“Does this happen to everyone?”: Women professors of color reflect on experiences in the academy

Abstract

Women of Color in higher education often experience cultural taxation alongside feelings of invisibility and hypervisibility. In this paper, two women faculty of color use duoethnography, a dialogic research method, to unpack a shared journal that documented their own experiences of navigating and negotiating predominantly White academic spaces. By analyzing their experiences, the researchers discovered that their shared journal revealed similar patterns documented by other women faculty of color. The dialogic nature of duoethnography also led to transformational understandings of their positionality in the academy, self-healing, and development of strategies for moving forward. Vignettes from their shared journal and dialogic excerpts are discussed.

Keywords:

• Duoethnography
• faculty of color
• higher education
• women of color

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Madora Soutter and Jennifer Dorsey for their generous support of this work and Sherry Deckman for her feedback and for pointing us toward duoethnography in the first place. We are endlessly grateful.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Because this project grew iteratively out of our experiences as faculty of color in a predominantly White institution (PWI), we begin here with a narrative.

2 We developed this term to describe our own institution and others like it, which have an explicit focus on issues diversity. We use it to describe institutions that are ‘working on’ diversity, by building offices dedicated to diversity, adding these issues in ongoing strategic planning, and engaging in community activities. At the time of this writing, our institution was fairly newly engaged in all of these efforts.

3 Both of us have thought of ourselves as quantitative researchers, and we still use these methods. We had training in qualitative methods, but this study is our introduction to duoethnography. Perhaps it is unwise to point out our novice status, but to us, this learning process feels essential to our dialogue.

4 We realize that duoethnographers do not typically refer to their analytic discussions as ‘results’, but we use the term here intentionally. Given our training, this work pushed us to expand our epistemological thinking. But we use the term here in an emblematic way, as we are unlearning some of what we were taught and merging various versions of our research selves.

5 We have cleaned these dialogue transcriptions to remove false starts, pauses, etc. as is consistent with duoethnographic methods.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christina L. Dobbs

Christina L. Dobbs is an assistant professor of English Education at the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development at Boston University. Her research focuses on adolescent writing in the disciplines, disciplinary literacy, and teacher professional learning. Her work has been published in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, Reading Research Quarterly, Professional Development in Education, and the Journal of School Leadership. Her recent books include Investigating Disciplinary Literacy (2017) and Disciplinary Literacy Inquiry & Instruction (2019).

Christine Montecillo Leider

Christine Montecillo Leider is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Language Education at Boston University. Her research focuses on bilingual language and literacy practices; policy and civil rights issues regarding teacher training and multilingual learners’ access to education; teacher beliefs about language; and developing bilingual models of reading comprehension. Her work has been published in Reading and Writing, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and TESOL Journal.