WIRED: Critically Resisting, Reshaping and Engaging an Institution of Higher Education

Year of Funding: 

2012/2013

This collaboration is working towards the creation of an edited volume comprised of theoretically rich and critically engaged chapters outlining, describing, and critiquing the experiences of women of color on the tenure track at the University of Washington.

The contributors of our book are all members of WIRED (Women Investigating Race, Ethnicity, and Difference), a crossdisciplinary research collective of assistant and associate professors from fifteen different departments across the three UW campuses. We have had a variety of experiences that caused us to think critically about and, in a sense, “re-package” or “re-frame” the ways in which we approach our teaching, our colleagues, and our research. Because of who we are, how we are racialized and gendered, and how we must negotiate our ideas and experiences as women of color, our very presence at the university challenges traditional notions of research, teaching, service and collegiality.

The book has four aims:

• illustrate the historic, political, economic and social context of contemporary predominately white and male institutions of higher education;
• document and critically investigate the experiences of women of color on the tenure track at a Research 1 (R1) university;
• describe and analyze the significance of the role of race and ethnicity in shaping the “work” (i.e., production of knowledge via publications, research grants, and teaching) done within predominately white institutions of higher education;
• instigate a discussion about the ways marginalized populations can push back against and transform elite, stratifying institutions from within.