Examining the Experiences of Racialized and Indigenous Graduate Students as Emerging Researchers

Abstract

In this article, we explore the experiences of graduate students as researchers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in the social sciences and humanities in Canada. This analysis is based on 22 semistructured qualitative interviews with BIPOC students and explores their experiences using critical race theory and an analysis of color-blind racism. The participants in our study narrate four dimensions of experience in relation to being researchers. (1) Supervision: Participants express positive relationships with supervisors who are intellectually open, engaged in critical scholarship, politically engaged, and who recognize the impact of larger forces on BIPOC students’ lives. (2) Funding: Participants describe unequal access to funding and to grant-writing skills development. (3) Self-tokenization: Some participants confront pressures to carry out voyeuristic, deficit-focused research on their own communities. (4) Responsibilities to community: Some participants want authentically to research their own communities, which entails additional responsibilities to avoid reproducing colonial and racist dynamics. Despite the ways in which racism and colonialism shape BIPOC students’ experiences as researchers, participants are clear that they are not victims of the university. Rather, they find meaning in knowledge creation and offer proactive recommendations on how to improve the experiences of BIPOC graduate student researchers.

Introduction

In this article, we explore the experiences of graduate students who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in the social sciences and humanities in Canada. Specifically, we focus on their experiences as emerging researchers. According to the hegemonic narrative, universities are spaces of openness, inclusion, fairness, and equity (Bailey 2016:1262; Henry, James, et al. 2017; Mohamed and Beagan 2019); however, the students in our study offer counter-stories that highlight the ways in which racism and colonialism shape their experiences of the university. As Frances Henry, James, et al. (2017:3) argue, equity is a “myth” at Canadian universities: “the goal of achieving social justice by creating equitable institutions has been consistently promised but persistently denied for racialized and Indigenous scholars.” There is strikingly little written on BIPOC graduate students as researchers in the social sciences and humanities. The small but rich literature on racism and colonialism in academia in Canada overwhelmingly focuses on faculty. While there is a growing wealth of literature on BIPOC graduate students in the United States, relatively little centers on their experiences as researchers. This article, thus, contributes to filling significant gaps in literature by delving into the experiences of racialized and Indigenous graduate students as emerging knowledge producers.

The participants in our study narrate four dimensions of experience in relation to being researchers. First, they explore relationships with supervisors (or advisors). Notwithstanding some very negative experiences, our participants generally enjoy positive relationships with supervisors. The most supportive relationships narrated by participants are characterized by supervisors who are intellectually open and supportive of students’ own research priorities, engaged in critical scholarship, politically engaged, and who recognize the impact of larger forces on BIPOC students’ lives. Second, our participants narrate inequalities in relation to funding, which is essential for graduate student researchers—either to finance research (e.g., pay for fieldwork) or to free students from taking on additional paid employment so they can focus on their research. Participants describe unequal access to both funding and grant-writing skills development. The inequity relating to funding, in turn, reproduces classed and racialized inequality, especially for students who are first-in-family to attend graduate school. Third, BIPOC graduate students sometimes confront pressures to carry out research on their own communities, which seems to arise from the expectation that these students simply could not have other research interests. This leads some BIPOC graduate students to experience feelings of “self-tokenization,” which our participants conceptualize as engaging in voyeuristic, usually deficit-focused, research on their own communities in response to feeling that the university rewards “exotic” research to achieve the appearance of diversity. Self-tokenism is layered with self-doubt about whether their achievements are a result of tokenism, which arises from racialized or colonial imposter syndrome experienced by BIPOC graduate students. Fourth, some BIPOC graduate students want authentically to research their own communities and/or advocate for the importance of having insiders engage in knowledge production with their communities. However, conducting research with one’s own community is not uncomplicated. One Indigenous participant underscores additional responsibilities in carrying out community-embedded research to avoid reproducing colonial dynamics, while another student expresses the worry that there is no “market” for research on marginalized communities by their own members. Despite the ways in which racism and colonialism shape BIPOC students’ experiences as researchers, our participants are clear that they are not victims of academia. Rather, they find meaning in knowledge creation and they offer proactive recommendations on how to improve the experiences of BIPOC graduate student researchers.

Color-Blindness And Critical Race Theory Methods

We examine the narratives of BIPOC graduate students through the lens of color-blind racism and CRT. Asserting a condition of racelessness or post-racialism, color-blindness claims “not to recognize skin color as a racial differentiating trait in making decisions” (Henry, Dua, et al. 2017:304) and thus forms another dimension of the hegemonic narrative of the university as fair, inclusive, and equitable. However, color-blindness perpetuates inequality as policies and practices that are purportedly race-neutral produce racially unequal outcomes (Blockett et al. 2016; see Bonilla-Silva 2009; Harper 2012). Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2009:54, emphasis in original) argues that any racial ideology operates according to “frames or set paths for interpreting information” that are used to “explain racial phenomena following a predictable route.” Color-blindness works through four frames: (1) Abstract liberalism appeals to principles of political liberalism (such as equality of opportunity and meritocracy) and ideas associated with economic liberalism (such as individual choice) to resist substantive action to challenge racialized inequality. (2) Naturalization explains racial phenomena as arising from nature (such as asserting segregation results from an innate human drive toward in-groups). (3) Cultural racism appeals to supposed cultural differences to explain unequal outcomes (such as treating stereotypes as facets of “culture”). Finally, (4) minimization of racism asserts that discrimination no longer shapes the lives of non-white peoples and that racism is rare—an idea premised on a narrowing definition of racism as only the most overt, extreme expressions (Bonilla-Silva 2009:56–57). Color-blindness in the university explains unequal outcomes as a result of merit, individual choices, human nature, or (pathological) culture while disavowing structural and systemic barriers. Thus, racialized and colonial inequalities disappear in the hegemonic narrative of universities in Canada.

