Caribbean and African Women Faculty's Transnational Feminist Understandings of Becoming Academics

• In Event: Tenure at What Cost? The Stories of Faculty of Color Striving for Success

Abstract

While there is a growing body of literature about the experiences of Black women faculty in the North American context, the intricacies of the heterogeneity of those identities are often lost in the larger discourses of the traditional constructs of race. As Black women faculty, who locate ourselves as African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American, our complex identities inform who we are and how we teach. In this paper, the authors interrogate their understanding of themselves as immigrant/immigrant descendant, Black women faculty. They utilize a theoretical tapestry of intersectionality, transnational feminism, and endarkened feminist epistemology to situate their ontological and epistemological orientations on how their histories, journeys, individual and collective subjectivities inform their process of becoming educators in the academy.

Authors

• Christine Wanjiku Nganga, The George Washington University

• Kimberly N. Williams Brown, Vassar College

• Makini Z. Beck, Rochester Institute of Technology

• Joyanne Beverly De Four-Babb, University of Belize