Navigating the academic borderlands as multiracial and trans* faculty members

ABSTRACT

Postsecondary institutions remain bastions of oppression, threat and harm for faculty who hold minoritized identities. While some scholars have explored the ways in which monoracial faculty of color and LGBT faculty members navigate an academy that is steeped in racism, genderism, sexism and other systems of oppression, there remains a paucity of scholarship focused on the experiences of multiracial faculty and nonbinary trans* faculty. Given the need to focus on faculty who hold liminal identities in relation to hegemonic identitarian illogic, we used Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory and an auto-ethnographic analysis to explore our academic experiences as faculty members whose identities place us betwixt-and-between socially constructed monolithic identity categories.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• gender
• higher education
• inequality/social exclusion in education
• race

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Anzaldúa used the term ‘los atravesados’ in her writing. We have changed the term to ‘lxs atravesadxs’ to reflect current gender-expansive linguistic turns in Spanish, as well as to reflect how the current research study traversed and transgressed gender categorizations (Scharrón-Del Río & Aja, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessica C. Harris

Through her research, Dr. Jessica C. Harris critiques interlocking systems of oppression that are embedded throughout postsecondary contexts and influence educational and social inequities. Her multidisciplinary research agenda focuses on multiraciality on the college campus and women of color survivors of campus sexual violence. Dr. Harris teaches graduate level courses such as critical race theory in education, history of higher education and student development theory. Her research, teaching and service are guided by commitments to radical social justice and educational equity.

Z Nicolazzo

Dr. Z Nicolazzo teaches courses on college student development, postsecondary access and diversity, equity and culture. Hir research centers on trans* collegians, with a particular emphasis on trans* student resilience and kinship-building. Dr. Nicolazzo’s specific areas of interest include gender in higher education, particularly the experiences of trans* collegians; college student activism; and intersectionality, particularly students’ experiences of the intersections of race, disability and gender identity. Dr. Nicolazzo also writes about the use of alternative methodologies, epistemologies and representations of knowledge.