Surviving an academic boys’ club: a black feminist autoethnography of PhD icking , workplace bullying and mobbing in higher education

This Black Feminist Autoethnography (BFA) examines the systemic workplace bullying and mobbing I experienced as a woman lecturer in a masculinist academic department within a patriarchal university in Botswana. Framed by Black feminist scholarship, the paper centres lived experience, anger, and resistance as legitimate forms of knowledge production. Drawing on personal documentation, including emails, voice notes, and journal entries compiled between 2022 and 2025, the study treats storytelling as both analytic and liberatory practice. It asks what constitutes workplace bullying and how mobbing is experienced and enacted. The article extends scholarship on workplace bullying and mobbing by examining the tactical weaponisation of students by male academics. These practices were normalised by institutional hierarchies and silence, causing serious psychological and physical harm while exposing inadequate institutional responses and leadership complicity. The autoethnography argues that workplace bullying in academic institutions functions as structured violence sustained by patriarchal authority and institutional silence, calling for policy reform, structural change, and collective action to challenge silencing and create safer academic environments.