A race re-imaged, intersectional approach to academic mentoring: Exploring the perspectives and responses of womxn in science and engineering research

• Published in: Contemporary educational psychology 2019-10, Vol.59, p.101786, Article 101786
• Main Authors: Villanueva, Idalis, Di Stefano, Marialuisa, Gelles, Laura, Osoria, Paul Vicioso, Benson, Sheree
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0361-476X; 1090-2384
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cedpsych.2019.101786

•Power, communication, and awareness roles on academic mentoring equity were initial themes.•When introduced to tokenism, themes differed based upon intersectional identities.•Electrodermal activities increased for multiracial women on gender-equity issues.•Electrodermal activities decreased for White/Caucasian women on race-equity issues.•Womxn had varied responses to tokenism based on their academic research roles. In academic mentoring research, there is a need to include empirical designs that consider more sociocultural perspectives. The purpose of this exploratory study was to race re-image academic mentoring by considering its sociocultural perspectives (i.e., intersectionality, tokenism, and awareness). For this, a qualitative-dominant, convergent mixed-methods approach was used to explore the perspectives and responses of twelve womxn graduate students and faculty involved in science and engineering research. Using multi-modal approaches that included two structured interviews and electrodermal activity (EDA) sensors, participants were asked to respond to case studies of achievement-, race-, and gender-equity through an academic mentoring lens. Our qualitative findings suggested that across the interviews, issues of power, communication strategies, and awareness are predominant themes and needs of academic mentoring in their respective disciplines. Furthermore, our quantitative findings supported the notion that throughout the interviews, varying forms of identities (e.g., social, institutional, discourse) appeared to predominate or interact throughout the cases explored. Together, the data points to the complex racial- and gender- influenced sociocultural perspectives of academic mentoring in science and engineering.