As a response to cultural reckonings in the wake of Black Lives Matter, the media and other institutions have become more interested in drawing on people with lived experience to talk about racism and its contemporary manifestations. While this is a welcome development and many individuals (including myself) and communities stand to benefit from it after a long history of racist stereotyping and misrepresentation, there are a couple more issues to contend with. Firstly, it is assumed those with lived experience do not possess analytical expertise, or the ‘neutrality’ needed for analysis. Secondly, those chosen to talk about their lived experience are often drawn upon to talk solely about their personal histories, without making reference to connected racial struggles.

In the wake of this year’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, I want to extend the central idea of El Gibbs’s 2022 essay on ‘lived expertise’ and argue that in media accounts of racism, analytical expertise and lived experience ought to be valued together and even in the same body.

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Every time an ‘Indian’ issue hits the headlines in Australia, whether through the visit of a head of state or an upcoming local election in which the diaspora is being ‘courted’, I inwardly sigh in anticipation of the media requests for commentary to come. And they do come. I say yes to some of them, even though my current research doesn’t have much to do with the Indian subcontinent. However, I do still produce work on the changing media, cultural, and political dynamics of the Indian diaspora in Australia as it is an emerging and important area (and I am somewhat embedded in it). When doing this work, I often collaborate with colleagues in other disciplines and in the community and arts sector whenever I feel that the project would benefit from their lived experiences as well as their expertise.

So why do I comply with some requests to comment on issues that I clearly don’t always have professional research expertise in? Perhaps the better question is — why do I not get contacted to provide commentary on topics that are my direct area of interest and that I have recently published in? One side of the answer likely lies in us being temporally situated in a cultural moment when many producers and editors are trying to reckon with the post-Black Lives Matter discourse. Many are genuinely attempting to make sure that lived experience is represented in stories about racisalised communities. And this is mostly a welcome development.

However, what then happens to those of us who may embody aspects of the lived experience but have other kinds of expertise that has been developed from it, but is not confined to it? In the case of my own research trajectory, it has evolved from personal experience of civil conflict in the Kashmir region as well as ancestral histories of partition and forced displacement in the subcontinent to an interest and expertise in contemporary refugee issues in Australia (where I have lived for over two decades). Despite this, I seldom get contacted about this aspect of my personally-inflected professional experience and make peace with less related, and often essentialised commentary about a homogenous ‘Indian’ experience.

As I head out of a Dadirri (deep listening) workshop organised by the Indigenous portfolio of my faculty, I am thinking about how we placate everyday racism by saying yes to so many invitations that need a response that is more along these lines – ‘You are asking the wrong person; and possibly also asking the wrong questions…You should be listening instead.’ When you inhabit a racialised body that is differently advantaged/disadvantaged in a range of institutional settings, you get used to only being picked on to provide décor or a stamp of approval for matters that were decided elsewhere. Some institutions are changing and engaging in genuine collaborations with First Nations and other racially marginalised communities, but they need to be careful not to fall into the trap of essentialising our experiences, either.

It is on this note of caution that I propose building on the timely concept of ‘lived expertise’ to allow those with adjacent experiences on racialisation as well as expertise on how race operates to use the personal as a starting point without reducing it to the whole story. In her well-known work on ‘speaking nearby’, Vietnamese-American academic and filmmaker Trinh Minh-ha describes this as an appropriate approach as it is:

a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or claiming it.

Taking up the challenge of positionality, Korean-American poet and writer Cathy Park Hong explains that ‘writing nearby’ her Asian American condition means that she is compelled to “write nearby other racial experiences.” This means that she is not merely interested in writing about racial identity in a way that is a reaction to whiteness and often siloes particular ethnic experiences.

In our most recent (and ongoing) responses to the genocide in Gaza, then, we must heed the words of Palestinian voices to centre them, but still remember to show solidarity by writing, analysing, and protesting nearby. Our own ethnic communities may have undergone a similar or different forms of racialisation, and that gives us the responsibility to not just speak up and take up invites that pertain to a personal story only. This dimension of ‘lived expertise’ must ‘analyse nearby’ even as it speaks of personal and collective trauma. It must insist that analysis is never neutral and that neutrality is never just.

Acknowledgement: I am grateful to my colleague and mentor, Associate Professor Tanja Dreher who first introduced me to El Gibbs’s brilliant essay that succinctly articulated many of my long-standing concerns about expertise across the media and academia. We were fortunate to set this as a reading at a “Beyond Benign Diversity” workshop held at UNSW in 2023 and plan to build on these conversations at an international symposium this year.

Photo: Kelly