Search Results (211)

The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand how STEM graduate students conceptualized problems that undergird a negative departmental racial climate and explore which policies and practices these students recognized as potential levers for change. Using a generic qualitative inquiry (GQI) approach, we conducted eight focus group meetings and one interview with graduate STEM students (n = 34) at two predominantly white institutions in the United States. Our findings suggest that STEM graduate students identified interpersonal interactions with faculty as a primary driver of negative departmental climate, highlighting a culture of discrimination and lack of accountability. Although students suggested institutionalizing DEI labor and making structural change, they often sought to first improve care for fellow graduate students, feeling ill-equipped to facilitate organizational change. Few research studies address the conceptualization of departmental racial climate from the student perspective and examine their proposed solutions. Using racialized organizations as a guiding theory, this study calls on scholars and practitioners to think more critically about efforts to improve departmental racial climate and address issues of entrenched whiteness. This study suggests that STEM practitioners examine their current departmental processes to enhance racial climate and involve STEM graduate students in valuable ways. Full article

Leadership plays a critical role in promoting equitable and high-quality early care and education (ECE) environments. Within this context, leaders of color bring unique perspectives and experiences that support ECE teachers, children, and families with diverse backgrounds. Despite their importance, there is limited research focusing on the professional experiences and well-being of ECE leaders of color. Drawing on Critical Race Theory (CRT), the current study aims to fill the gap by exploring the well-being, challenges, and strengths of ECE leaders of color. Using applied thematic analysis, we analyzed interview data from 17 leaders of color working in center-based ECE settings. Five themes were identified: (1) Multidimensional and interconnected well-being, (2) structural and racialized challenges in leadership roles and career pathways, (3) strengths and assets drawn from leaders of color’s identities and experiences, (4) interconnections between strengths and burdens, and (5) suggestions for well-being and work conditions improvement. The findings suggest that improving the well-being and work conditions of ECE leaders of color requires both individual and structural support, including more targeted well-being resources, culturally sustaining organizational practices and climate, leadership preparation and development support, and more stable policy environments. Full article

This article offers a rhetorical close reading of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary’s Report on Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. While the report presents itself as an institutional reckoning with a legacy of slavery, racism, and white supremacy, this analysis argues that its rhetoric simultaneously minimizes the significance of those injustices. Three recurring rhetorical moves structure this dynamic. First, the report centers the experiences and dilemmas of the seminary’s white leadership, producing narrative empathy for institutional actors while decentering the experiences of those harmed by the institution’s history. Second, it employs subtly pejorative characterizations of external critics and other historical actors, reinforcing an evangelical “embattled identity.” Third, the report rhetorically constructs the concept of the “gospel” in a manner that separates core Christian doctrine from concerns of racial justice. Drawing on agenda-setting theory, this study introduces the concept of religious agenda-setting to describe how religious leaders rhetorically prioritize certain moral concerns while marginalizing others. Together, these strategies allow for the report to confess historical wrongdoing while simultaneously preserving institutional legitimacy and authority. Full article

Status characteristics and expectation states theory (SC-EST) describes how general beliefs about capability contribute to disproportionate rates of power, prestige, and resource outcomes between group members. Similarly, endorsements for competition stem from a general belief that it is useful for identifying which people are more capable and therefore more deserving of limited or highly valued resources. This paper investigates the relationship between both contexts simultaneously by considering whether introducing intergroup competition into an otherwise collectively oriented task situation essentially promotes inequality between diverse group members. Using a two-condition experiment, we demonstrate how interaction dynamics change in racially diverse task groups when their task involves intergroup competition compared to no competition. The findings support our predictions that intergroup competition promotes inequality by reproducing and exacerbating macro-level inequalities in micro-level interpersonal interactions. Specifically, white group members were significantly less likely to defer (i.e., accept others’ suggestions) when the group task involved intergroup competition. Overall, these results offer insight into the diverging effects of unequal group processes in group settings and the detrimental effects of competition. Full article

This article examines the interaction between phenomenological illness theory and magical realism in Stephen King’s The Green Mile. It uses ideas from phenomenological psychopathology and illness narrative theory to explain how King presents supernatural events through a restrained and matter-of-fact narrative register. Instead of considering magical realism as a genre or a mere literary device, the article views magical realism as a stylistic mode that is produced by the tension between realistic descriptions and unexplained supernatural moments. Through a close reading of King’s prose, especially his diction, narrative voice and bodily descriptions, this study shows that John Coffey’s healing acts represent the otherwise incommunicable experience of suffering. These supernatural events make visible forms of institutional violence such as prison brutality, racial injustice and execution, which are often invisible in traditional realist narratives. This article also argues that magical realism is not limited to Latin American literature but can function effectively in American popular fiction. Finally, the findings suggest that, while magical realism may be helpful in exposing injustice and suffering, it may also have the danger of aestheticizing pain rather than fully transforming it into political critique. Full article

