Discourses on ‘Diversity’: Perspectives from Graduate Programs in Geography in the United States

Abstract

This qualitative and contextual study explores how ‘diversity’ is interpreted by graduate students and faculty in ten departments of geography in the United States. It applies a model that considers historical, structural, psychological and behavioral dimensions. Themes addressed include issues related to gender, international origin, race/ethnicity, age, family status, disciplinary subfields and institutional location; silences persist around sexual orientation and disability. We highlight differences across subgroups of students, faculty perspectives and the approaches used in departments that have attained greater diversity, especially of racial and ethnic minorities.

Keywords:

• Diversity
• discourses
• graduate students
• faculty
• geography departments

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our colleagues on the EDGE Project, Michael Solem and Ken Foote, for their support and contributions, Patricia Solís of the AAG for her work with the AAG's diversity initiatives, Rebecca Theobald for her work with computer-assisted coding, and the faculty and students who participated in the interviews. The research was supported by grant REC0439914 from the NSF.

Notes

¹ Some problems of differing assumptions used in statistical reporting offered in such studies are discussed in Monk et al. (2004).

² We also interviewed administrators including associate deans and deans of the colleges in which the departments were located and of the ‘graduate colleges’ responsible for graduate education campus-wide. Those interviews inform our interpretations but are not reported in detail in this paper.

³ Most departments awarding doctoral degrees also grant master's degrees. The data are drawn from the 2005–2006 AAG Guide to Geography Programs in the Americas because this is the version we utilized for selecting the case studies for this project.

⁴ Faculty interviews were primarily individual, though at two of the five campuses they also included small group faculty discussions.

⁵ The Diversity Task Force Report (2006) includes race/ethnicity for undergraduate students, but does not give comparable detail for graduate students or separate domestic and international students.

⁶ Departmental practices in representing graduate students on their websites are quite variable. For example, some master's departments do not include them, while some doctoral departments give names without photographs, making gender identification difficult, especially for international students.

⁷ As our previous discussion indicates, the language of external identifications is fluid. We use ‘color’ and ‘white’ as the most obvious markers which also allow us to include e.g. African-born (who are likely to be US citizens if they hold tenured appointments) as well as US-born ‘blacks.’ We have also included faculty of Middle Eastern origin in this grouping, though their categorization is problematic in US usage (see Tehranian, 2007). We have excluded only those whom departments identified in roles not likely to be significantly engaged with graduate students such as emeriti, adjuncts, and some technical staff.

⁸ These differences could reflect a combination of gender differences across the department and the voluntary nature of student participation.

⁹ A program funded by the National Science Foundation to support achievement by minority undergraduate students.

¹⁰ To protect confidentiality we have not detailed some of these examples.