Current Projects

“Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.”

– Zora Neale Hurston

DISSERTATION (in progress)

 Title (tentative): “Sojourning through the Academy: Examining the Terrain First-Generation, Working-Class Graduates Travel on the Journey to the Doctorate/Professional Degree” 

Project Summary:

The dissertation focuses on how graduate and professional students from economically poor and working-class communities become interested in and later adjust to graduate and professional study, how they make sense of their status as graduate students while managing other identities, how they work to maintain familial bonds, and the adjustments and negotiations they make as these relationships change over time.
Research Questions:
What are the pathways to graduate/professional school are for first-generation and working-class students?
    • Understanding the circumstances (ideologies about education and familial ties) under which working class and first-generation students choose higher education
    • What leads to the decision to go to graduate/professional school?
    • Conceptions about higher ed vs. the reality

What are the experiences of first-generation and working class students in graduate/professional school? How do these experiences affect academic success and retention?

      • Academic experiences
      • Cultural conflicts, micro aggressions
How do they find and cultivate communities that help them navigate the terrain of graduate/professional study? Is finding community/sense of community significant to their progress to the degree?
How does graduate/professional education affect the relationships first-generation and working class people have with their families and communities of origin?

2021

Manuscript Title: “Racial Injury in the Context of Graduate Education at Majority White Universities: How Graduates of Color Navigate the Terrain of the “Small-Town”“

ABSTRACT

This paper discusses four cases drawn from a larger ethnographic and interview study of first generation graduate students to show how racial injury occurs within the context of graduate education. The author argues that graduate students of colorare often recipients of micro-aggressions, a form of racial injury. Further, prolonged exposure to microaggressions can significantly impede their progress, take up their time, and harm their psychological well-being. Further, racial injury happens between graduate student peers; between white faculty and graduate students of color; and when graduatestudents of color assume positions of power vis-à-vis white students. The findings show how a culture of civility both facilitates occurences of racial injury and hinders overt responses to them. Microaggressions are especially damaging whenthey occur in the context of ongoing professional relationships that overlap with informal friendships, a situation that is common because graduate school is a kind of “small town.” Finally, the paper discusses strategies for overcoming that include assimilation and various forms of resistance.

Keywords: graduate education, microaggressions, racial injury, civility