This Is Not Just Hair Textured Knowing and Epistemic Entanglements. A Relational Critique of University Practices

This paper explores the politics of identity, belonging, and difference in higher
education through the metaphor of hair. Drawing on personal and collective stories from across the world, the authors: Curly/Mercy and Straight/Kate, use Indigenous and decolonial epistemologies to challenge dominant academic structures and knowledge systems. The narrative begins with a poetic exchange between the authors, revealing the internal tensions and inherited assumptions around hair, identity, and racialised belonging. These tensions become a gateway into deeper conversations about educational spaces, university ethics systems, and the lived experiences of those whose ways of being, knowing, and appearing are rendered marginal.

Rather than adopt a traditional academic structure, the paper unfolds through dialogue, first and third-person storytelling, poetry, and relational reflection. This approach resists extractive knowledge practices and centres story as both method and meaning-making tool. We share five stories, some deeply personal, others generously offered to us. Woven together, they speak to how institutions sort and limit knowledge and identity. In this work, hair becomes both metaphor and method.

We draw on decolonial and indigenous ethics and methodologies while also been guided by the principles of Ubuntu. Truth for us is relational and often reside within contradictions and as such relational accountability becomes pivotal in how we share, hold and honour stories. Ultimately, this paper invites the reader to embrace difference and discomfort while also acknowledging dialogue as instrumental in changing how we live and learn well together in a university space.