Deirdre Cobb-Roberts

Accountability in a Postdesegregation Era: The Continuing Significance of Racial Segregation in Florida’s Schools:

In the wake of both the end of court-ordered school desegregation and the growing popularity of accountability as a mechanism to maximize student achievement, the authors explore the association between racial segregation and the percentage of students passing high-stakes tests in Florida’s schools. Results suggest that segregation matters in predicting school-level performance on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test after control for other known and purported predictors of standardized test performance. Also, these results suggest that neither recent efforts by the state of Florida to equalize the funding of education nor current efforts involving high-stakes testing will close the Black-White achievement gap without consideration of the racial distribution of students across schools.

Running Bamboo: A Mentoring Network of Women Intending to Thrive in Academia

This article is based on the authors’ experiences as women academics who engage in informal peer mentoring to persist in the cultural milieus of their respective institutions. The authors draw on poststructural perspectives and the metaphor of the rhizome “running bamboo” to illustrate the connections they forged in a mentoring network that folds across multiethnic, multilingual, and multi-geographic spaces. The analysis of personal narratives surfaced the significance of context for understanding each other’s persistence in the academy. By rhizomatically constructing personal and professional narratives, the authors identified how shared experiences in academia, the contextual variations among them, and a process of becoming peers in a mentoring network supports their negotiation of the academy.

Productive Tensions in a Cross-Cultural Peer Mentoring Women's Network: A Social Capital Perspective.

A growing body of researchers documents the unique barriers women face in their academic career progression and the significance of mentoring networks for advancement of their academic trajectories as faculty. However, few researchers explore the embedded tensions and conflicts in the social processes and relations of mentoring networks, and the implications this has for social capital. Using this as our starting point, our narrative reflections suggest that while productive orientations and shared experiences as women faculty of color promote supportive professional roles; the structural, relational, and cultural dynamics subtly frame the basis of our tensions. In moving beyond these, we advance the need for structured and constructive engagement of our differences in building the social capital of peer mentoring networks. While this is not an easy task, we hold that it requires fluid and ongoing negotiations of these relationships if collective goals are to be realized.

Introduction Schools as Imagined Communities

We often envision schools as communities. Some of us picture a little red schoolhouse where all the children in the neighborhood came to learn and play together. Others have memories of a school down the road they could not attend because they were shipped off to other neighborhoods far away. And, finally, there are those who remember a school that denied them access and made no other educational provisions. This last type of memory makes imagining schools as communities problematic. At first glance we would like to see a school as a place where children, teachers, and parents gather with a shared sense of purpose. The image of everyone working together has been an ideal. In an 1899 lecture, John Dewey said, “What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy” (emphasis added). In the midst of industrialization and the growth of bureaucracies within schools, Dewey was trying to justify humanitarian treatment of children by reference to supposedly bygone communal values.1

The Stony Road We Trod: Black Women, Education, and Tenure

The focal point of our book is the comparative examination of Black women in higher education across the United States and the Caribbean, their professional experiences, and strategies for negotiating their institutional environment. We start therefore with an acknowledgement and shared epistemological position that while (post)colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, as systems of domination, provide common sociohistorical experiences and structural realities for Black women in the United States and in the Caribbean, they do not represent a monolithic group; their localized experiences, and related specificities of such social locations, will produce diverse responses to systemic systems of oppression (Collins in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, New York, 1990; Collins in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Routledge, New York, 2000; Richardson, Bethea, Hayling, & Williamson-Taylor in Handbook of Multicultural Counseling. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 2010). Through our comparative examination of Black women in academe therefore we center the experiences of African American and Afro-Caribbean scholars (including those who work in the United States and in the Caribbean).

Comparative Intersectionality: An Intra-Categorical Approach

Our work is based on a comparative intersectional approach. Through comparative lenses, we explore a systematic process through which we can capture the differences and similarity within and between Black women academics in the United States (BWAUS), Black Caribbean women academics in the United States (BCWAUS), and Black women academics in the Caribbean (BWAC). This theoretical and methodological emphasis mirrors what Hancock (Perspectives on Politics 5:63–79, 2007) referred to as multiple intersections that are understood using what McCall (Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society 30:1771–1800, 2005) defined as intra-categorical analysis of experience within and between groups. More specifically, we empirically explore various strands of narrative inquiry to examine our own narratives and those of Black women in academe across the two contexts. This we employed as a strategy to interrogate the lived experiences of six African American women, five Afro-Caribbean women academics in the United States, and six Afro-Caribbean women academics in the region.

