‘Where are you from?’ and ‘foreigners’

Abstract

This paper discusses the discursive ways in which a group of well-established academics living in the UK construct their sense of identity in their personal everyday lives-outside the context of academia, by projecting their self-perception vis-à-vis how they believe they are perceived by ‘the white perceiving subject’ (Rosa and Flores 2017). While race and accent are the lens through which these academics believe are perceived whereby, they are labelled ‘foreigners’ and questioned about who they are through what can be described as a politically loaded question of ‘where are you from?’, they resist being framed within these categories. This is by labelling themselves differently in ways which defy identity ascription and assert their own sense of identity. This paper reveals that experiences of exclusion and discrimination permeate the lives of these professionals who are ascribed identities based on perceptions of how they look and sound.