Surviving the white higher education: shame, affect and resistance in women of colour academics’ lives

Women of colour academics in British higher education face racialised and gendered harm that is simultaneously structural, institutional, and affective. Existing frameworks have shed light on partial dimensions of this harm but have rarely been integrated into a unified account that explains how ideology, institutional practice, and emotional experience interact across levels of social reality. Drawing on twenty-seven semi-structured in-depth interviews with women of colour academics across Russell Group, pre-1992, and post-1992 English universities, this qualitative study adopts a phenomenological orientation grounded epistemologically in Critical Race Theory’s (CRT) counter-storytelling tradition. Data were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, with findings mapped across Macro, Meso, and Micro analytical levels. Against these pressures, participants enacted feel-back as a counter-affective practice of reclaiming voice and subjectivity through writing, liberatory pedagogy, and collective solidarity. From these findings, we develop the Racial Affective Burden (RAB) framework, identifying three mutually constitutive dynamics: imposition, accumulation, and reclamation.