Defining ourselves: Exploring our leader and activist identities as Asian American women doctoral students.

Abstract

Student leadership and activism on college campuses has received more widespread attention in recent years, with attention to how student identities inform these organizing efforts. But, how students make sense of their leadership and activism practices is less understood, particularly in graduate student contexts and for different marginalized identities. Through collaborative autoethnography, the authors focus on how being Asian American women has shaped our leadership development and activist stances as doctoral students. Our findings demonstrate that in our efforts to create change as Asian American women, our engagement can only be understood through nonlinear and fluid processes for leadership and activism development, the role of institutional contexts, and the centering of racial and gender identities. This study contributes to how leadership and activist identities develop in graduate school while also highlighting complexities within Asian American women’s experiences.

Bicultural Asian American women’s experience of gender roles across cultural contexts: A narrative inquiry.

“…It is possible that the participants in this study, who were generally more educated compared to those from the aforementioned studies, had been exposed to more critical ideas about Western colonialism, the U.S. history of immigration and exclusion, and their influence on the construction of Asian American women (Espiritu, 2008), which allowed them to view their racial and gendered experiences with a more critical lens. Their critical awareness of the limitations of White feminism and their valuing of women from their cultural and racial group are more in line with recent findings about women in higher education (Hsieh & Nguyen, 2020; Leigh et al, 2021).…”

“…The narratives of Asian American women in academia revolved around awareness of cultural hierarchy and relational caretaking, in line with Asian cultural values, and the pressures to succeed within White patriarchal institutional and societal contexts as a model minority (Hsieh & Nguyen, 2020). Literature on Asian American female student activists in higher education suggested that Asian American women are aware of the performative aspects of White activism, the stereotypes of Asian American women as passive or overly aggressive "Tiger Moms," their privilege vis-à-vis Black activists, and their strengths built on their immigrant experiences of cultural brokering and relational caretaking (Leigh et al, 2021).…”

In Their Experience: A Review of Racial and Sexual Minority Experience in Academe and Proposals for Building an Inclusive Criminology

“…Mentorship relationships prove an important and consistent theme in othered academic experience (Chang et al, 2014; Hsieh & Nguyen, 2020; Mokhtar & Foley, 2020; Moua, 2018). These othered scholars document a struggle to define themselves as legitimate and to decolonize their own conceptions of the archetypal academic (Leigh et al, 2021). Unlike the small sample of CCJ authors, narratives in the larger sample include more transnational scholars who discuss implications of citizenship status and nationality, including regulation of mobility, microaggression, linguistic bias, and challenges to their competency especially in cultural subject matter (Cruz et al, 2020; D’Souza & Pal, 2018; Kim, 2020; Phùng, 2020; Roy et al, 2021; Yoon, 2019).…”

How It Feels to Be Asian in U.S. Academic Libraries and Higher Education: A Systematic Review of Challenges and Coping Strategies

“…Asians and Asian Americans face multiple marginalities in U.S. academic libraries and higher education, based on their race, gender, and cultural background. Intersectionality reveals multi-faceted systems of oppressions such as sexism, racism, and classism (Leigh et al, 2021) and the impact of their intersectional experience is "greater than the sum of racism and sexism" (Crenshaw, 1989, p. 140), as evident in sexual harassment cases involving Asian and Asian American women (Cho, 1997;S. Hune, 2002S.…”

“…Research shows that the barriers they experience are often due to misconceptions about this group (Museus & Kiang, 2009;Ng et al, 2007;Suyemoto et al, 2009), discrimination stemming from prejudice and stereotyping (Cho, 1997; S. J. Lee & Hong, 2020;Suzuki, 2002), lack of role models (Leigh et al, 2021;Poon, 2014), family obligations (Buenavista et al, 2009;S. Hune, 2006;Kodama & Huynh, 2017;Yeh, 2002), internal struggles (Kawahara et al, 2007;Yee, 2009), and racialized and gendered organizations that legitimate and maintain inequality (Acker, 2006;Ray, 2019;Wooten & Couloute, 2017).…”