First-Generation Faculty of Color: Reflections on Research, Teaching, and Service

By María C. Ledesma, Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner, Varaxy Yi and 17 more

First-Generation Faculty of Color: Reflections on Research, Teaching, and Service is the first book to examine the experiences of racially minoritized faculty who were also the first in their families to graduate college in the United States. From contingent to tenured faculty who teach at community colleges, comprehensive, and research institutions, the book is a collection of critical narratives that collectively show the diversity of faculty of color, attentive to and beyond race. The book is organized into three major parts comprised of chapters in which faculty of color depict how first-generation college student identities continue to inform how minoritized people navigate academe well into their professional careers, and encourage them to reconceptualize research, teaching, and service responsibilities to better consider the families and communities that shaped their lives well before college.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Release date: Oct 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781978823464

Book preview

PREFACE

To be Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the academy is an exercise in grace, strength, and innovation. On an everyday basis, we embody unbelonging while simultaneously being conditioned to seek a sense of belonging in a place that was never meant for us. Our existence as BIPOC faculty is lauded in theory but met with perpetual disdain in practice by the institutions we have infiltrated and exacerbated by the first-generation student identities that shape the survival strategies that have enabled us to persist. This book is a collective testimonio of what it means to be first-generation faculty of color, a distinct and complex position experienced by many but rarely ever documented.

Our decision to write this book is an effort to document first-generation faculty of color stories. As critical race theorists, we believe in the power of storytelling to illustrate that faculty of color are not a monolith and how we can experience shared spaces—in this case, the academy—very differently. Writing our stories is an attempt to validate the experiential knowledge and intuition of first-generation faculty of color in the academic diaspora and who are likely away from the families and communities that feed and nurture us. Stories reveal that our isolation within programs and departments, colleges and universities, and academic fields are shared, systemic, and symptomatic of the unforgiving white supremacy that is American higher education. Stories are also what facilitate connection among us when we need