2019 Annual Conference

Colleges and Universities

Concurrent Session (45 minutes)

The proposed presentation will explore how our positionalities, race and gender, influenced our academic journeys. We propose that our academic lives as professors are encrypted by our positionalities. So, we comparatively analyze our individual autoethnographic narratives to turn them into themes to explore our experiences as faculty of color.  

This presentation will be suitable for all attendees who wish to broaden their knowledge of positionality and power dynamics based on race and gender in higher education. It will especially appeal to those who want to understand how professors who identify themselves as faculty of color experience their professorships in contemporary higher education. The following people are the target audience of the presentation: faculty, adult educators, learners, and practitioners in adult and higher education, administrators, instructors, staff members, and graduate students who wish to become faculty members.

Upon completion of this presentation, attendees will have a better understanding of how positionality influences people’s lives in general within an academic environment. Attendees will also gain more knowledge about some general concepts on intersectionality, positionality, and social justice in contemporary higher education. In addition, attendees will learn how tenure and promotion processes were experienced by faculty of color at predominantly White institutions and will be more knowledgeable about how race and gender influenced their tenure and promotion processes.

The academic workplace is an American workplace and therefore it carries with it the societal positional privileges and disadvantages ascribed by race, gender, national origin, class, and sexuality. We propose that our academic lives as professors are encrypted by our positionalities, especially our race and our gender. We use a comparative auto-ethnographic method (in examining our constructed individual narratives) and the literature on the promotion and tenure experiences of faculty to triangulate and present the major themes in the academic lives of two faculty of color.

This presentation has five sections. First, the presenters will use PowerPoint slides to provide general information about the professoriate and tenure and promotion processes in higher education from relevant literature. Second, the presenters will ask attendees about their general ideas of the professoriate in higher education. Then, the presenters will share their experiences of being professors in predominantly White institutions from their perspectives as a Black female professor and an Asian male professor. Next, the presenters will provide opportunities for the attendees to share their experiences in higher education regarding their own positionalities. Last, the presenters will provide a Q&A session.