In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Still Searching for Our Mothers' Gardens: Experiences of New, Tenure-Track Women of Color at 'Majority' Institutions ed. by Marnel N. Niles and Nickesia S. Gordon
  • Stephanie Troutman (bio)
Still Searching for Our Mothers' Gardens: Experiences of New, Tenure-Track Women of Color at 'Majority' Institutions edited by Marnel N. Niles and Nickesia S. Gordon. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2011, 310 pp., $36.99 paper.

This collection of essays continues the important work of situating the women-of-color experience into larger issues of institutional equity and social change. Distinctly, this volume features insightful, contemporary research on communication between women of color and their peers, administrators, and students, while also managing to foreground and maintain connections between women of color who are new to the academy and the rich heritage and legacies of our institutional foremothers. Feminist throughout, the collection brings together a diverse kaleidoscope of voices in order to "shed light on the intersectionality of race/gender/ethnicity/identity . . . interrogation of power dynamics at play in institutions of higher learning" (xviii). With a primary goal of establishing and sustaining empowerment, this collection's "broad topics include: road to tenure, student perceptions and stereotypes, unsupportive colleagues, otherness, denial of discrimination, teaching strategies, muted voices" (ibid.). The book is divided into five sections: "Managing Tensions and Contradictions: Diversity in Question"; "Confronting Prejudice and Discrimination: Strategies for Survival"; "Responding to 'Otherness': Navigating Identity"; "Experiencing Difference in the Classroom: Teaching Majority Students"; and "Working with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)." These sections serve as the basis for the structure of this review.

The first section of this book lays the groundwork for broad themes and issues that each of the following sections expounds upon from various and diverse theoretical lenses, research approaches, and personal narratives. With diversity—various definitions and understandings thereof—at the forefront, the chapters in this section provide considerations that are crucial to comprehending the ways in which institutional diversity has multiple definitions and contradictions that permeate their cultural climates and curricula. In chapter 1, authors Angela Prater, Yuping Mao, Marnel Niles, and Yuxia Qian interviewed six female minority professors—one of whom was notably Asian-identified working at an historically black college/university (HBCU)—to examine three areas: university understandings of diversity versus personal understandings of diversity, tokenism and the lack of cultural sensitivity associated with diversity, and the ways in which students and peers/colleagues understood and managed diversity. Using a dialogical framework, chapter 2 focuses on power dynamics in a Christian university setting. The author, Jeanetta Sims, identifies central religious tensions and contradictions that could be useful for anyone working in this environment, not just women of color. She ends with practical tips and personal advice that, again, could apply to all new professorial candidates. [End Page 244] Chapter 3 pairs auto-ethnography with meritocracy to explain the ways in which perceptions of third world female scholars face a quadruple Othering: black, female, immigrant, and third world. Author and book editor Nickesia S. Gordon goes on with great detail and specificity to provide examples of the unique academic barriers and treatment that undermine graduate students who fit into this category. Some examples include ethnocentric judgments and assumptions about student abilities, low academic expectations, lack of attention in terms of academic support and development, and the privileging of westernized curriculum and research topics. She recalls how a friend was told that she could not pursue a dissertation topic related to the Caribbean and was to instead pick an African American-oriented area to pursue. Gordon comes to the conclusion that "academia does not necessarily embody a marketplace for the exchange of diverse views, but instead embodies a colonizing space that reifies the superiority of the developed world" (56). While the features that are distinct to the plight of international black women are centralized throughout, in the end, strategies from American black feminist thought are mobilized as solutions: seeking mentorship, building a network of support, and cultivating spaces of empowerment from the margin.

Section 2 of the text focuses on surviving continued legacies of discrimination. Using standpoint theory—a hallmark of feminist thought and methodology—Marcia Alesan Dawkins explores issues facing young, multiracial, female...

pdf

Share