Negotiating Academic Learning and Research: The Spiritual Praxis of Graduate Students of Color

Abstract

Drawing on data collected in a qualitative study of racially minoritized faculty members, this article examines the challenges these faculty members faced in bringing different aspects of their spirituality into their scholarly work as graduate students. This article explores the questions: How do racially minoritized graduate students negotiate their spiritual identities and integrate their spiritual epistemologies and cultural knowledge into academic practices, and what challenges do they face in doing both? This article presents three salient themes: sacred subjectivity in student-focused research, spiritual praxis in the classroom, and new visions for inclusive spiritual expression in the academy. By focusing our analysis on study participants' strategies for resisting pressures to closet their beliefs, this article affirms the importance of legitimizing the spiritual epistemological perspectives of racially minoritized graduate students in creating a more equitable and diverse higher education culture.

Notes

We are grateful to the participants of this study for sharing their personal narratives and raising the question of graduate student spirituality in the academy. We also thank Laura Rendón, Andrew Pinto, and Kimine Mayuzumi for their support and comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Finally, we are grateful to the anonymous reviewers and editors of the journal for their constructive comments.

1. The phrases “racially minoritized graduate students” or “graduate students of color” and “racially minoritized faculty” or “scholars of color” are used interchangeably throughout this article. The term “minoritized” is used to refer to the social, political, economic, and cultural forces that construct and consign groups of people to a subordinated status.

2. The term “spiritually-minded activist scholars” refers to a group of racially minoritized university faculty who self identified as: (1) as spiritual beings and who are teaching about and/or researching specifically on gender, class, race, sexuality, disability, or anti-colonialism issues; (2) activists whose spirituality informs their social justice work; (3) non-dogmatic and non-evangelical in their spirituality; and (4) conscious integrators of spirituality in their academic activities.

3. While the larger study upon which this article is, in part, based, was composed of five men, only one of those men's narratives fit the criteria for this article. The other men's narratives either did not raise the issue of graduate school experiences and/or their graduate experiences were earlier than 1996.