Working in the Margins

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for the people who unknowingly influenced and inspired my academic journey to this project, including Valentina, a non-traditional, first-generation college educated Chicana like myself, who introduced me to Gloria Anzaldúa. I distinctly remember the day at the University of Utah in Milton Benion Hall when she smilingly handed me her copy of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Scanning the pages of Anzaldúa’s book, I found myself reading about my people, my cultures (Tejana, Mexican, American) and my life in the borderlands. Gloria Anzaldúa continues to inspire me and, as evident in the pages of this book, generations of Latinx teachers and scholars. Gracias Gloria, por tu labor de amor y por tu vida. The work presented in this book also builds upon countless stories by people of color and women living in the margins of academia. I am grateful for the communication teachers and scholars that inform this volume, including Brenda J. Allen, Bernadette Calafell, Lisa Flores, and John T. Warren, among others.

I appreciate Dr. Erika Hendrix, Associate Editor for Peter Lang Publishing, for her guidance and patience through this publishing process. I am grateful to Kathryn Harrison for helping me through the early stages of this project. I value Peter Lang’s anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback. Devika Chawla, Ahmet Attay, Carolyn Ellis, Benjamin Myers, and the anonymous reviewers for Departures in Critical Qualitative Research provided valuable insight on earlier versions of my paper, Navigating Toxic Communication. I thank my colleagues Allison Cantrell, for her assistance in copy-editing, and Bridget Kirkland for the beautiful book cover design and photo.

Dedicated time to organize, write, edit, and prepare Working in the Margins was made possible by the generous support of the Office of Sponsored Awards and Research Support (SARS) Course Reallocation Program at the ←vii | viii→University of South Carolina Upstate and the Research Initiative for Summer Engagement (RISE) grant Sponsored by the University of South Carolina. I appreciate the SARS staff, Dr. Melissa Pilgrim, Elaine Marshall, and Adrian Hayes, for their professionalism and assistance in processing my grants.

Introduction: Working in the Margins of Our Difference

Carolyn “Carolina” Rosas Webber

A critical communication perspective offers multiple ways of understanding interactions and constructions of meaning between human beings, cultures, and politically laden discourses of difference (e.g., race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender, and sexuality). For example, a transformational model of communication takes into account an individual’s frame of reference—the personal experiences, social institutions, and contexts that shape a person’s self-concept—as well as the larger historical and political contexts that shape human interactions and perceptions. This model informs critical and feminist communication difference research that explores how communication constitutes identities and shapes relations of power and domination. The simultaneous consideration of individual (micro) and cultural/ideological (macro) processes of communication holds vast potential for scholars and teachers interested in helping members of society understand how perceived differences in identity can shape personal, professional, and civic lives. Minority scholars and teachers also centralize communication as a constituting and articulating force of identity constructions and power dynamics in order to understand and explain their own experiences of marginalization in academia.

Like any organization inhabited by humans, people who administer, teach, and study at universities can act on perceptions of difference to particularize and marginalize women and minorities. Yet, it can be difficult for some people to accept that universities, as perceived bastions of knowledge and learning, are vulnerable to the reproduction of toxic ideologies and power relations that normalize the status quo and simultaneously particularize and exclude those who are deemed too different from the norm. It is also difficult for individuals to accept that their own language and actions are the mechanisms through which these relations of power and domination ←1 | 2→are maintained. For instance, Ahmed (2012) describes her experiences with a dean at her university who stated, “race is too difficult to deal with” (p. 3); attributed the whiteness of the university as simply the result of geography (p. 4); and charged Ahmed, the woman of color, to fix the problem. This administrator’s responses reflect an implicit understanding that (a) racism is a thing of the past; (b) a denial that race and whiteness are deeply imbedded within institutional structures; and (c) that racial inequality is a problem only people of color imagine and see (Cooks & Simpson, 2007, p. 15). As such, when people of color and White allies attempt to bring awareness to the material impact of institutionalized racism in higher education, they can be framed as uncivil troublemakers or monstrous others (Calafell, 2015) who threaten the presumed rationality and neutrality of a given university. Raymond Williams (1977/1998) explains that the strongest barrier to recognizing “human cultural activity” in the present is the “immediate and regular conversion of experiences into finished products” (p. 1168). The fixation of cultural formations, such as racism, nativism, ethnocentrism, and sexism, as historical events of the past obscures how ideological residues are resurrected, performed, and reproduced over and over again in contemporary culture and social institutions, including academia. It is often much easier to blame critically aware/thinking people of color and White allies for disrupting presumed cultures of sameness than it is to critically examine how toxic ideologies are cultivated in daily formal and informal communication processes.

Current research indicates that minority faculty experience marginalization in their classrooms, departments, and universities regardless of the size or type of institution, field of study, or the content of the courses that they teach (Ahmed, 2012; Boylorn & Orbe, 2014 Calafell, 2015; Gutierrez y Muhs, Flores, Niemann, and Harris, 2012). In the classroom, conditions of marginalization are intensified when critical thinking minority and White faculty teach courses that challenge dominant ideologies such as racism, ethnocentrism, nativism, whiteness, classism, patriarchy, and/or heteronormativity; introduce critical and feminist perspectives; and share their marginalized experiences in America (Boylorn & Orbe, 2014; Cooks & Simpson, ←2 | 3→2007). Domestic and international women who conduct difference research can also find their academic work undervalued and themselves isolated and excluded from mentoring and networking opportunities in their departments and universities.