Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities : First-Gen PhDs Navigating Institutional Power

The contributors to Amplified Voices, Intersecting Identities: First-Gen PhDs Navigating Institutional Power 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, 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, 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, and women. 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 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: Lamesha C. Brown, LaToya Brown, Altheria Caldera, Araceli Calderón, Marisa V. Cervantes, Joy Cobb, Raven K. Cokley, Francine R. Coston, Angela Gay, Josué R. López, Rebecca Morgan, Gloria A. Negrete-Lopez, Lisa S. Palacios, Takeshia Pierre, Alejandra I. Ramírez, Matt Reid, Ebony Russ, Jaye Sablan, Travis Smith, Phitsamay S. Uy, Jane A. Van Galen, Jason K. Wallace and Lin Wu.

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.