Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities : First-Gen PhDs Navigating Institutional Power in Early Academic Careers

The contributors to Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities: First-Gen PhDs Navigating Institutional Power in Early Careers overcame deeply unequal educational systems to become the first in their families to finish college. Now, they are among the 3% of first-generation undergraduate students to go on to graduate school and then become faculty, in spite of structural barriers that worked against them.

These scholars write of socialization to the professoriate through the complex lens of intersectional identities of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, ability and social class.

These first-generation graduate students have crafted critical narratives of the structural obstacles within higher education that stand in the way of brilliant scholars who are poor and working-class, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, immigrant, queer, white, women, or people with disabilities. They write of agency in creating defiant networks of support, of sustaining connections to family and communities, of their activism and advocacy on campus. They refuse to perpetuate the myths of meritocracy that reproduce the inequalities of higher education. In response to a research literature and to campus programming that frames their identities around “need”, they write instead of agentive and politicized intersectional identities as first-generation graduate students, committed to institutional change through their research, teaching, and service.

Contributors are: Veronica R. Barrios, Candis Bond, Beth Buyserie, Noralis Rodríguez Coss, Charise Paulette DeBerry, Janette Diaz, Alfred P. Flores, José García, Cynthia George, Shonda Goward, Luis Javier Pentón Herrera, Nataria T. Joseph, Castagna Lacet, Jennifer M. Longley, Catherine Ma, Esther Díaz Martín, Nadia Yolanda Alverez Mexia, T. Mark Montoya, Miranda Mosier, Michelle Parrinello-Cason, J. Michael Ryan, Adrián Arroyo Pérez, Will Porter, Jaye Sablan, Theresa Stewart-Ambo, Keisha Thompson, Ethan Trinh, Jane A. Van Galen and Wendy Champagnie Williams.

Jane A. Van Galen, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Washington Bothell. She has authored multiple articles and co-edited two books on class, mobility, and education. She leads the First in Our Families digital storytelling project.

Jaye Sablan, MA, is Assistant Director of Graduate Student Affairs in The Graduate School at the University of Washington and leads the First-Gen Graduate Student Initiative. She is Native Chamorro, genderqueer, and first in family to go to college.