racialised academics in predominantly white UK and Eurocentric academia are increasingly invited to be included in different academic spaces, from institutional committees to conference discussion panels. Building on own account of ‘being included’, this session unpacks how when such invitations are disingenuous and exploitative, the racialised is instrumentally utilised as a smokescreen to reinscribe white patriarchal colonial structures and relations producing hypervisibility, tokenisation, alienation and dehumanisation that render deviant racialised Black/Brown bodies. With such harmful experiences being nested in the racialised body’s everyday (re)negotiation of socio-political relations and structures, some racialised academics may end up quiet quitting, walking away or exiting such spaces. Drawing inspirations from Black and decolonial feminist philosophies of refusal, this session underscores the epistemic significance and feminist generative possibilities of refusal in/as action.
Bio
Dr Amal Abdellatif is an Assistant Professor of Organisation Studies at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. Amal’s research centres around inequalities at different intersections of difference, otherness and marginalisation, and alternative forms of feminist organising. In exploring these themes, Amal draws upon diverse theoretical constructs, adopts unconventional qualitative methodologies and the use of visual and art-based approaches. Her work is published in top leading academic journals incusing Journal of Business Ethics, Organization, Gender, Work and Organization, Culture and Organization. She holds board roles in different non-for-profit organisations and is the Social Media Editor at Management Learning Journal, as well as Media and Social Media Section Co-Editor-in-Chief at Culture and Organization Journal.
For further information, please contact business-school-research@glasgow.ac.uk
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First published: 8 October 2025