Cultivating and Embracing Community Cultural Wealth With the Femtorship of Black and Latina Faculty

• In Event: A Reflexive Plática Honoring the Femtorship of Black and Latina Women in the Ivory Tower

Abstract

This autoethnographic study incorporates Yosso’s (2005) theoretical framework, Community Cultural Wealth, through which I examine the ways that Black and Latina women faculty have shared and cultivated community cultural wealth with me, a first-generation, woman of color, doctoral student. Yosso challenges Bourdieu’s limited and deficit-based definition of cultural capital by using Critical Race Theory (CRT) when examining the experiences of Communities of Color. She argues that Communities of Color actually have other forms of capital, such as aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial, and resistant capital.

This autoethnography will consist of reflexive journals as a methodological tool to examine how the femtorship of Black and Latina Faculty has enriched my graduate experience and scholarship (Campos, 2016; Hesse-Biber & Piatelli, 2014). The journal will include written letters addressed to each of my femtors, through which I discuss the ways their femtorship has allowed for my personal and professional development. Reflexivity highlights and disrupts the power dynamics among researchers, and through these femtor-mentee relationships reflexive practice allows for co-creation to take place.

Author

• Cristal Briseida Almonte, Claremont Graduate University