Experiences of Black Women in the Caribbean Academy

Our work advances a comparative intersectional exploration of Black women in academe. In so doing, we begin to tease out the relative significance and connectedness of socio-historical, cultural, economic, and political contexts, as well as, embedded structures and relations of power that collectively undergird their experiences. In applying this comparative intersectional framework to the examination of Black Caribbean women in academe, we therefore begin with the understanding that their lives are also structurally situated within parallel axes of power. We also bring to bear some fundamental complexities and contentious ways in how they speak of and work within issues of context, structure, power, and agency.

Black Women in the US Academy

Larger discourses and social constructions of Black persons in the US are often framed within social misrepresentations, prejudices, stereotypes, and myths (Christian in Black feminist criticism—Perspectives on Black women writers. Pergamon, New York, NY, 1985; Fox-Genovese in Within the plantation household: Black and White women of the Old South. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 1988; Coltrane & Messineo in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 42:363–389, 2000; Smedley & Smedley in American Psychologist 60:16–26, 2005; Scott in The language of strong Black womanhood: Myths, models, messages and a new model for self-care. Lexington Books, London, 2017). To some extent, these knowledge sets stem from ongoing forms of colonization and exploitation; wherein Blacks in the US have been socialized into a system of perceived racial and cultural inferiorities and stereotypical notions of being (DuBois in The education of Black peoples: 10 critiques 1906–1960, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, 1973; DuBois in The souls of Black folks. Dover Publications, Mineola, NY, 1994; Helms in An overview of Black racial identity theory, Praeger Publishers, Westport, CT, pp. 9–32, 1993; Woodson in The mis-education of the Negro. Africa West Press, Trenton, NY, 1990). A related argument is that these dominant ideas and socialization practices are fuelled and sustained by more fluid combinations of power-structures that exist in the broader society (Crenshaw in University of Chicago Legal Forum 139:139–167, 1989; Collins in Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge, New York, 2000). The effect of this complex ideological and structural web of influence cannot be underestimated. In fact, Collins (Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Routledge, New York, 2000) contended that as a constellation of knowledge projects, such thinking about Black women, have worked to frame hegemonic ideas as socially scripted frames of reference that inform understanding of selves, and their relative positioning in that contentious space. There is growing evidence of this standpoint in the literature on Black women.

Black Women in Higher Education: Toward Comparative Intersectionality

Intersectionality theory offers a methodological approach, a heuristic tool, and an epistemological stance for understanding and combating multiple forms/manifestations of marginalization (Davis in Women, race and class. New York, Random House, 1981; Giddings in When and where I enter: The impact of Black women on race and sex in America. New York, William Morrow, 1984; hooks in Feminist theory: From margin to center. Brooklyn, South End Press, 1984; Collins in Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment. Boston, Unwin-Hyman, 1990; Davis in Feminist Theory 9: 67–85, 2008; Carbado, Crenshaw-Williams, Mays, & Tomlinson in Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10: 303–312, 2013). In its classical sense, intersectionality has been used to explain how fields/structures of power (for instance gender, race, class, and nation, to name a few) interact to produce social inequities for any limitless combination of identities. In particular, the theory delves into the systematic and structural analysis of social hierarchies, processes, power dynamics, and their collective relationship to social identities; particularly for marginalized women.

Changing Educational Landscapes: The Challenge of Academic Capitalism

In looking at the issue of tenure, it is also important to address the changing nature of educational landscapes across the globe. We start therefore by acknowledging that the impact of the global, neo-liberal landscapes on higher education and more specifically on academic labour, have, and continue to be quite profound (Slaughter & Rhoades in Higher Education 26(3):287–312, 1993; Slaughter & Rhoades in Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state and higher education. The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 2004; Slaughter & Leslie in Academic capitalism: Politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1997; Slaughter & Leslie in Organization 8(2):154–161, 2001; Becher & Trowler in Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. Open Press and the Society for Research into Higher Education, Buckingham, UK, 2001; Clarke in Neoliberalism: A critical reader. Pluto Press, Ann Arbor, MI, pp. 50–59, 2005; Giroux in Teachers as intellectuals: Toward a critical pedagogy of learning. Bergin & Garvey, Westport, CT, 1988; Giroux in Thought & Action 2006:63–78, 2006). We recognize specifically that neo-liberal ideologies and institutionalized practices have led to the commodification, internationalization of the new public management practices within the academic community, as well as the massification of higher education.