ABSTRACT
As a scholar of colour I have long noticed a major part of me wills to resist academic writing norms. It is hard to explain. In this auto-ethnography I try. I trace how epistemic racism works within me and at the academic level to stifle certain ways I wish to speak and write. But it also produces certain other ways. Indeed, at the very least it ignited a desire for epistemic disobedience. From my undergrad to my PhD, and as an early career researcher, I have harboured a wish to not play along, and this typically plays out through a desire to break writing rules, or at least bend the establishment’s expectations of how I should speak. For instance, I began to interpret the rigid form of a typical essay paper as something that shaped the content of my thinking and the ways I should resist racism.
