What is Acquiescent Silence

Since the 1990s, the scale and speed of cross-border academic mobility has notably increased. Universities around the world are recruiting across national boundaries and increasingly employ a diverse and transnational academic workforce. Ferdman argues that working toward inclusion in diverse organizations (such as universities) can present many challenges and tensions and is complex and multifaceted, because of issues concerning safety, voice, authenticity, equity, and equality for people across multiple identity groups. This chapter draws on 17 semi-structured interviews with transnational academics from 11 countries employed by eight different universities across Australia to explore the workplace experiences of diversity and inclusion in terms of their voice and/or silence. The findings indicate that although the respondents believe in having constructive forms of voice in their workplace, they often reported that they were reluctant to speak up.