Creating New Resource Pathways: Building Opportunities and Funding Sources

• In Event: A Dialogue on the Status of Junior Women of Color in the Discipline

Abstract

According to the 2013 report by the American Political Science Association, less than 15% of political scientists are women of color. This underrepresentation is especially notable when the group is disaggregated by race and ethnicity. Many reasons exist for this underrepresentation (Bedolla 2014; Merhson and Walsh 2015; Hero 2015; Sinclair-Chapman 2015; Kittilson 2015), one of which is the extreme social and intellectual isolation women of color may feel with so few of us spread out at different institutions across the country. In the spring of 2019, Danielle Lemi and Diane Wong applied for and received $10,000 from the APSA Centennial Center to support a three-day pre-conference writing workshop that brings together early-career women of color PhDs across institutions (e.g. teaching-oriented and doctorate-granting), regions, and subfields. In doing so, there were several immediate goals: 1) To foster a social community among untenured women of color in political science who will support each other through their careers, 2) To foster an intellectual community of untenured women of color who will provide intensive feedback to each other on writing projects that advance their careers, 3) To use part of the conference week toward structured and focused writing and 4) To help junior women of color develop strategic and action plans to publish their written work. 5) To find new pathways to support the professionalization for women of color within the discipline. This paper will discuss the process of writing such a grant and how critical it is for the discipline to create more funding sources to fund events like this one. The paper will also consider the challenges in receiving funding and the ways we must negotiate with stakeholders in order to curate our own spaces for growth. What are the challenges and opportunities of receiving support and engagement from individual institutions and research centers, relative to our broader discipline associations? What does collaboration with respective funders look like to make this a productive space for early career women of color? Finally, we will also reflect on ways to make this a sustainable endeavor in the future; and reflect on the implications were this to become a consistent space for women of color to turn to.

Authors

• Jamil Shatema Scott, Georgetown University

• Nura Sediqe, Princeton University

• Diane Wong, Rutgers University-Newark

• Melina Juarez, Western Washington University