This talk explores how Dr Ozturk negotiated racism in an understudied but significant work context, business and management conferences, where power and politics imbue social interactions among academics. Drawing on auto-ethnographic insights, he examined key experiences and incidents from his conference career, paying particular attention to how he has struggled emotionally with race-inflected identity challenges. The data reveal multiple paradoxes and dilemmas that relate to my professional identity at the juncture of emotions and identity work. In particular, He shows how his racialised professional identity is fragmented, and thus virtually impossible to reconcile into a linearly experienced core self. Yet, the vignettes he analysed indicate that he nevertheless actively seeked some semblance of identity coherence. Moreover, on the one hand, emotions shape the particular strategies of resistance he enacted as identity work. On the other hand, his identity work is generative of a complex web of emotions. Thus, in this talk, emotions and identity work operate as relational phenomena that are mutually constitutive, and that go beyond an individual-level process, encoded by the effects of social contexts within which they transpire.

Mustafa Bilgehan Ozturk is Senior Lecturer in Management in the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary University of London. He holds key school-wide leadership roles such as the Co-Director of BSc Business Management and the Co-Chair of the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion Committee. Dr Ozturk operates in the broad area of human resource management and organisational behaviour, with a primary specialisation in workplace equality, diversity and inclusion. His research aims to delineate privileges and disadvantages associated with gender, gender identity, sexual orientation as well as race and ethnicity in organisations.