CRT offers a lens to critique the hegemonic narrative of universities. CRT is skeptical of color-blindness (Allen and Joseph 2018; Hubain et al. 2016), underscoring the ways in which color-blindness perpetuates racialized inequality. Rather than agreeing to the post-racialism implied by color-blind racism, CRT places central focus on race and racism along with intersecting axes of inequality (Johnson-Bailey et al. 2008:368; Solorzano, Ceja, and Yosso 2000:63). While analyzing race as a social construct, CRT confronts the real effects of racism and racialization (see Allen and Joseph 2018; Henry, James, et al. 2017; Hubain et al. 2016). Consequently, CRT strives for social justice, challenges racism, and struggles to eliminate race-based oppression (Allen and Joseph 2018:155; Gildersleeve, Croom, and Vasquez 2011; Hubain et al. 2016; Johnson-Bailey et al. 2008; Solorzano et al. 2000). CRT works to challenge the privilege and dominance that accompanies normative whiteness (Henry, James, et al. 2017:15). To do so, CRT mobilizes narrative data to examine lived experience from the perspective of the oppressed. As such, critical race methodology (Hubain et al. 2016) centers “those who are least heard . . . as they provide counter-understandings to dominant ideologies” (Gildersleeve et al. 2011:97). Counter-storytelling or counter-narration “acts as a form of resistance to standard or majoritarian-stories” (Hubain et al. 2016:949) and “demystifies” dominant stories (Allen and Joseph 2018; Barker 2016; Gildersleeve et al. 2011). Indeed, our participants tell different stories from the hegemonic narrative of the university.

Methods

Participants were recruited through advertisements sent to 20 social sciences and humanities programs. Due to COVID-19 public health measures, interviews were conducted via the videoconferencing application, Skype, in Fall 2020 with 22 students (9 doctoral and 13 master’s students). Participants were drawn from one Canadian university with a population of over 30,000 students, located in one of Canada’s most populated urban centers. However, because participants extensively explored their experiences at other universities across the country (some participants, indeed, devoted most of their interview time to discussing other institutions), experiences at various institutions are blended together in this analysis.

Participants were asked to identify or describe their identities in relation to racialization or ethnicity. The following categorizations reflect the broad identifications of the participants:

• Biracial/“mixed”: 3

• Black: 5

• East or Southeast Asian: 3

• Indigenous: 3

• Latino: 1

• Middle Eastern: 2

• North African: 1

• South Asian/“brown”: 4

Some participants added layers to their identification. Two participants identified as queer, one as gay and one as two-spirit, while eight students made direct or indirect reference to having migrated to Canada. Interviews were transcribed, verified, and then coded in NVivo. Transcripts and preliminary analyses were provided to participants who wished to review and provide feedback on these documents.

As a small-scale qualitative study, the goal of this project was not to produce generalizable findings but to explore the texture of these students’ experiences and, in keeping with CRT, to hear their counter-stories. The interview guide was comprised of a small number of wide-open questions to encourage participants to steer the conversation in their chosen direction (e.g., “In your experience, how has being [identity] shaped your experiences of supervision?”). The goal and key benefit of this approach was that participants were able to engage in counter-narration in relation to their own priorities. A drawback, however, is that we did not systematically hear from every participant on each of the themes that ultimately emerged. Thus, in our analysis below, we include the number of participants who raised a particular issue; however, the numbers do not necessarily reflect the prevalence of issues. While the numbers suggest thematic patterns, the numbers are not meant to homogenize experience.

Bipoc Students And Faculty In The Canadian Context

The small but rich literature on racism and colonialism in the context of Canadian universities is largely focused on the experiences of faculty (for the most comprehensive discussion, see Henry, James, et al. 2017). This literature explores continued material inequities, especially relating to representation, pay, and tenure and promotion (Henry, Dua, et al. 2017; Henry and Tator 2012; Wijesingha and Ramos 2017); the neoliberalism of Canadian academia (James 2012); as well as various forms of racism that Indigenous and racialized faculty confront, including overt, institutional, and everyday racisms (Mohamed and Beagan 2019; Samuel and Wane 2005). There is comparatively little research on the experiences of BIPOC students in Canada, which stands in sharp contrast to the large and established literature on BIPOC students in the United States.

The literature on BIPOC students in Canada principally focuses on Indigenous students. Despite improving rates of degree completion, Indigenous students face wide-ranging barriers that are systemic and historically rooted (Ottmann 2017). Indigenous students endure isolation both socially and academically, as well as discrimination (Bailey 2016). Indigenous students, moreover, continue to confront stereotypes and assumptions, including that they are “primitive,” criminal, and intellectually inferior to white students. Indeed, hard-earned achievements are often assumed to result from unfair advantages or privileges (Canel-Çınarbaş and Yohani 2019; Clark et al. 2014). While Indigenous students are subject to intrusive prying and voyeurism relating to their identity, there is a rigid social division between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students on campus that contribute to ongoing ignorance of issues facing Indigenous students among settler peers (Bailey 2016; Canel-Çınarbaş and Yohani 2019). This situation is worsened by curriculum that reproduces misrepresentation of Indigenous peoples or the absence of curriculum relating to Indigenous peoples (Clark et al. 2014). Moreover, Indigenous students experience invalidation of identity, culture, history. or spirituality in education and the denial of their racialized reality (Canel-Çınarbaş and Yohani 2019). Zahra Hojati’s (2009) study on the orientalism Iranian Canadian women graduate students face stands out as one of very few studies of other racialized students in Canada.

