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Given the lack of research on the lived experiences of racially minoritized women in academia, this paper provides primary accounts of their experience with impostorization. Impostorization refers to the policies, practices and seemingly innocuous interactions that make or intend to make individuals (i.e. women of color) question their intelligence, competence and sense of belonging.

To explore experiences with impostorization and identify effective coping strategies to counter the debilitating effects of impostorization, 17 semi-structured interviews were conducted with women of color PhD students and faculty at universities throughout the USA and across disciplines.

While impostor syndrome, which refers to feelings of inadequacy that individuals experience and a fear that they will be discovered as fraud, has garnered much attention, the present accounts suggest that the more vexing issue in academia is impostorization, not impostor syndrome. Forms of impostorization include microaggressions, grateful guest syndrome, invisibility and inclusion taxation.

The interviews reveal the implicit and explicit ways in which academia impostorizes racially minoritized women scholars and the coping strategies that they use to navigate and survive within academia. The accounts demonstrate the pernicious effects of labeling feelings of inadequacy and unbelonging as impostor syndrome rather than recognizing that the problem is impostorization. This is a call to change the narrative and go from a fix-the-individual to a fix-the-institution approach.

Mohammad Azharuddin's arrival in professional cricket served, to quote Karl Marx, as a reform of consciousness that awakened the sport ‘from its dream about itself’. His expertise with the bat invoked the wide expanse of human sensorium, provoking reactions of shock and admiration among observers. In this chapter, I examine Azharuddin's life in cricket and public through a dialectical probing of the relationship between shock and aesthetics. Azhar and cricket appear as a productive terrain to carry out the analysis, as it pushes the possibility of what or who can be considered as a valid subject for theoretical scrutiny. Taking cues from Walter Benjamin and CLR James, I theorise the shock effects created by a cricketer most unusual. From his wristy wizardry with the bat to his appointment as captain of the Indian men's cricket team during the rise of Hindu nationalism in the country, Azharuddin's presence and popularity extended beyond the boundaries that are often imposed on a sportsperson. Through his involvement in the match-fixing scandal that was exposed at the turn of the 21st century, Azhar (the name by which he was popularly known) challenged the mores of a game that had emphasised Victorian notions of purity on and off the field. For the purposes of this chapter, I discuss how Azhar constructed a bodily discourse that pushes us to reassess our very notions of art and aesthetics.