Invisible or Hypervisible: Narratives of Brown Professors in Higher Education

• In Event: 18.028 - "Well Situated to Do the Work": Female Professors of Color Navigating White Academia

Abstract

In fall 2015, of the full-time faculty members at degree granting institutions of higher education, 86% identify as white (41 and 35, male and female, respectively), 6% identify as Black, 5% identify as Hispanic, 10% as Asian/Pacific Islander, and 1% or less for both American Indian/Alaska Native and those who identified as mixed-race (NCES, 2017). As institutions of higher education continue to grow their efforts in diversifying faculty, more effort should also address the experiences of faculty of color in the university. This is particularly important at predominantly white institutions (PWI) where faculty of color experience incidents that can be difficult to navigate. The purpose of this paper is to examine the experiences of two female professors of color. We draw on the frameworks of visibility, invisibility, and hypervisibility (Brighenti, 2007; Simpson & Lewis, 2005) to make sense of these incidents, both in how these incidents might manifest and how these incidents are experienced by faculty of color.
Narratives for this study were written by two professors, reflecting on their own experiences in academia. Both professors identify as women and people of color. One professor identifies as Filipinx-American and the other as multiethnic, Latinx and White. Each author wrote personal vignettes which described incidents we’d encountered as women professors of color. Each professor reflected on her career thus far in academia and wrote vignettes they felt were related to their identities as Brown women, and they did not discuss which incidents they would capture prior to the writing. Each professor simply wrote narratives intending to capture incidents that stood out in her memory in some way as related to her identity. The narratives were analyzed by the opposite author using a narrative analysis technique (Riessman, 1993). We developed a framework of codes related to visibility, and then we used an open and axial coding strategy as well to see what important themes emerged from the data (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). We analyzed the vignettes by each author separately and then compared results across the two data sets.
These vignettes revealed that it depended on the interaction whether the participants were viewed as visible or not. Vignettes coded as hypervisible tended to center around students, with students often seeming to find professor of color very visible in choosing who to ally themselves with. Codes related to hypervisibility also related to situations where professors were asked to do work explicitly about diversity, such as recruiting students of color. Codes related to invisibility often related to professors being present in discussions where their communities were denigrated or the qualifications of scholars of color were being called into question. By carefully studying the experiences of professors of color, we hope to shed light onto our lived experiences as marginalized people within the academy, to understand how Brown female professors can be perceived in academia, and how this might influence whether professors continue to navigate academic spaces.

Authors

• Christina L. Dobbs, Boston University

• Christine Montecillo Leider, Boston University