19 september 2019

Mélissandre Varin,

1st year PhD candidate – University of Luxembourg/ Warwick University.
Title of the dissertation: A fleur de peau: The politics of (in)visibility, the case of French Black mixed race individuals, dissecting a hyper-visible Black skin that silences the mosaic of multicultural heritages.
Description: My PhD project brings together the postcolonial body and decolonial methodologies to reconsider what doing research could mean.
I have been made to believe that Western systems of knowledge were the only way forward. I am only starting to deconstruct this fact – (re)thinking knowledge as socially and historically constructed. I share a claim articulated by the Nigerian Feminist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, individuals with African diasporic identity must be studied in their own terms (2005).
I have noticed that nothing was easy – neither about exposing the self – nor about reaching one’s own narratives to engage in (auto)ethnography.
“The more I read.
The less I know. You know.
I do – I don’t.”
(Framing refraining fragmentations, melissandre, 2019)