When Expertise Is Questioned: A Black Feminist Reflection on Knowledge, Legitimacy, and the PhD Journey

Black feminist scholars have long insisted that Black women’s lived experiences are not only valid forms of knowledge; they are also necessary forms of knowledge. This has always resonated with me. But the deeper question I keep returning to is this:

How much of our lived experience do we actually believe?

Because in academic spaces, our knowledge is so often repackaged as emotion, anger, disappointment, bitterness, or some imagined insecurity about our careers not progressing “like our white sisters.” The intellectual labour we bring is frequently reframed as personal grievance rather than expertise.

I felt this acutely at the beginning of my PhD journey.

The Moment My Expertise Was Dismissed

A professor suggested, quite casually, that I should consider repeating my master’s degree because it was “so long ago.” I remember sitting there, stunned.

My master’s was completed at a highly prestigious university in the United Kingdom. My clinical work had been grounded in research for years. I was not returning to study because I lacked knowledge, I was returning to extend it.

So what was she really saying?

The message landed sharply: My knowledge was not relevant. My education was not current. My expertise was not legitimate.

It was the beginning of a subtle but persistent deconstruction of my confidence, a slow erosion of my sense of authority in research spaces I had worked in for decades.

The Politics of Undermining Black Women’s Knowledge

Looking back, I can see the pattern clearly.

The researchers around me often lacked the practical understanding of how research projects are built, how papers are deconstructed, how ideas are generated. Yet somehow, I was the one being questioned.

This is the familiar choreography of Black women’s intellectual devaluation:

• Our knowledge is scrutinised.

• Our competence is doubted.

• Our education is treated as inferior.

• Our confidence is chipped away until we begin to question ourselves.

And all of this happens in institutions where the “experts” have reached the pinnacle of their careers, institutions that still carry the residue of policies that once explicitly excluded Black people. In my case, I was attempting a PhD in a country that, not long ago, had a no‑Black migration policy.

So yes, the questioning of my qualifications was not neutral. It was political.

The Silent Violence of Being Disregarded

What made it worse was the silence.

There was no real dialogue. No curiosity about who I was. No depth of conversation. Just a sense of discomfort in my presence, as though my being there disrupted an unspoken order.

I felt passed over. I felt gossiped about. I felt like my expertise was something they needed to dismantle before they could impose their own agenda on how I should conduct my research.

But here’s the turning point:

I chose not to internalise their doubts. I recognised them as nonsensical opinions from people who had no understanding of what it means to be a Black woman navigating academia in a historically exclusionary landscape.

This refusal to internalise their gaze was an act of resistance, a Black feminist reclamation of my own intellectual authority.

Moving Into the Next Stage of My PhD Journey

As I step into the next phase of my PhD, I am holding onto this clarity:

My knowledge is legitimate. My experience is evidence. My expertise is not up for debate.

And I am also holding onto the truth that many Black women in academia experience similar forms of erasure, appropriation, and dismissal.

Which is why this reflection is not just personal; it’s communal.

A personal reflection on starting my PhD at UTS in 2017 by Dianne Morris 

At my big sister Paulette's request, and in the wake of the Jason Arday tragedy, I decided to write this series of blog posts about my journey in academia. 

In 2017, I began the process of applying for a scholarship at the University of Technology Sydney.  Before I left the UK for Australia, my research mentor had given me a paper on workforce planning, one he thought would interest me, not realising how directly it would shape what came next. I was already in contact with one of the paper's investigators, an adjunct professor at UTS who was well known in the UK, 

Before submitting my application, on a sunny Sydney day on UTS campus, I met with a professor, the paper clutched in my hand. The paper I held so tightly in my hand carried the names of two professors I had previously encountered. I thought that my own PhD would explore that same subject, workforce planning, but from a different angle. I chose to focus on Midwifery, my own profession, an area I felt would be more psychosocially accepting than my first experience doing research with doctors, where I had not felt fully accepted by the midwifery world of academia. I wanted to be accepted and belong as an academic within my own field of Midwifery.

 During my meeting with this professor, I talked through the research ideas I had been forming. She was friendly, open, and genuinely interested in my point of view. I remember feeling that she would be the perfect person to support me through the next fours years of the journey I was about to embark on. It was partway through that conversation that I realised she, too, was one of the joint investigators on the very paper my mentor had handed me, and I held tightly in my hand. Workforce planning had been my passion from the very first time I did research with Medical Doctors and academics in a prestigious research institute in London.

Two professors. Different sides of the world. Same research paper. Same types of institutions. Same way of seeing the world. I put this all down to a magical coincidence. 

Then began the prospect of writing my project proposal. I had limited access to technology at home,  just an Apple computer, which I was not at all used to, and I was still finding my way around how to use it for writing essays. I managed to put something together. The professor at UTS I had been speaking with had asked me to send her drafts before submission, and because I trusted her,  trusted her ability to understand what I was trying to get across in my research proposal,  I sent her drafts on several occasions in the lead-up to the submission deadline. The final submission was rough, more than rough, because my computer program crashed and I was not able to go back and edit the document before sending it to her. I sent her what I had, and hoped she did not judge my writing ability too harshly. 

Underneath the stress, I was genuinely excited; I was opening up the analytical, critical-thinking part of my brain that had been put on hold for years while I got married and moved to Australia. That part of me had not been allowed to come forward in a long time, and that is exactly why it felt so exciting. I did not tell my husband I was applying for the PhD. He was not the most positive or supportive person in my life.

Part of my reasoning for not telling my husband was that I might not get the scholarship at all, and I did not want to be discouraged before I had even started; discouragement was his default response rather than encouragement. So I put that aside and submitted the proposal as it was, making sure all the documentation was complete. One piece of advice from that experience: if something is missing when you are applying for anything like this, do not leave it blank, flag it, and let the form reader know you have not overlooked that part of the application, just that the information was not available yet.

I submitted the proposal, and a few weeks later I got the news that I had been accepted into the PhD program at UTS, and that I had received a full scholarship for the entire duration of my studies. I was so excited I did not know what to do with myself. I kept it to myself and just sat with it, marinating in that glow you get when you realise you have achieved something big, entirely on your own, without encouragement from anyone. I had not told a single person in my personal life. I wanted this to be my journey, my work,  all mine. I did not want to have to thank anybody for helping me through it.