Exploiting the margins in higher education: a collaborative autoethnography of three foreign-born female faculty of color

Abstract

In a collaborative autoethnographic process, we, three foreign-born female professors from the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, Kenya, and Korea explore how our personal status as immigrant women of color and social–institutional factors in US higher education affect our experiences in the academy. Based on experiences as graduate students and later as faculty and leaders, we trace the development of three empowering and transforming navigational strategies we utilized to survive and thrive at a US institution – exploiting multifocal lenses, reconfiguring identities, and engaging tempered radicalism. We discuss how the cultivation of a unique standpoint as outsiders/within can be a valuable resource for foreign-born women of color to advance active research agendas and to leverage their position in the academy.

Keywords:

• women of color
• immigrant
• collaborative autoethnography
• intersectional identities

Notes

1. Regardless of the order in which our names are listed, each author equally contributed to the process and production of this collaborative autoethnography. Hereafter, “we” will be used when all three authors are collectively referenced. Otherwise, last names will be used.

2. We use the term “foreign-born” in reference to ourselves to clarify that we are members of the US immigrant population that were born and socialized in their respective countries and migrated here as adults.