A Tool for Healthy Critique: Safe Spaces for Women of Color in Political Science

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

Abstract

A small group of early career women of color scholars attended a writing retreat in San Juan, Puerto Rico before the Southern Political Science Association’s annual meeting in 2020. The goal was to build community and be academically productive as the academy is a space where scholarship and production is required. Too often, women of color find themselves presumed incompetent as scholars, educators, and participants in the academy. This presumption often leaves women of color feeling like who they are, not just the scholarship they produce, is being critiqued. Often, their identities are connected to and inspire their scholarship, and yet, their research is decried as ‘mesearch’, invalid, and unimportant in the field of political science. Therefore, retreat and workshop spaces organized by women of color for women of color allow for the acknowledgement of the lived intersections in academia, while providing critique for produced scholarship. For example, the retreat space offers a space to openly discuss the various ways our intersectional identities emerge and opportunities to bring the full dimensions of ourselves into a political science space. It also offers an important space to interrogate academic and disciplinary practices passed down to us, and deliberate on what can move us from surviving in an academic space to thriving in an academic space. Black feminists and academics have been self-reflective about how power structures have consistently placed women of color in marginalized conditions (Lorde, 1984). This has moved them to build collaborative spaces to do the work themselves (Combahee River Collective,1977). This retreat space extends this important tradition to the discipline of Political Science to help move our academic community to a place that does not sideline the intricate ways or diminish the challenges women of color face. This work will be a group of reflections that discuss the motivations of academic scholarship, what was structurally and communally gained out of the retreat experience, and why such efforts must be duplicated for the viability of women of color in the field of political science.

Authors

• Sherice Janaye Nelson, CSUDH - Dymally Institute

• Taneisha Nicole Means, Vassar College

• Nura Sediqe, Princeton University