Bipoc Graduate Students In The United States

There is a significant body of literature on the experiences of BIPOC graduate students in the United States, in sharp contrast to the lack of such research in Canada. Despite differences in national context, the findings of our study strongly reflect the U.S. literature. The literature on American institutions shows that BIPOC graduate students face significant obstacles and barriers. There is research on graduate students of color, in general (e.g., Brunsma, Embrick, and Shin 2017; Curtis-Boles, Chupina, and Okubo 2020; Gay 2004; Hubain et al. 2016; Noy and Ray 2012; Truong, Museus, and McGuire 2016), as well as literature specific to the experiences of graduate students who are Black (e.g., Allen and Joseph 2018; Barker 2016; Blockett et al. 2016; Gooden, Devereaux, and Hulse 2020; Johnson-Bailey et al. 2008), Latinx (e.g., Gildersleeve et al. 2011; Ramirez 2017), Indigenous (Alejandro, Fong, and De La Rosa 2020; Shotton 2018), and Asian (e.g., Mayuzumi et al. 2007). Racialized experience intersects with other dimensions of identity and oppression, including gender (e.g., Allen and Joseph 2018; Noy and Ray 2012; Squire et al. 2018), sexuality (e.g., Means et al. 2017), and class (Crumb et al. 2020; Ramirez 2017). These studies overwhelmingly share similar and overlapping findings; thus, here, we collate findings from these studies.

In addition to overt racism, BIPOC graduate students in the United States experience a range of everyday and institutional forms of racism. BIPOC graduate students experience exclusion (such as being left out of peer study groups), a lack of social integration in their programs and in the campus community, feeling that they are being merely tolerated, that they are “out of place,” and that they do not belong. Simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible, BIPOC graduate students in the United States experience isolation in an unfriendly or even hostile climate in which they are the only (or one of very few) non-white bodies. This is accompanied by feelings of tokenism and expectations that they represent their entire race. They experience microaggressions and discrimination in and outside of the classroom and stereotyped assumptions, including underestimation of their abilities, challenges to their knowledge, and being treated as criminals. Witnessing or hearing about racism against faculty or peers, moreover, produces experiences of “vicarious” or secondhand racism. Experiences of racism as well as the realization that racism is normalized/a normal experience in academia can be especially devastating because universities and graduate programs often claim to be progressive spaces, leading to a sense of betrayal. BIPOC graduate students are also confronted with a systematic lack of diversity in curriculum, pressure to assimilate to (white) academic culture, and a lack of community and family supports that lead to experiencing feelings of estrangement and cultural alienation. These realities lead many BIPOC students to experience “battle fatigue”—the negative effects on health and well-being from continuously battling racism. Indeed, BIPOC graduate students often struggle with the impact of racism on their mental health, which can also result in reduced academic engagement and greater difficulty in program completion.

Experiences Of Canadian Bipoc Graduate Students As Researchers

Supervision

BIPOC graduate students have layered experiences as researchers, which they narrate through experiences at their current and past institutions. Supervision is an important dimension for analyzing graduate students as researchers because of the central role of supervisors in student socialization and success. (We use the terms “supervisor”/“supervision,” which are commonly used in the Canadian context rather than “advisor”/“advisement,” which is more common in the U.S. context.) Supervisors “play various instrumental, intellectual, and affective roles in the professional development of students” (Noy and Ray 2012:876). The “doctoral student advisor is a key stakeholder and gatekeeper for a student’s success during academic study and degree completion” (Blockett et al. 2016:97). Loni Crumb et al.’s (2020:221) study of working-class Black women graduate students finds that supervisors who “were responsive to students’ academic needs, personal wellness, research interests, and professional development contributed to their persistence.” While student persistence and expeditious completion of graduate school is correlated to various factors (including a strong academic self-concept and a sense of belonging), effective mentoring by the supervisor is “the most important factor in achieving end goals such as degree attainment” (Brunsma et al. 2017:6, emphasis in original). Supervisors play an essential role in providing guidance to students, including helping students develop their research and gain opportunities to present conference papers and co-author publications, and providing support in relation to funding and professional development (Blockett et al. 2016:103). Students who have supervisors who engage in good mentorship “are more likely to publish their research, are more optimistic about their career prospects, report higher career satisfaction, and feel better about the support they received during their graduate years” (Brunsma et al. 2017:6). Positive experiences with supervisors also lead to higher levels of long-term job satisfaction for (former) supervisees (Noy and Ray 2012:877).

While supervisors play wide-ranging, essential roles for students, BIPOC graduate students often report problematic relationships with their supervisors, which belies the hegemonic narrative of color-blindness. Some research suggests that faculty “view certain students [as] more worthy of advisor support than others”; specifically, white male students are seen as the “ideal student” (Noy and Ray 2012:877). BIPOC graduate students are less likely than white peers to feel respected by their supervisors and are more likely to feel their supervisors hold “negative assessments of their ideas” (Noy and Ray 2012:891); moreover, BIPOC graduate students may feel their supervisors are less invested in their research and are less likely to be offered mentorship that helps them develop as scholars (Noy and Ray 2012:883). BIPOC students often suffer from “benign neglect” by their supervisors. In particular, supervisors might be “benevolent” in the sense that they claim to support their students but fail to “provide the kind of critical and constructive instruction that [students] need to develop their intellectual, research, writing and teaching skills”—This “non-directive laissez faire” attitude results in students floundering (Gay 2004:277). Moreover, Ryan Evely Gildersleeve et al.’s (2011:101) study shows that Black students may not feel understood by their supervisors, while Juanita Johnson-Bailey et al. (2008:376) point out that supervisors engage in avoidance of BIPOC graduate students resulting in less mentoring and few professional opportunities. Differential treatment by supervisors challenges the hegemonic narrative that universities offer all students equal opportunities and that success is based on merit (i.e., Bonilla-Silva’s frame of “abstract liberalism” noted above).

