The invisible ink that marks our paths: lived experience perceptions of academic legitimacy

Despite institutional discourses of diversity and inclusion, the epistemic authority of neurodivergent scholars, queer educators, and care work in higher education remains filtered through hierarchies that privilege normative knowledge systems and quantifiable outputs. In this paper, we reflect as a neurodivergent educator, a queer scholar, and a mother navigating care work amid AI-driven academic reform, not through evaluation of any single university, but instead on how systemic exclusions have led us to enact a politics of resistance in our scholarly work. Using autobiografiction, an ethically moderated form of self-writing blending lived experience with fictionalisation, we generated three reflexive narratives in a 3-month collaboration guided by shared prompts on belonging, recognition, and legitimacy. Using alternative epistemologies allowed us to trace the indelible ink of how governance frameworks materially impact scholars in the academy who are otherwise. The invisible ink that can mark academic life is enunciated in this paper, and while we critique, we also acknowledge our own entanglement within these same systems, as our participation in publication, recognition, and performative accountability is inseparable from the critique itself. We approach our analysis from a position of equipollence, recognising the equal weight of institutional complicity and resistance within our scholarly practice.