Black Women Navigating The Doctoral Journey

With the increasing focus on the critical importance of mentoring in advancing Black women students from graduation to careers in academia, this book identifies and considers the peer mentoring contexts and conditions that support Black women student success in higher education. This edited collection focuses on Black women students primarily at the doctoral level and how they have retained each other through their educational journey, emphasizing how they navigated this season of educational changes given COVID and racial unrest. Chapters illuminate what minoritized women students have done to mentor each other to navigate unwelcome campus environments laden with identity politics and other structural barriers. Shining a light on systemic structures in place that contribute to Black women's alienation in the academy, this book unpacks implications for interactions and engagement with faculty as advisors and mentors. An important resource for faculty and graduate students at colleges and universities, ultimately this work is critical to helping the academy fortify Black women's sense of belonging and connection early in their academic career and foster their success.

This book explores the experiences of gifted Black women doctoral graduates, featuring narratives of their challenges related to race, gender, parenthood, class, and first-generation status offering discussion on the role of community and academic support in their success. Delivering concrete guidance on navigating the challenges of doctoral programs, this critical text draws on endarkened epistemology, recognizing the nuanced path gifted Black women walk in the academy. Accessible and evocative, this collection highlights the role of academic and social sisterhood, supplying a much-needed contribution to the ongoing discussion around race, academic achievement, gender, and mental health.

With the increasing focus on the critical importance of mentoring in advancing Black women students from graduation to careers in academia, this book identifies and considers the peer mentoring contexts and conditions that support Black women student success in higher education. This edited collection focuses on Black women students primarily at the doctoral level and how they have retained each other through their educational journey, emphasizing how they navigated this season of educational changes given COVID and racial unrest. Chapters illuminate what minoritized women students have done to mentor each other to navigate unwelcome campus environments laden with identity politics and other structural barriers. Shining a light on systemic structures in place that contribute to Black women’s alienation in the academy, this book unpacks implications for interactions and engagement with faculty as advisors and mentors. An important resource for faculty and graduate students at colleges and universities, ultimately this work is critical to helping the academy fortify Black women’s sense of belonging and connection early in their academic career and foster their success.

Data from the Education at a Glance in 2019 states that less than 2 percent of the United States’ and world’s population holds a doctorate degree. Germane to this fact, the National Center of Education statistics reported that, in the 2018-19 academic year, of the doctoral degrees awarded to women, only 10.9 percent were awarded to Black women compared to 63.6 percent awarded to White women in the U.S. Black women who are interested in pursuing a doctorate, already in doctoral programs, or in their field of doctoral work are in crucial need of resources, community, and support. For too long, Black women have faced many systemic barriers and various forms of racist exclusion and oppression in educational settings, which has often led to burnout, low sense of belonging, and low retention rates. This memoir, “Our Doctoral Journey: A collection of Black women’s experiences,” serves as a resource and toolkit for Black women doctors, future doctors, and professionals. Prepare yourselves to read transparent and ground-breaking stories from 24 co-authors, ranging from doctoral students to doctors to professionals, who, with great tenacity, have chosen to share their doctoral experiences. Undeniably, this memoir will give you hope, motivation, and determination to choose what is best for you and persist in your program or in your field of work. As the saying goes, “We’re all that we’ve got.”

Black women in higher education continue to experience colder institutional climates that devalue their presence. They are relied on to mentor students and expected to commit to service activities that are not rewarded in the tenure process and often lack access to knowledgeable mentors to offer career support. There is a need to move beyond the individual resistance strategies employed by Black women to institutional and policy changes in higher education institutions. Specifically, higher education policymakers and administrators should understand and acknowledge how the race and gender makeup of campuses and departments impact the successes and failures of Black women as they work to recruit and retain Black women graduate students, faculty, and administrators. Black Women Navigating Historically White Higher Education Institutions and the Journey Toward Liberation provides a collection of ethnographies, case studies, narratives, counter-stories, and quantitative descriptions of Black women's intersectional experience learning, teaching, serving, and leading in higher education. This publication also provides an opportunity for Black women to identify the systems that impede their professional growth and development in higher education institutions and articulate how they navigate racist and sexist forces to find their versions of success. Covering a range of topics such as leadership, mental health, and identity, this reference work is ideal for higher education professionals, policymakers, administrators, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.

