Leading Unprotected: A Phenomenological Exploration of Black Women Higher Education Administrators’ Precarity in Their Practice

• In Event: Hear Our Voices: Black Feminist Articulations of Systemic Oppression and Organizational Failure at HWIs

Abstract

Purpose
How do Black women (BW) persist in leadership as ubiquitous encounters with racialized and gendered oppression are disregarded by the institutions in which they lead? BW who serve as administrators at colleges and universities lead amidst conflicting experiences of where they are positioned to exercise authority while navigating conditions, broadly and institutionally, wherein practices of gendered racism are upheld (Goins, 2011). This paper centers BW leaders’ experiences of the absence of institutional protection from incidents of gendered racism.

Theoretical Framework
Black feminist thought (BFT) and critical race feminism (CRF) offer nuanced lenses that can tease out the particular experiences that can otherwise become obscured in “majority monocultural” theories (West, 2017, p. 285).

Key themes that give shape to Black feminist thought are self-definition and self-valuation, the interlocking nature of oppression, and converging but distinct experiences (Collins, 1986, 2002). CRF provides an anti-essentialist approach to examining intersections of oppression such as racism and sexism (Patton & Ward, 2016) while signaling that the experiences of women of color are distinct from the experiences of White women and the experiences of men of color.

Where BW are often negotiating between their personal frames of reference and those maintained within their fields of discipline and practice, BFT and CRF position BW as theorists, knowledge producers, and active resistors to simultaneous oppressions.

Methods, Techniques, Modes of Inquiry
Using interpretative phenomenology, I assume a “double positional” role (Alase, 2017) wherein I, as the researcher, draw on my lived experience to make sense of the participants as they engage in their own sensemaking about their experiences.

Data Sources
The context of the study is eleven BW mid, senior, and executive-level leaders in the Fall semester of two of the COVID-19 pandemic. who gathered virtually for a semester. The participants met in six virtual group sessions in a professional counterspace--a gathering place of affirmation, inclusion, and solidarity (West, 2017). Sessions took place semi-monthly for approximately ninety minutes per session. Interviews, session recordings, and focus groups serve as the primary data sources for this research. I used inductive and deductive coding, iteratively, to derive themes.

Results
A theme that emerged across the administrators’ experiences was inconsistent institutional support for their well-being. For example, one leader described poor onboarding that undermined her authority as she assumed senior leadership at her R1 institution. Another senior leader experienced repeat inaction as she escalated reports of a racial incident. While their responsibilities included guarding team members’ well-being (Neal & Griffin, 2002), the leaders regularly recalled feeling unprotected. The positional authority of these administrators neither exempt nor guard them from microaggressive assault.

Scholarly significance of the study or work
Scholarship on the precarity of BW in educational spaces is critical. Calls for greater protection of BW and girls recurs in the work of some education practitioners and scholars (e.g., Carter Andrews et al., 2019; Evans-Winters & Hines, 2021; Love, 2016; Morris, 2016). Transformation of exclusionary organizational cultures demands continued attention to narratives, such as these leaders’, to illuminate the eminent need for reconstructing inclusive systems.

Reference list removed for word count.

Author

• Chenelle S Boatswain, CSB Consulting Services