At the time of their interviews, 4 of our 22 participants had not yet found a supervisor at their current institution, while a total of 18 participants had a supervisor. Quite strikingly, all 18 of these participants report generally positive experiences with their current supervisor. (One explanation for this is that, despite guarantees of confidentiality and de-identification, students may feel reluctant to say negative things about their supervisors because supervisors play such a vital role in their academic lives.) The positive assessments of supervision included relatively thin forms of satisfaction such as being able to find a supervisor easily, having no particular problems with their supervisors, or finding their relationship to be good overall. Several participants provided further positive descriptions of their supervisors (past and current) as transparent about their own limitations, accommodating, knowledgeable, supportive, and understanding. Arina, a Persian Canadian student, appreciates that her supervisor works with diverse students. James, a Black student, describes his current supervisor as someone who “tries as much as possible to meet me as I am.” Natalia, an Indigenous student, expresses feeling “safe” with her Indigenous supervisor and appreciates that she feels no pressure to be “on” with him. Similarly, Amy, an Indigenous student, values that her Indigenous supervisor understands her background and can communicate in a way that is culturally meaningful to her. Likewise, it was important for Cristiano, who identifies as Latino and gay, that one of his past supervisors identified as a lesbian woman of color and that she was motivated by a desire to support a student with shared experiences. There is not space here to explore fully same-race and cross-racial supervision; however, some U.S. research shows that same-race mentoring can be important for some students, but “most students found support from faculty members of all racial and ethnic backgrounds helpful when they were supportive of their racial identity, research interests, and progress” (Blockett et al. 2016:99).

Indeed, some participants emphasized the importance of having a supervisor—irrespective of the supervisor’s race—who is intellectually open and enables the student to do the research they wish. Melissa, a Black participant, underscores that her supervisor has allowed her to “stay true to myself and to say what I came here to say.” Similarly, Janna, an Indigenous student, describes her reasoning for choosing her supervisor: “the single most important thing to me is that the supervisor I work with lets me do my work the way that I want to do it.” Although Kathleen, a Black student, did not yet have a supervisor at the time of her interview, she describes a constructive dynamic at another institution in which her supervisor affirmed and encouraged her critical work: “I don’t think he was ever unwilling to allow me to do whackier things”:

He’s, like, “Brilliant. Great. Love it.” . . . He didn’t care what I said. In his opinion, if it was well-reasoned then, you can say whatever you want . . . And he allowed me to do, sort of, off the wall things in my thesis because he was just, like, “Oh, yeah, this is interesting. You’re approaching it from this other way that’s not standard in this department but at least you’re doing something that’s fun and it’s interesting.”

For these students, having a supervisor who is open to—and supportive of—their own intellectual agendas has been vital.

Simone, a Black student, describes her supervisor as “just fantastic” for other reasons. In particular, “he just has always seemed to get it.” Simone continues, “I can go onto his Twitter page at any moment and he’s sharing scholars, like, of color, of different ethnicities. He’s sharing scholars of different genders.” Here, Simone underscores the importance of a supervisor who engages with critical scholarship. Moreover, the interviews for this project took place in the period following the police murder of a Black man, George Floyd, in the United States and the ensuing protests, which had ripple effects worldwide and resonated in Canada. Within this context, Simone goes on to explain of her supervisor:

I just know he’s paying attention . . . he will engage with me and say, like, “oh, I know this is happening in the news” and I know often people have a hard time . . . seeing violence and the killing of Black people, which is obvious, but people don’t just check in. But he’ll send an email saying just “hey” and if I don’t respond in two days, he’s like “HEY, how’s it going?”

Thus, Simone’s positive supervisory experience is informed by having a supervisor who is politically engaged and who recognizes how forces in the broader world may impact BIPOC students.

Despite these generally positive experiences, several students also discuss negative experiences. Asma, a South Asian Canadian student, recounts feeling deeply neglected by a “temporary advisor” (i.e., in Asma’s program, this is a professor initially assigned to a student when they commence the program), a feeling that deepened when she learned of her peers’ experiences with temporary advisors who were engaged and supportive. Sarita, another South Asian Canadian student who had not yet found a supervisor at the time of her interview, has similarly found her temporary advisor to be neglectful. Even positive experiences with current supervisors were sometimes preceded by difficult struggles. Some students express having significant difficulty locating a supervisor. It took Alanna, who identifies as mixed race, two years to find a supervisor. As a racialized man, Alanna’s supervisor is very supportive of her, but he is new to the Canadian system and, himself, is not yet familiar with matters key to students, such as Canadian grant application processes. In her struggle to find a supervisor, Radwah, a South Asian Canadian student, “reached out to every single professor listed” including adjuncts and finally was accepted by an adjunct as a supervisee. Amy also struggled to find a supervisor and ultimately had to look outside of her home department because there simply was nobody suitable in her program. Finally, Cristiano describes his current supervisor as “kind” but “strict” and “professional”; however, speaking to a different kind of challenge, Cristiano reports an extremely negative experience of sexual harassment by a supervisor at another institution. Thus, the participants in our study express largely good experiences with supervision, which is an important positive finding given the vital role supervisors play in students’ academic trajectory; however, there are also notable negative experiences.

