Bearing Witness to One’s Life as a Latina Leader: An Autoethnographic Examination of Race/Ethnicity and Gender While Leading Across the Continents

• In Event: Intersectional Challenges and Successes of Women in Higher Educational Leadership Internationally: Autoethnographic Reflections

Abstract

Objectives or Purposes
This paper examines the leadership experiences of a senior scholar and higher education executive leader through the intersections of race/ethnicity and gender.

Theoretical Framework
This autoethnography is situated in intersectionality theory. Gender is not a single analytical frame: race, migration, status, history, religion, social class etc., affect one’s experience as a woman (XX; XX). Furthermore, for many women of color, feminist efforts are simultaneously embedded and woven into their efforts against racism, classism, and other threats to accessing equal opportunities and social justice (XX).

Methods, Techniques, or Modes of Inquiry
Ellis and Bochner (2000) define autoethnography as “an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (p. 739). Philosophically, autoethnography challenges the dominant positivist scientific paradigm that privileges quantitative methodologies, and invites other ways of knowing (Wall, 2006). It is grounded in the philosophical paradigm of postmodernism: we can come to knowledge and being through many means, not solely through the positivist approaches that underlie quantitative research methodologies (Hutcheon, 1989). My autoethnography employs the principles of evocative autoethnography which privilege the story over what the story means. Ellis and Bochner (2006) note, “If you turn a story told into a story analyzed . . . you sacrifice the story at the altar of traditional sociological rigor. You transform the story into another language, the language of generalization and analysis, and thus you lose the very qualities that make a story a story” (p. 440). In my results, the central voice is me as narrator over other secondary analysis.

Data Sources, Evidence, Objects, or Materials
Using written reflections, blogs, newsletters, and photographs from my work globally, I reflect on my habitus—that is, how my own positionality affects my work as a scholar when I conduct work globally and as a higher education leader in my daily professional responsibilities.

Warrants for Arguments/Point of View
Because this study employs evocative autoethnography, the work I present has less analysis than typical autoethnographies may provide. My stories include those from Afghanistan, China, India, Rwanda, Pakistan, and other countries where I conduct research on women in leadership. The reflections within each story provide the analysis. For example, overall, in my work globally, I continually seek out intellectual traditions that privilege indigenous thinking, challenge colonial perspectives, and assert postcolonial precepts (Kaiwar, 2014). This effort results in recognizing the funds of knowledge that individuals bring to their work, and thus affect my work as an educational leader (Moll et al., 1992).

Scholarly Significance
This investigation provides insight into the challenges and successes of a woman leader of color in her work across the continents as well as a deeper examination of the use of autoethnography to provide authentic voice to the intersections of race/ethnicity and gender for individuals often marginalized. It provides a deeper perspective on both self and society, process invites deep inquiry about, reflection on, and scrutiny of our lives.

Author

• Elizabeth C. Reilly, California State University - Channel Islands