Over and over, studies have concluded that the doctoral experience is a monumental challenge in higher education, particularly for women. This book, Women Scholars: Navigating the Doctoral Journey, provides an enlightening ethnographic look at women and their doctoral developmental experiences. The book’s aim is to empower women to be able to contextualize their experience while also offering support and inspiring readers to consider alternative ways to successfully approach the doctoral process. Women anticipating and entering the life of academia will benefit from the voices and experiences shared by the women scholars in this book. The essay writers in this volume offer an examination of critical incidents in their doctoral experiences and offer strategies they have found helpful in managing those incidents. The book also addresses challenges presented by the transition from doctoral study to post-doc employment. The volume presents 46 essays from 40 women representing a range of ages, ethnicities, academic disciplines, sexual orientations, family circumstances, and family educational histories. Their stories are told in five stages: Stage 1: Preadmission to Enrollment Stage 2: First Year of Program Stage 3: Second Year Through Candidacy Stage 4: The Dissertation Stage Stage 5: Completion and Transition to Employment These are stories of empowerment, of pitfalls and barriers overcome, of successful negotiations of the graduate school process, of the joys and challenges of scholarly pursuits, of positive help-seeking behaviors and strategies, and of life after the dissertation is completed. Potential applicants for doctoral studies will walk away with a sense that graduate education is possible and that one can be successful. Higher educators in doctoral programs, as well, will acquire a deeper understanding and appreciation for the idiosyncratic challenges facing their female students and, one hopes, develop policies and/or strategies and behaviors that empower and encourage these students’ completion of their doctoral studies.

As a new generation of African Americans completes college, an increasing number of students are aspiring to the Ph.D. as a stepping stone to a career in the academy and to fully participate in shaping our society. Most African Americans are conscious that they are the first in their families to embark on this journey. They are aware they will meet barriers and prejudice, are likely to face isolation and frustration, and find few sources of support along the way.This book, by twenty-four Black scholars who “have been there,” offers a guide to aspiring doctoral students to the formal process and to the personal, emotional and intellectual challenges they are likely to face. The authors come from a wide range of disciplines – from computing, education and literature to science and sociology. Although their experiences and backgrounds are as varied as they are as individuals, their richly diverse chapters cohere into a rounded guide to the issues for those who follow in their footsteps.From questioning the reader about his or her reasons for pursuing a doctorate, offering advice on financial issues, the choice of university and doctoral program, and relocation, through the process and timetable of application, interviews, acceptance and rejection, the authors go on to describe their own journeys and the lessons they have learned.These men and women write candidly about their experiences, the strategies they used to maintain their motivation, make the transition from HBCUs to PWIs, balance family and work, make the right choices and keep focussed on priorities. They discuss how to work effectively with advisors and mentors, make all-important connections with teachers and build professional and personal support networks. They recount how they dealt with tokenism, established credibility, handled racism, maintained their values and culture, and persuaded supervisors to legitimize their research interests in African American issues. This is both an inspirational and practical book for every African American considering pursuit of a doctoral degree.

Inspired by those who mothered before and through the COVID-19 pandemic, this is a book about, for, and with those who live different embodiments of academic mothering—mothers, othermothers, academic mothers, and mothering academics. In this book, mothering is defined broadly, encompassing those who are biologically or legally mothers with children; those who are “not-mother” but who nonetheless understand and practice mothering; those who do identify as mothers but not as women; and all those who take on mothering roles in academia and beyond. Through poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, image and text, the authors in this edited book creatively explore academic mothering through their unique lived experiences, illuminating three ideas that comprise the three sections of this book: mothering as practice, mothering in precarity, and mothering as relational. Through considering—and in many cases, writing about and through—their own mothering practices, this diverse collection of authors critique the systemic failures of academia in the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, fabulating new possibilities that envision a future in which mothering is valued and supported in (and by) higher education.