Unequal Access to Funding

More than 40 percent of participants (9/22) highlighted unequal access to funding. We include funding in this discussion because funding enables research through offsetting the costs of research (e.g., paying for fieldwork) and freeing students from additional paid employment to allow them to focus on research. U.S. research shows that BIPOC students often receive inadequate funding that is less than the funding awarded to their white peers (Gooden et al. 2020:398; Ramirez 2017). Kimberly A. Truong et al.’s (2016) study, moreover, discusses students of color who had their funding offers retracted after registration. Some participants in our study indicated that they received insufficient and unequal funding support. For example, Natalia’s funding offer at one institution was a pittance and significantly lower than the average funding offered to students at that institution. Kathleen’s experience is illuminating: She recounts that a white peer with whom she was friends was admitted into the same program as her one year earlier and had managed to negotiate “a pretty sweet deal.” In contrast, Kathleen was offered less funding and when examining her funding offer, she realized that the program administrator had accidentally forwarded e-mail discussions between the program and the relevant administrative unit that allocated funding. This e-mail exchange revealed an unwillingness to offer Kathleen additional funding. Kathleen explains, “I am aware that there are a lot of things that go into those types of decisions,” but the institution was open to negotiating with her white friend and he “did get much better funding, like double.” This echoes the experiences of participants in Elvia Ramirez’s (2017) study who observed the favoring of white students in terms of the allocation of funding; this unequal distribution of funding reproduces existing class and racialized inequalities.

Indeed, inequitable funding entering into a program has a knock-on effect that reproduces racialized inequalities. Genevieve, a Black student, points out that

if you’re coming into the program and you don’t have funding [versus] somebody who has funding—of course, they can be at the library for ten hours a day. You may have to go to work for five to eight of those hours and then still have to study at night.

As Genevieve observes, the student who does not need to take additional paid employment can devote additional time to developing competitive applications for further funding, for example, to major research councils, which in turn contributes to reproducing the inequity. Moreover, Genevieve observed unfair treatment relating to how funding and professional development information was shared. By way of example, Genevieve offers:

there might have been some incidences where individuals were called for a special meeting and others were not included in that type of meeting. So, I found that there was some differential treatment as it relates to the actual development of the student as a professional . . .

She found that BIPOC students were often left out of “conversations happening” and some students received detailed information while “for others, it was glazed over.” Likewise, the Latinx students in Ramirez’s (2017:31) study noted that programs “failed to teach students grant-writing skills.” However, the unequal access to knowledge and opportunities relating to funding and professional development is invisibilized. As Genevieve explains, “if you try to explain this to somebody, they may think that you’re overreacting” but, ultimately, the same opportunities were not offered to all students in her program. Similarly, when probed if she ever received any guidance in relation to grant writing at one institution, Nisrine, a North African Canadian student, exclaims, “Oh, my God, no! No one helped me with anything.” Radwah, too, indicates in relation to applying for major awards that she has observed “not that much” support for “visible minorities”: “I’m trying to apply for [major grants] and I’m, kind of, really confused.”

The lack of support afforded BIPOC students when applying for funding is especially problematic for students who are first in family to attend graduate school. Several participants point out that being first in family produces barriers, especially that they do not enjoy the cultural capital of their class privileged white peers. As Nisrine is “the first in my entire family . . . to actually go to graduate school,” she witnesses the advantages her peers enjoy of having family members with graduate degrees and knowledge of academia, especially in relation to receiving guidance. Similarly, Amy explains that “a lot of [Indigenous students] are first generation students . . . like, my mom doesn’t have a high school education. She doesn’t know what SSHRC [a Canadian federal research council that awards grants] is . . .” Arina’s experience illuminates the ways in which being first in family and racialized inequality combine to produce feelings of self-doubt. On one hand, Arina suspects implicit racial bias in the assessment of awards: “I got rejected for [internal] awards and I was very confused. Why? I have a perfect GPA. I have manuscripts . . . [And] I keep thinking back about why my [major grant application] was rejected last year.” When she saw that her grant application was not advancing in an internal adjudication process (before being forwarded to the external agency), she could not

help but wonder, “is it a race thing? Or is it just a coincidence because there are more white people at [this institution]?” So, it could be a coincidence—that’s me giving them the benefit of the doubt, but . . . sometimes, I think, “is it a race issue?”

The graduate school environment produces feelings of self-doubt in BIPOC students who are first in family, causing Arina to question her own merit. When probed further on whether unsuccessful applications might relate to implicit bias, Arina responded by questioning her own merit:

I mean, potentially. The thing is it’s hard because my family members aren’t educated. I mean, I am the most educated and so, sometimes, I do feel like my English isn’t as good as someone else who grew up here because my parents’ English is their second or third language . . .

Arina’s self-questioning reflects the “the tentativeness, insecurity, and doubt that can be projected onto doctoral students of color” (Gildersleeve et al. 2011:100). Gildersleeve et al. (2011) refer to this as the “Am I going crazy?!” narrative, which captures both the struggle and the resilience of Latinx and Black graduate students as they navigate the university as a racialized space. However, they argue, this is an unjust burden on BIPOC students “because the self-analyses prompted through the narrative are overtly racialized self-analyses: doubts about their self-efficacy because of their race” (Gildersleeve et al. 2011:108).

For Aniess, who identifies as a mixed-race person of color, first in family BIPOC students need additional supports. As Aniess explains, “I didn’t really know the ropes . . . I was very different from my cohort . . . I had trouble finding support,” but

having a mentor, or someone in your corner within the faculty, makes such a big difference . . . for me, as someone who is the first person in graduate school in my family, I didn’t know about funding. And I don’t know the in’s and out’s and so I’m so reliant on faculty to guide me through that.

This echoes Crumb et al.’s (2020:221) finding that BIPOC students, who often are less familiar with various aspects of graduate school, benefit “from positive affirmation of their abilities, as well as insight on how to navigate their programs.” Despite the added need for mentorship, BIPOC students who choose research topics that are not “mainstream” may struggle to find a mentor to support them through the funding application process. The lack of mentors, then, becomes a barrier to funding for their research given the important role, outlined above, of supervisors in training students including relating to grant-writing skills. Kathleen explains that “because of what my research is, it sort of leaves me on my own” in terms of mentorship. While she received some limited support from one professor who offered general tips on her application, Kathleen observed people in her “program who were able to find a mentor, basically, right away.” For example, a white woman peer quickly found a mentor she has “long conversations with about where her degree is going, and I feel like I haven’t been able to do the same thing. But it was especially evident when we were” working on grant applications.