Grounded in a Critical Race Theory framework, this study explores the racial microaggressions experienced by Faculty of Color at one four-year university in California during what Bell would call a “peak of progress” for racial justice—where equity and inclusivity took center stage in the institutional agenda. We engaged a Critical Race Feminista Methodology, using group pláticas to gather stories of Faculty of Color from diverse racial and generational backgrounds to understand how they experienced everyday racism within the context of racial realism—the acknowledgement of the permanence of racism in U.S. society. Our findings revealed that despite the institutional focus on equity, Faculty of Color experiences with racial microaggressions were connected by threaded histories of imposed racial hierarchies, marginalization, and structural inequities. Faculty of Color across age, gender, and rank described the everyday racism that impacted academic trajectories and personal lives across time, from the late 1990s for the most senior faculty to the present for the most junior. However, we also found that faculty responded to those microaggressions through racial microaffirmations—the everyday ways People of Color affirm each other’s dignity, integrity, and shared humanity that make them feel seen and supported. Indeed, we found that Faculty of Color engaged powerful strategies of racial microaffirmations with each other across generations that supported their well-being and their careers. Full article

Time travel in science fiction, a subgenre distinct yet often overlapping with alternative history, often explores historical contingency through counterfactual scenarios to produce alternative histories. Yet some works deliberately negate this potential, presenting time travelers who refrain from altering the past despite possessing the apparent ability to do so. This essay examines this underexplored narrative mode through a comparative analysis of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and Miyabe Miyuki’s The Incident at the Gamō Residence. Framing the narrative device as a non-interventionist history, it explores how both novels deploy time travel not to revise history but to confront the ethical, emotional, and cultural implications of engaging with historically traumatic events that remain causally intact. Drawing on science fiction theory and historiographical debates, the essay argues that these texts redirect the function of time travel toward ethical reflection, embodied experience, and the formation of national identity. While Kindred presents history as an ongoing system of racialized violence that resists reconciliation, The Incident at the Gamō Residence frames historical violence through affective memory and postwar nostalgia, facilitating symbolic closure. Together, these novels demonstrate how time travel can serve as a critical apparatus for negotiating national trauma without recourse to historical revision. Full article

Within the Canadian context, the academic trajectory of Black males is typically discussed in terms of failure or disengagement, with comparatively little attention paid to those who persist and succeed in post-secondary education (PSE). This paper examines the factors that enhance African Canadian males’ pursuit of PSE in Ontario and explores how their understandings of race, racism, and PBRI shape their academic trajectories. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and a Positive Black Racial Identity (PBRI) framework, the study analyzes phone interviews with 18 Black male post-secondary students drawn from a larger qualitative project on Black student success involving 56 participants. Findings highlight how PBRI, culturally grounded mentorship, and community-based support function as protective factors that foster academic persistence, advocacy, and a redefinition of success beyond deficit-based narratives. The paper argues that Black male success in PSE must be understood not as exceptional but as evidence of agency and resistance within structurally inequitable institutions, and it concludes with implications for curriculum, mentorship, and institutional policy in Canadian higher education. Full article

We examined gender and racial parity in agricultural education enrollment and engagement among 230,228 students representing 1245 secondary-level agricultural education programs in nine U.S. states. Guided by the Representative Bureaucracy Theory, we evaluated agricultural education demographic enrollment and compared it to the demographics of the school that each program served to assess gender and racial representation differences. We also analyzed engagement patterns in Supervised Agricultural Experiences (SAE) and FFA activities by comparing the agricultural education enrollment to program engagement data. The results indicated that minority students were enrolled in school-based agricultural education (SBAE) programs at rates slightly below their representation in the school population. However, engagement data suggested that females were enrolled in agricultural education at expected rates but participated in SAE and FFA at higher-than-expected rates. These findings highlighted modest discrepancies in demographic representation and engagement, though the differences were generally minor and reflect progress toward inclusivity. The study concludes that, while increasing diversity and parity remain goals, agricultural education programs have made measurable strides in engaging broader student audiences. Recommendations include continued efforts to recruit and support underrepresented groups in SBAE, with a focus on both enrollment and meaningful participation. Full article

In a period of rapid social and economic change in Saudi Arabia under Vision 2030, increasing numbers of Saudi women undertake international sojourns for study and professional development. This article examines how these temporary migrations serve as sites for renegotiating gender roles, autonomy, and mobility. Using feminist narrative inquiry, we conducted 13 in-depth biographical interviews with Saudi women sojourners (students and spouses) living in Ottawa, Canada, and analyzed data using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants described a liminal autonomy: the startling acquisition of everyday freedoms—driving, unchaperoned mobility, and mixed-gender interaction—contrasted with prior constraints under male guardianship. Yet these freedoms were constrained by two transnational forces: a digital leash of family/community surveillance from home and a racializing gaze in Canada, where Islamophobia and othering complicated daily life and identity work. Women critically assessed a “moving target” of reform in Saudi Arabia, celebrating new mobilities (e.g., driving) while expressing skepticism toward the 2022 Personal Status Law, perceived as codifying patriarchal authority. We argue that sojourner autonomy is fragile, intersectional, and perceived as reversible upon return. The study advances theory by articulating liminal autonomy, showing how polymedia reproduces control across borders and distinguishing lifestyle freedoms from structural autonomy. Implications include intersectional campus supports, culturally attuned counseling, and recognition of returning sojourners as agents of social change. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic intensified faculty emotional labor as instructors were expected to sustain learning while responding to students’ grief, isolation, and uncertainty. Educational leadership educators occupy a distinctive role as mentors and models for current and aspiring PK–12 and higher education leaders. Using a secondary phenomenological analysis, we reanalyzed de-identified Zoom interview transcripts (2022) from nine U.S. educational leadership educators (seven women; four educators of color) originally collected to examine caring pedagogies. Guided by Hochschild’s emotional labor theory and feminist care ethics, with particular attention to Tronto’s political theory of care, we conducted a theoretically informed thematic analysis focused on caring expectations, role boundaries, and well-being. Findings highlight five interrelated themes: serving as an “anchor” during crisis; blurred instructional–counseling roles and invisible care work; gendered and racialized expectations of availability; competing care obligations across work and home; and boundary-setting as resistance and sustainability. Participants described deep relational commitments to students alongside exhaustion, role strain, and frustration with institutional cultures that assumed limitless capacity to care without reciprocal support. Emotional labor in leadership education should be recognized as central leadership work, and sustainable cultures of care require systemic policies that redistribute and resource care labor. Full article

