Sister Scholars

Lived experiences of women in academia: Metaphors, manifesto and memoir , 2018

Cautious about the dangers of ‘authentic experience’ and confessional narrative, this chapter uncreatively assembles accounts of the complexities of women’s lives in academia. Online sources of information about navigating academia as a woman become elements for artistic experimentation. Purposely juxtaposing official university web accounts of valuing equity, diversity and flexible working arrangements with online newspaper, blog and social media accounts of the lives of women in universities, the tensions, contradictions, perplexities (and potential liberties) of women’s lives in academia are foregrounded. These words, images and screenshots are re-arranged into a form akin to a poem with footnoted weblinks. Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) has described this form of writing as “uncreative”, “patchwriting”: “a way of weaving together various shards of other people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole” (p. 3). This chapter appropriates Goldsmith’s methodology of writing into feminist methodologies of “collective memory” (Haug et al., 1999) and “collective biography” (Davies & Gannon, 2006). Working with digitised fragmentation (and/ or proliferations) of subjectivities, uncreative writing forms a “postidentitarian literature” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 85). To deliberately sort, manipulate, move and manage words, images and screenshots from webtexts performs and parodies the sorting, manipulations, movements and management strategies of the corporate university, even as there are concurrent, latent modes of agency at work. Creative combinations of information become “moving information” – language is “push[ed]” around while, simultaneously, the author/ reader is “emotionally moved by that process” (Goldsmith, 2011, p. 1). These new assemblages may not always “make recognisable sense”, but “express intensities” “capture forces” and “act” (Lecercle, 2002, p. 195), to make a “different sense” (St. Pierre, 2008, p. 330). In these re-arrangements, the reader (and writer) become disoriented, amused, and impelled to re-think habitual modes of reading, writing and living our shared lives.

Communication Theory, 1999

Women in academe often become entangled In an intricate equation of sensemaking as they work to balance the professional demands of teaching, research, and service, while at the same time learning the political and moral meanings of being a scholar. Structuration theory offers avenues for closely examining communicative strategies women utilize to navigate their roles as assistant professors. Through intensive interviews with seven female assistant professors this research investigates their process of wresting and arresting sense of the complicated roles, rules, and structures in academe. Analysis of interview data reveals the multiple discourses that frame organizational practices that facilitate and constrain these women's lives. Focusing on their patterned discourse led to the discovery and generation of three discursive structures women utilize in their sensemaking practices: the involute, refractor, and translate. The stories presented show how the involute, refractor, and translate function as opportunities for beneficial, detrimental, knowledgeable, unacknowledged, transforming, conscious, and even, unconscious communication practices. The movement of each discursive structure indicates the women's struggle to word their worlds as defensive resistances to communication that marginalizes, undermines, and dismisses their contributions. At the same time, each discursive structure represents the ways the women construct discourse to celebrate, reform, and rediscover who they can become and want to become in their academic work. The theoretical and practical implications of this research offer XII Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: WRESTING AND ARRESTING SENSE IN ACADEME 'W as there ever a life more riddled with seif-doubt than that o f a female professor?" Sarton's book, The Small Room, p. 29 Each day I understand this quote a little better. It has been somewhat o f a brainteaser like m y life in academe, both as an adjunct professor and as a doctorai student. Perhaps this is why I write the dissertation, to resolve this riddle and to determine m y fate In academe.

Education Review

The academy is a gendered institution that promotes and requires the adoption of a particularly masculine way of learning and producing knowledge. Commonly accepted notions of what constitutes a successful academic devalue emotions, vulnerability, and dependence in interpersonal relationships. Using Bourdieu's concept of the habitus, our analysis focuses on a collaborative narrative of a critical incident between a graduate student working on her dissertation and a faculty member pursuing tenure. In our analysis we critique the masculine bias of the academic habitus, revealing how graduate student and faculty interactions can replicate gendered power relations in the academy and shedding light on avenues of resistance. We conclude by explaining how the practice of co-mentoring within a feminist framework may help conceptualize a new kind of successful academic-one who sees the rationality in emotions and the emotions in rationality, as well as the strength in vulnerability and the vulnerability in strength.

Race, Ethnicity, and Education, 2022

The authors draw upon their lived experiences as Black women in the academy to conceptualize a framework for Black women’s peer mentorship, or ‘sister scholarship,’ within academia. Through auto-ethnographic ‘sister talks,’ the sister scholar relationship is conceptualized as a sanctum from gendered and racialized trauma, an impetus for the co-generation of knowledge, an approbation of intersectionality, and a gathering of the whole self. This work is grounded in Black feminist understandings of resiliency, resistance, and grace within academia. In discussion, the authors call for the abolition of oppressive policies and systems that aim to marginalize and disenfranchise Black women and other Women of Color in the academy.

Higher Education, 1990

This analysis examines the emergence of feminist scholarship in the United States, specifically how a cohort of academic women came to challenge and propose revisions for the content and organization of academic knowledge. It is based on in-depth interviews from a larger two-year, multi-site study. The intellectual biographies and career histories enable us to consider how the current organization of knowledge has constrained or facilitated feminist scholars who advocate interdisciplinarity and social change. The analysis uncovers some of the processes by which intentional intellectual communities are formed and sustained within the current systems of disciplinary peer review and academic rewards.

Psychology of Women Quarterly, 2023

It is vital for women to publish their writing for tenure and promotion so that they are no longer underrepresented as senior scholars in academia. Furthermore, it is important that their radical and important ideas are published and not lost to history. For the 2022 Carolyn Wood Sherif Award talk, I focused on five topics: (1) publishing is vital for women in academia; (2) women may not feel entitled to write and publish; (3) women need to learn how to be invited to publish; (4) women may leave academia; and (5) feminist writing is political, radical, and important.

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 2013

In this paper we reflect on how deans at six schools of a Dutch Arts and a Dutch Sciences based university construct the image of the ideal academic and how these images are gendered. We expected the images of the ideal academic to be more gendered in the Sciences than in the Arts based university, considering the stronger male domination in the Sciences University. The images of the ideal academic at the two universities fundamentally differed regarding the expertise, the applicability of knowledge, and the visibility needed to be considered successful. However, the images were equally gendered in assuming that practicing science leaves little room for caring obligations outside work; in both places science was considered an omnipresent and greedy calling. Moreover, deans at both universities to a similar extent expected women academics not to fit to this standard. Paradoxically, in the Arts university deans construct an image of women academics that in some aspects reflects a mirror image of women academics in the Sciences university and vice versa. We suggest that in this construction the process of 'othering' women academics is more constant than the content of the ideal academic. We contribute to theories on the ideal worker in the field of science by arguing the construction of the ideal academic is fluid rather than fixed. We argue that this fluidity offers space for renegotiating the ideal academic norm by making it more inclusive for women.