Furthermore, BIPOC students who research topics that are not “mainstream” may find it difficult not only to locate mentors but even to find funding sources for their projects. As Aniess remarks, “the content I’m working on is . . . not reflected in the internal awards,” which results in fewer potential sources of funding for her research. The lack of awards targeted at topics that may be more likely to be of interest to BIPOC students exemplifies how color-blind racism works by appearing neutral while favoring through funding some research over others, which has the effect of systemically disadvantaging BIPOC students. More broadly, the experiences of students in our study underscore that the allocation of funding is not based purely on merit and chances in competing for funding are not equal per the hegemonic narrative of the university. Rather, their counter-stories show the inequity in funding and access to skills development to win funding, which belies color-blind mythology.

Researching One’s Own Community and “Self-tokenism”

Several participants (6/22) expressed feeling limited by other people’s expectations about their intellectual and research interests. For example, two participants describe, in depth, feeling “pigeonholed” by others, especially faculty, who overdetermined their research interests based on identity. Nisrine frequently had to deal with professors’ assumptions at her previous institution:

I used to wear the hijab so people would assume I had certain politics or certain ideas. But then when I stopped wearing it, I don’t know, people just assumed I had some Arab background therefore I had certain politics, certain ideas . . . [T]he one thing I could say is I was not really listened to and I felt that there was an assumption of what I was curious about . . . [T]hey assumed my identity and then assumed what I’m into . . . I had a professor [who] assumed I was into Middle Eastern Studies. I’m not Middle Eastern. I don’t really have that interest.

Professors “just assumed I was just into, like, Arab studies and, like, Orientalism and all that stuff,” which does not reflect Nisrine’s self-described interests. Pigeonholing BIPOC students as interested exclusively in their own communities echoes the frame of naturalism that Bonilla-Silva describes in color-blind racism. Nisrine was assumed “naturally” to be interested exclusively in her own community while it seemed her white peers could enjoy boundless intellectual interests. Asma narrates a similar story on feeling pressured by her temporary advisor to study her own community, despite having developed other research interests that she wanted to pursue:

I felt like [the temporary advisor was] really pushing me in the direction to research South Asian women . . . [But] I have so many more interests beyond that, and I just felt like they weren’t interested in any of that . . . I just felt like I was in this box that I can only do research on brown women . . . [I]n grad school, I didn’t want to feel limited. I just want to feel like I can maybe switch my research topics . . . but it’s like I felt like that wasn’t what they wanted.

Asma also expresses feeling pressured to do “exotic” research “to stay in grad school,” or at least, “my temporary advisor definitely made it feel that way.” Asma, ultimately, switched out of the thesis stream of her program into a coursework-only master’s degree and no longer plans to pursue doctoral studies. Asma’s experience reflects the problem of the “leaky pipeline,” that is, the loss of BIPOC students through the various educational levels leading to the professoriate (Blockett et al. 2016; Brunsma et al. 2017). Moreover, Asma also expresses the feeling that she was being asked to “self-tokenize.” While tokenism is normally associated with symbolic inclusion to give the appearance of equity (as Nisrine puts it, “a diversity quota”), the participants in this study add a further layer of meaning to the term. Self-tokenization refers to voyeuristic, usually deficit-focused, research on one’s own marginalized community in response to feeling that the university rewards “exotic” research to achieve the appearance of diversity. Asma explains that the research she was being pressured to do was “white gaze-y,” while Nisrine explains that she felt pressured to do “struggle porn” research that focuses on the pain experienced by her community. She describes it as having to “parade” hurts: “let’s explore the wounds; let’s keep on doing research on the wounds.” Moreover, Nisrine feels that research funding is contingent on self-tokenization:

There [are] so many of my friends who are in grad school and others have told me this . . . tokenizing [our experience] in our research to get funding and then saying what they want to hear from us is the worst thing. It’s so, so painful because I’m more than this. I’m more than my experience with my racial identity. I’m more than whatever history my community has been through . . . that is my issue with applying for funding and I know that I will have to do that . . .

Natalia similarly struggles with self-tokenism, recounting that when she first applied to her program, her research proposal used “a lot of the keywords” relating to Indigenous peoples in Canada: “I had accidentally sold myself as a token ‘Indian’ and I struggled with that in my first year.” Natalia interprets the interest her program showed in her research and enthusiasm for admitting her as evidence of tokenism (“because they needed this token ‘Indian’ here”), but she also recognizes her reaction as a manifestation of imposter syndrome. As Evette L. Allen and Nicole M. Joseph (2018:151) point out in relation to Black women, “perspectives of inferiority and imposter syndrome” have a deep impact on “academic and social progress while in the academy.” Natalia explains that even though white peers also experience imposter syndrome, “theirs’ is usually gonna be based just on, like, they’ve attached their worth to their grades and their performances.” In contrast, BIPOC students experience much deeper imposter syndrome. As Natalia puts it, “we’ve had to attach our worth to, like, our culture, to those worths, too. And not by choice.”

Over one-third of participants (8/22) expressed worries about tokenism, which may be manifestations of imposter syndrome. Rather than assuming their own meritoriousness, BIPOC students often wonder if successes are a result of tokenism. While the literature suggests that BIPOC graduate students do experience tokenism (Alejandro et al. 2020; Barker 2016; Curtis-Boles et al. 2020; Gildersleeve et al. 2011; Hubain et al. 2016; Ramirez 2017), worries about tokenism also echo the insecurity, self-doubt, and self-analysis that Gildersleeve et al. capture in the “Am I going crazy?!” narrative described above. As Amy explains, after winning a high-value prestigious national scholarship, she struggled with doubts: “Did I get it because I deserved it, or did I get it because I self-identified as an Indigenous person?” Arina is repelled by the worry that she might receive funding for tokenism rather than merit: “I don’t want to just win an award or receive funding because [of] tokenism . . . I want to be able to compete with my peers for these super competitive funding” programs. Deeply bothered by tokenism, Arina questions whether she was even “accepted because they need to bring in more minorities.” Angela, an East Asian Canadian student, similarly questions whether her work is “impressive because I’m a woman of color, or is it impressive because of [the quality of] scholarship I’m pushing out?”

