Understanding Female White Migrant Academics' Career Narratives: An Intersectional Feminist Standpoint Approach

This paper presents how a team of women researchers, with differing intersectional characteristics of race, family support, age, migration background, and career achievement, individually and (subsequently) collaboratively interpreted the career narratives of three white Western women migrant academics. Through auto‐ethnographical accounts, we share how each of the researchers' intersectionalities shaped their respective initial interpretations. Moreover, through joint collaborative questioning and analysis of their individual perspectives, the process of their collaborative “doing” of feminist standpoint research uncovered unconscious privilege and power dynamics among the co‐authors, leading to intense individual and collective reflexivity. A diverse intersectional research team facilitates a dynamic interplay between scholars' social locations and their evolving interpretations, moving beyond static understandings of standpoint. This underscores the bidirectional nature of knowledge production: Although social situatedness informs interpretation, engagement with diverse perspectives also reshapes scholars' own standpoints. Doing collaborative intersectional feminist standpoint research, therefore, leads to more comprehensive richer analysis where the power relations within a research team are also interrogated to spotlight inequality and exclusionary norms in academia. Drawing reflexively on our own diversity and intersectionalities can bring to light gender, motherhood, social class, ethnic, or racial marginalized positions and aid in understanding the othering process in career progression within academia. This reflexive collaborative research process involves intensive identity work, which is both emotionally exhausting and enlightening, prompting a united position on the intersectional inequalities among female academic migrants and the need for systemic change that questions dominant power structures and advocates an intersectional‐focused, inclusive, and broader evidence‐based academy.