This phenomenological study explores the experiences of Black males in U.S. public schools and draws parallels between Black millennials and the “indignant generation,” a term Lawrence Jackson uses to describe African American life between 1934–1960. While the purview of school discipline discourse is saturated with conversations on racial disparities, the exigent problem still remains. As such, this research provides a nuanced probe into concepts of discontent and indignation within Black students. In doing so, this study recasts Black male students as experts, not observers, within educational research. Using counter-storytelling as the theoretical and analytical framework, this study examines both student engagement and school disaffection through the lens of “Black male positionality.” Participants (Black males, ages 25–35, n = 9) provide individual reflections of their past schooling experiences and also detail critical needs in educational reform. Using semi-structured interviews, participants provide in-depth, retrospective perspectives of schooling and reconceptualize renewed possibilities of educational reform for Black students today. The study’s major findings demonstrate school carcerality was evident via counterproductive discipline policies and semblances of “untapped potential” among students. The study’s findings surface important topics in Black education and help to broaden the scope of research to explore concepts of Blackness, being, and belonging within phenomenological studies. Full article

This paper explores the entanglement of the coloniality of time, justice, and emancipatory horizons through the lens of restorative justice in public schools. The author utilizes Jacques Derrida’s theory of hospitality in order to demonstrate how restorative justice, as an open spacetime of impossible choices, creates liberatory possibilities. The author utilizes Charles Mills’ “white time” to deconstruct racial capitalism’s notions of time as they manifest in schools and to reflect upon how restorative justice’s orientation towards relational, fluid temporalities offers a means through which the ethico-ontoepistemological assumptions that underlie oppressive systems in schooling can be questioned and transformed. A restorative justice approach grounded in hospitality, this theoretical paper argues, offers a way through the oppressive temporality of White Time. Full article

This systematic literature review provides an extensive synthesis of the empirical, theoretical, and policy research on Black students with disabilities in higher education in Canada and the United States. Grounded in the Preferred Reporting Items to Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses approach, this study incorporates the perspectives of critical race theory, Black feminist thought, disability studies in education, and disability critical race theory to examine racism and ableism as mutual, structuralizing forces. The results indicate that Black students with disabilities experience a spectrum of systemic marginalization across the stages of education, including racialized academic tracking, Eurocentric and inaccessible curriculum, unequal accommodation practices and microaggressions. These barriers are intensified by financial precarity, mental health inequities, and a radical absence of representation in faculty and institutional administrations. The results suggest that institutional approaches frequently isolate race and disability, culminating in policies that overlook intersectional harm. This study concludes that transformative changes must extend beyond compliance-driven diversity and access programs to encompass justice-driven intersectional reforms in pedagogy, policy, funding, and institutional culture. The findings underscore the need to prioritize Black students with disabilities when redesigning higher education systems to foster substantive equity and inclusion. Full article

Past research has consistently demonstrated the negative effects of interpersonal mistreatment on student experiences by employing retrospective studies; however, little is known about the daily effects that could lead to career derailment. The present study advances evidence of the consequences of experiencing multiple forms of interpersonal mistreatment, including sexual harassment, racial harassment and microaggressions, and incivility (collectively labeled HARM) by employing an experience sampling methodology (ESM) to estimate the immediate impact of HARM on career-relevant attitudes among a sample of 202 biomedical health trainees (mentees) funded by a National Institutes of Health fellowship. Grounded in Affective Events Theory, we found that mentees’ daily experiences of HARM were associated with an immediate degradation of their attitudes toward their training program mediated by negative affect. Being racially isolated in a lab or having a racially different mentor increased the prevalence of HARM; moreover, accounting for negative affect, experiences of HARM were positively associated with program attitudes for mentees who were racially well-represented, suggesting that majority status may buffer the negative impact of HARM on attitudes. Understanding these dynamics provides insight into the importance of assessing and addressing daily experiences of mistreatment among graduate and postdoctoral trainees. Full article