Nisrine expresses frustration with feeling used by the university: “The last thing I want to do in my academics is tokenizing my identity because it’s going to make the university look diverse.” However, she also expresses that the only paths to success open in the university for BIPOC students is either to self-tokenize or perform to a higher standard than others:

I know that if I tokenize myself, I have higher chance [at success]. I know this and I hate that reality. I know many of my friends have done this—they have tokenized themselves because they . . . felt like they had no choice. And we discuss this in our classes, actually, where [global Southern] scholars have to do this. We have to discuss and do research on things that the [funding bodies] want to see and it’s very frustrating because you either show academically that you’re better . . . or you explain your struggles . . . [N]obody wants to do that. Nobody wants to bring out their wounds. Nobody wants to expose their wounds as a show, you know. Like, it’s humiliating . . .

For Nisrine, she feels,

I have to prove that I do deserve to get that award . . . I have to make my proposal far . . . sharper and my writing [must be] so great and I have to . . . show them exactly what I want to do and be as prepared as possible.

Natasha, a South Asian student, expresses similar concern: “Do I need to work extra hard to prove myself?” Arina feels the pressure to distinguish herself to “make it”: “I need to publish more in higher impact journals. And then, if my name’s getting out there more, then if I have a lot of funding and I have publications, then I’m going to be closer to making it.” Several participants (6/22) express the imperative that BIPOC students need to “outperform” to prove themselves (Barker 2016:129). The feeling that one must choose between self-tokenization and working harder demonstrates that BIPOC students do not experience the university as color-blind in relation to their work as researchers. Rather, participants’ counter-stories highlight the ways in which racialization shapes their experiences of knowledge production.

Additional Challenges of Researching One’s Community

While some participants feel confined in relation to research on their own communities, a small number of participants express genuine desire to research their own communities (4/22) while others emphasized the importance for BIPOC people to study their own communities rather than having research carried out by outsiders who have sometimes engaged in problematic practices (5/22). Cristiano remarks that he wants to see “Black professors who study Black communities, Eastern-Asian profs study East Asia, Latinos who study Latin America.” Amy reminds us that “non-Indigenous peoples went into communities . . . and they took knowledge and they appropriated it . . . Indigenous peoples, for too long, have had narratives told about them that they [did not have a] hand in crafting.” However, doing research on one’s own community comes with added feelings of responsibility—a point emphasized by two Indigenous participants. As Amy notes,

. . . I think I’m doing [my research] in a community-based way to . . . empower [my] community and show [my] community in a really positive light. But I’ve also spent the last ten years in a colonial institution and that’s the world that I’m working within. And it’s hard because [while] there’s always issues of ethics in any sort of research, but I think with people of color, Black people or Indigenous peoples, you’re also always worried about the narrative [that] is gonna come out, and the way that you specifically are shaping that narrative because you know there’s this history of having your thoughts and your knowledge being devalued and you don’t want to become complicit in the furthering of the othering of your people . . .

Thus, Indigenous students who study their own communities feel a deep responsibility not to engage in practices they regard as exploitative or potentially damaging. This jibes with research on Indigenous graduate students in the United States and the value of reciprocity and the principle of nation-building. For example, Heather J. Shotton (2018:492–93) finds that the main motivator for Indigenous students’ persistence through graduate studies is to “give back” to their communities and to contribute to “capacity building and self-determination” of their communities. Thus, rather than being driven by solely individual ambitions, graduate studies are not an individualistic pursuit but can serve one’s community (Alejandro et al. 2020:682).

However, the research that some BIPOC scholars undertake in their own communities is often not valued. The experience of BIPOC faculty in Canada highlights that “[c]ommunity-engaged research was devalued, seen as not meeting ‘expectations in terms of what counts as scientific knowledge’” and that research relating to “race or Indigeneity was dismissed as ‘biased’ or lacking rigor” (Mohamed and Beagan 2019:350). It “takes longer” to get community-based projects “going and it takes longer for them to get published” (Henry and Tator 2012:n.p.). Moreover, community-based research “is usually not published in major journals” (Henry and Tator 2012:n.p.), which means that less professional value is accorded to this work. In the Canadian context, given that BIPOC faculty tend to outperform relative to white peers in terms of publishing journal articles (Ramos and Wijesingha 2017:71–72), the

issue becomes not so much the quantity of publications but the status and prestige of the journal. This issue is especially telling for racialized faculty, many of whom subscribe to progressive and critical theoretical frameworks that are not necessarily recognized as credible and valuable in mainstream scholarship. (Henry and Tator 2012:n.p.)

The pressure to “perform” and “produce” also shapes the experiences of BIPOC students. Indeed, as Geneva Gay (2004:279) underscores, “[s]ome students of color are even advised to reconsider their research choices because their significance is suspect. Thus, their research interests are marginalized, demeaned or invalidated.” “Michael,” an East Asian Canadian student, researches people who share his identity and life experiences. He explains, “[b]ecause we are studying our own communities, the racism or the alienation we encounter directly casts doubt on whether there is a market for our research.” As CRT shows us, race and colonialism are structuring forces for our participants’ experiences as researchers.

