Conditionally Accepted: Navigating Higher Education from the Margins

A collection of essays that provides advice and strategies for BIPOC scholars on how to survive, thrive, and resist in academic institutions.

Conditionally Accepted builds upon an eponymous blog on InsideHigherEd.com, which is now a decade-old national platform for BIPOC academics in the United States. Bringing together perspectives from academics of color on navigating intersecting forms of injustice in the academy, each chapter offers situated knowledge about experiencing—and resisting—marginalization in academia. Contextualized within existing scholarship, these personal narratives speak to institutional betrayals while highlighting agency and sharing stories of surviving on treacherous terrain. Covering topics from professional development to the emptiness of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and redefining what it means to be an academic in our contemporary moment, this edited collection directly confronts issues of systemic exclusion, discrimination, harassment, microaggressions, tokenism, and surveillance. Letting marginalized scholars know they are not alone, Conditionally Accepted offers concrete wisdom for readers seeking to navigate and transform oppressive academic institutions.

Eric Joy Denise is the owner of Speak Truth, LLC, founder of Conditionally Accepted, and coeditor of Counternarratives from Women of Color Academics.

Bertin M. Louis, Jr. is an associate professor of anthropology and African American & Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky, author of My Soul Is in Haiti, former editor of Conditionally Accepted, and owner/founder of Navigating Higher Education.