Locating Themselves: Black Womxn’s Geographies of Professional Socialization

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a larger study that explored the relationship among Black graduate womxn’s (BGW) geospatial and social locations in their academic organizations, their professional socialization processes, and their abilities to access their desired career pipelines upon program completion. More specifically, it is concerned with manners in which Black womxn (co-)construct geographies for their professional growth that (a) retain Black womxnhood at their centers – and in doing so, (b) challenge academia’s dominant discourses about students’ socialization processes and outcomes. The study took place in a highly ranked college of education (“the College”), at a highly regarded predominately-white public research institution in the American Midwest (“Midwest”). I conducted the study using a bricolage approach. Black Critical Race Theory, postcolonialism, and ideas about everyday resistance informed the paper’s methodology. The findings illustrate a theorizing of Black womxn’s created geographies as sites of resistance, and their liberatory imaginations, against anti-Black and colonial violence in the education academy. They also offer implications for how academia must evolve its understandings, structures, locations, and practices of graduate studies to be more responsive to the evolving needs of a diversifying population of learners and professionals.