Building on the recent intensified calls to decolonise the curriculum in higher education in the UK and beyond, and on my modest initiatives amongst some colleagues, this paper explores the impact of the dominant Eurocentric curriculum on minoritised ethnic students, and their perspectives of our decolonising initiatives, with the aim of refining them. To do so, I exercise 'affective awareness', and 'decolonial reflexivity', working with my discomforts whilst engaging with 10 minoritised ethnic students in criminology purposively selected to participate in semi-structured interviews after completing self-administered questionnaires. Based on the findings of this work, I argue that for 'decolonising the curriculum' beyond the box-ticking exercise, it should involve more than broadening the canon and revising reading lists. It should engage in an uncomfortable unpacking of asymmetrical power relationships and a shift in the practices of knowledge production, in ways that include the students' perspective more closely.

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This critical autoethnography is an account of my experiences as a woman of color (WoC) academic at a predominantly White institution in the times of COVID-19 and the consequential turn to online teaching and learning. It reflects on how the pandemic has exacerbated my experiences of discrimination, marginalization, isolation, and the struggles to find a balance between my personal and professional identities. Guided by intersectionality, the article explores the ways in which multiple forms of inequality are perpetuated within academia through my own lived experiences. It also explores the ways in which I, as a WoC and an early career academic (ECA), learned to navigate the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, and motherhood amid the pandemic. In writing this article, my hope is to adjoin the voices of WoC in British Academia calling for an urgently needed open dialog with those in positions of power. K E Y W O R D Sacademia, COVID-19 pandemic, critical autoethnography, ethnicity, gender, intersectionality, motherhood, race, women of color PROLOGUE I wrote and rewrote this article while sitting at my dining table in my 50 m 2 (538 sq. ft.) flat, where I spent most of the COVID-19 lockdowns. In writing, I felt compelled to reflect on my feelings of apprehension, anger, frustration, and exhaustion. In only a few months of my appointment as a permanent lecturer in a British higher education institution, the "system faced a sudden transition to remote teaching and learning" (Malisch et al., 2020, p. 15738) because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The story I tell here is about my experiences during the pandemic. But for the reader to understand these experiences and their implications, I must first tell the story of my experiences before the pandemic; experiences that mirror many who preceded me, and certainly many who will follow. Despite feeling fortunate to be one of the few PhD graduates who find a career in British Academia, I am stumped by the inequalities I must endure. I was the first woman of color (WoC) appointed, and the least paid among all newly hired-both male and female in 2019. This is in addition to experiencing microaggressions, marginalization, dismissal, and other unpleasant situations. I share these experiences with the intent of encouraging academics from underrepresented populations to persevere.