Resistance: Meaning And Recommendations

Despite the inequalities and barriers that BIPOC graduate students face as researchers, the participants in our study make clear that they are not passive victims but are active agents. In the broader study of which the present analysis is one part, students identify wide-ranging forms of resistance, including refusing to accept the burdens associated with racism and colonialism in the university and developing networks of solidarity. Moreover, all participants contributed to a long list of recommendations to improve the university, including diversifying the faculty complement and student body, transforming curriculum and pedagogical practices, and ensuring sufficient health, cultural, and social supports for BIPOC students on campus. However, here, we focus specifically on their agency in relation to their work and identities as researchers.

First, several participants (6/22) identified research as a source of meaning. Natalia feels “passion” relating to her thesis work and sees her research as personally vital: “I’m kind of leaning into it because I think that’s the only way I can survive.” For Natasha, despite feeling marginalized and excluded in her program, she feels validated in her research:

When I start talking about my research . . . then I find that people are actually—I actually get their attention. So, in that sense, I would say that [my research] helps catch people’s attention. Whether it’s white or non-white, that’s something I’ve always found. That has been quite encouraging.

For Bushra, an Arab Canadian participant, carrying out research with people of her own identity is gratifying. Her research is “totally personal. I would say it’s more like a passion piece just because I am going off of my own personal experience as an Arab Muslim woman in Canada.” Bushra strives to “give a voice to a marginalized group” and “highlight the issues” they face. Sarita’s research is on “where my family’s from and that has a lot to do with colonization and that, of course, has to do with race.” While Bushra’s research is to give voice to her community, Sarita’s goal is to do research to inform her community about issues of racism.

Second, participants recommended establishing greater support resources that are salient to the discussion in this article. Given that BIPOC students often struggle with the challenges of imposter syndrome and worries about tokenism, especially in relation to carrying out research on their own communities, Amy recommends that imposter syndrome be addressed head-on: “it’s definitely something I think we need to address a bit more. Like, it would be nice to have . . . a seminar or something like that” or a student group “open to all BIPOC students” to talk through issues like imposter syndrome. Natalia’s experience with a workshop on imposter syndrome organized by and for BIPOC students was very eye-opening. In the workshop, participants explored unequal experiences of imposter syndrome, including that white students might attach self-worth to grades and performance, while BIPOC students experience feelings of being an imposter much more existentially, as noted above. For Natalia, working through imposter syndrome helped her to cope more effectively. Simone, moreover, offered empowering insights on feeling tokenized:

I guess it pushes me in some way . . . there’s no point in doing anything if you’re not gonna try to . . . be the best. And that’s not the best of everyone. It’s just the best you that you can bring to the table every day. And so for me, I just say, if they think I’m only here because I can check these boxes, like, I will show them that . . . I’m doing my own thing. Like, your game isn’t even of interest to me. I’m here for so and so reasons, much beyond the institution.

Finally, given the importance of funding to be able to carry out research, participants (6/22) offered recommendations on improvements relating to funding for research. Genevieve calls for shifting the ways in which students are evaluated to take into account that BIPOC students may not follow a traditional trajectory through schooling, for example, needing to interrupt studies due to various forces. Genevieve also calls for ensuring employment opportunities for students who are not well funded when they start a program, such as guaranteeing research assistantships:

If someone is starting a program and they’re not, let’s say, having funding from a research council, perhaps there’s other things within the program or department that they could do that would . . . allow them to have some income so that they’re not wondering about how they’re going to pay rent or eat . . .

Furthermore, Genevieve recommends more structured support in relation to applying for funding. She urges

demystifying the grant writing process [which is] not really necessarily understood by everybody as they enter a program, as they’re going through a program. So really having clear seminars or informational sessions with students as they enter a program, or ensuring that students are aware of various opportunities . . .

Other participants recommend targeted funding. Aniess calls for “funding geared more toward BIPOC students”; for example, in Aniess’ program, internal awards are often “linked to a field of study,” but virtually none “are linked to fields of study that focus on racialized people.” As noted above, awards linked to fields of study reflects color-blind racism by materially privileging fields of study in which BIPOC students may be less likely to be involved. Developing awards targeted at research areas that are often of interest to BIPOC students may address this lack of research funding. More directly, Melissa argues that “we need more, like, resources for racialized students. Like, we need bursaries specifically for us. We need scholarships for us.” As Natalia puts it, “we need more because of our history of having less.”

Conclusion

In this article, we have highlighted struggles with supervision, funding, feelings of self-tokenization, and responsibilities associated with doing research with one’s own community. However, graduate students are not passive victims of racism and colonialism in higher education but engage in resistance through finding meaning in their research and advancing recommendations on how to improve the experience of BIPOC graduate students. Through this small-scale qualitative study, we focused on exploring the texture of experience, in keeping with CRT, through counter-narratives that belie the color-blind hegemonic narrative of the university. However, our research suggests opportunities for future research: Further research is needed on the additional responsibilities associated with researching one’s own community as a dimension of graduate school experience that is unique to BIPOC students, especially Indigenous students. Given that the literature in this field is based on studies with small sample sizes, a large-scale quantitative study of BIPOC students would inform us of the prevalence of challenges identified in our study and the qualitative literature more broadly. Even though participants in this study explored (often extensively) their experiences at institutions across the country, future research in Canada should involve students at different institutions, which may also enable comparisons, for example, across provinces.

Research comparing BIPOC and white students would produce a more robust understanding of how racism and colonialism shape experiences, especially in relation to differential experiences of issues that confront all graduate students. Finally, our study focused on shared experiences of BIPOC students, which did not enable a deep engagement with experiences of a given group. For instance, despite efforts to “Indigenize” Canadian universities (Ottman 2017), Indigenous students experience higher education within the context of ongoing settler colonial dispossession. Future research should, thus, disaggregate the specificities of experiences of Black, Indigenous, and other racialized students, which will lead to enriched strategies to address inequities and injustices in graduate school.