ABSTRACT. This article examines how higher education traverses what I call the Academic Fairytale: a governing story that organises aspiration, legitimacy and belonging through colonial and institutional scripts. Drawing on vā wayfinding and critical autoethnography and interpreted through the Samoan relational analytic grounds of vā and tōfā sa‘ili, the article reads three genealogical and autoethnographic scenes through the figures of Cinderella, Snow White and Nafanua. From the standpoint of a Samoan diasporic woman in Aotearoa New Zealand, these scenes illuminate how meritocracy, benevolent inclusion and institutional recognition operate in higher education. I argue that fairytales function not only as metaphors, but as narrative infrastructures that shape whose knowledge is heard, whose bodies are made legible and whose belonging remains conditional. In response, the article positions Nafanua as a genealogical and epistemic interruption that reorients authority away from institutional validation and toward relation, obligation and inherited responsibility. In doing so, the article contributes to Indigenous and diasporic scholarship on higher education by demonstrating how relational knowledge exceeds the academy’s dominant terms of recognition.

Keywords: vā wayfinding; critical autoethnography; diasporic belonging; higher education; Samoan relationality; Indigenous knowledge systems 

How to cite: Iosefo, F. (2026). The academic fairytale was never ours: Vā wayfinding, diasporic belonging and higher education. Knowledge Cultures, 14(2), 18–37. https://doi.org/10.22381/kc14220262

Received February 28, 2026 • Received in revised form June 22, 2026
Accepted July 15, 2026 • Available online August 1, 2026