A Q&A with Julie R. Posselt
Last month, Stanford University Press hosted an online discussion with Equity in Science » author Julie R. Posselt, Gibor Basri (UC Berkeley), and Natasha Warikoo (Tufts University). Because attendees of the talk posted more questions than could be answered in a short amount of time, we invited Julie to continue the conversation here.
Thank you for your work! During your fieldwork and interviews, how did faculty and/or graduate students (or administrators if they are part of the sample) think of themselves as workers? Did that come up at all, or did the “disciplinary steward” focus overtake most interviewees’ comments?
Graduate students have long been positioned dually as learners and workers, and mismanagement of that reality has been the source of graduate student protests and strikes in the last year. In my research on racially and gender diverse doctoral programs, students absolutely thought of themselves as workers as well as students. The students of color we interviewed recognized that their labor on behalf of the institution not only took the form of teaching and research assistantships. Departments striving for diversity leaned on students for other types of time and effort as well — engaging with prospective students for outreach and recruitment, providing support to other current students in the absence of faculty of color, and more. In some respects, graduate students were the ultimate cultural translators—an idea that I develop in the book—that allow these historically white and male organizations to transition into something more like the America we are becoming. All of this came with emotional labor for students, too, which they spoke about as a part of their work. It exacts a serious toll to conceal one’s negative emotions and reactions to everyday instances of racism and sexism, in order to help keep a positive tone.
Have you seen relevance of hiring and promotion practices of faculty in your case studies as shaping the grad student experience?
Faculty hiring and promotion is absolutely relevant to the student experience. My research has observed this in a few ways. First, the composition of a department’s faculty and availability of same-race or same-gender faculty to serve as advisors or informal mentors is important to recruiting doctoral students. Of course, students can learn with and from any faculty with the skill and disposition to provide guidance, but research demonstrates that the experience of being part of a community in which one feels they belong makes a significant difference to student wellbeing.
Many of the same mindsets about excellence and about what constitutes merit that affect faculty hiring and promotion also infuse how graduate students are selected and subsequently evaluated in their doctoral training. My current research is on doctoral qualifying exams, and how disciplinary norms are the basis for both access to and advancement in one’s field. The process of being socialized to norms that shape faculty advancement starts in graduate school.
A third way that faculty hiring and promotion affects the doctoral student experience is this: graduate students’ own interest in becoming a professor is often affected by their observations of faculty navigating tenure and promotion, as well as peers navigating faculty hiring. Seeing what it takes to be hired into the professoriate today affects graduate students’ own ambitions.
From your research, what do you think Sociology as a discipline could/should learn from this research?
Sociologists have engrained sensibility about social relations, culture, and inequality that can be a real asset as they address their own inequalities. But like STEM and other disciplines, sociologists benefit from intentional, continuous learning – especially as it concerns skills and knowledge for teaching, mentoring, or organizing themselves for equity. Among stratification scholars, for example, dominant frameworks give the field much better tools for understanding what maintains inequalities at scale than what it takes to redress them, and what the possibilities and limits of doing so are through familiar activities like teaching, research, and service. Knowing how inequality happens is different than knowing how to work together to reduce inequalities in one’s own university or department. For this reason, I appreciate and frequently cite Cecilia Ridgeway’s three-level model for the social construction of gender—cultural beliefs, interactions, and structures. As in other fields, sociologists would benefit from using that heuristic with respect to both gender and race to think about building some new habits of thought and interaction into their daily work.
Another important thing the discipline can learn is the importance of engaging in coordinated activity. Strategic planning sometimes (ok, often) gets a bad rap for good reason, but when done well, it can help busy professors collectively engage in meeting shared goals.
Finally, like all fields, those in homogenous corners of sociology should give some serious thought to how their intellectual priorities may be subtly excluding – or at least not attracting – students of color. In a case study of a psychology department that looked diverse numerically, a closer look revealed that it was highly segregated, with most students of color concentrated in social psychology. They can also learn from a physics department (which is typically a very tightly defined discipline that privileges theory) that took a hard look at it how it could broaden its intellectual paradigm. They engaged in disciplinary boundary work to purposefully include applied and interdisciplinary questions with race-forward implications (e.g., development of inexpensive solar panels as a backstop to the power grid for stop lights and street lights in under-resourced urban neighborhoods). In doing this, they found they could identify applicants who are not just conventional achievers, but also a different kind of excellent: they called it “intellectually adventurous.” This shouldn’t be read as a stereotype, but there is research to demonstrate that students of color are, on average, more interested in using scholarly research to address real-world problems that impact their communities. The more that all sub-disciplines of sociology can value applied knowledge generally, and questions that have bearing on race specifically, the more people from historically marginalized backgrounds may be interested in them.
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