Our Lived Experiences

Photo by Cheryl Skinner Rischer

Black Women in Academia

By Jennie Kroeger

Tamara Bertrand Jones (higher education M.S. ’00, program evaluation ’06) has been interested in the experiences of underrepresented populations—particularly Black women—in academia since her days as a graduate student at Florida State. “

My experience as a graduate student, particularly as a doctoral student, was very meaningful,” said Bertrand Jones. “I was a part of a great supportive network of other black women who were pursuing graduate education, and they were my role models.”

This group of women encouraged Bertrand Jones to pursue doctoral studies, and out of their relationships grew Sisters of the Academy (SOTA), of which Bertrand Jones is a founding member. SOTA is an educational network of Black women in higher education that fosters success in teaching, scholarly inquiry and service to the community. They also facilitate professional development and collaborative scholarship among Black women in higher education.

“[SOTA] was definitely a core part of the motivation for my research, but it was also our relationships, the support that we were able to provide for each other,” said Bertrand Jones. “We were able to not just support each other emotionally, but also academically in terms of being able to be critical partners of our ideas and research.”

This idea of “critical partners” was demonstrated when Bertrand Jones was preparing for her doctoral proposal and shared what she had written with two of her sister scholars. “They read it, and they said, ‘No, this is not good enough.’ It was a couple of weeks before my proposal presentation, and they tore it up!

“They really challenged me. I had to rewrite my proposal in a week, because I needed to submit it to the committee. It was one of the most stressful things that I’ve ever done, but it was so impactful because it was my friends who were challenging me, who were supporting me and who were very clear about what the standard was and how they could help me meet that standard.” This experience became the foundation for how Bertrand Jones thinks about peer relationships, mentoring and the development of scholarly identity.

The relationship with her network, the formation of SOTA, and her own experiences being a Black woman in the academy led Bertrand Jones to study this area in a more systematic way. “I realized some things were happening that were not just my experience. I think sometimes as women, we have that feeling of, ‘Is this just me?’ And then you talk to other women and find out it’s not just you,” she said. “That validation has been very impactful because it’s not just a personal individual experience. It’s this collective experience that signals to others that there’s something deeper here. There’s something systematic that might be happening that we need to examine.”

Bertrand Jones returned to Florida State in 2010 to further pursue this line of research as an associate professor of higher education, but the road to this research didn’t start smoothly. “When I was a new scholar, someone told me that my research on Black women was kind of navel gazing. He was downplaying the need to study myself, that it’s not important in the academy. So I thought, ‘Maybe I should focus on all women or women of color more broadly, and so I shouldn’t do this work.’ I tried to, but it didn’t feel genuine to me, because that’s really not what I was interested in.”

A conversation with Carolyn Herrington, professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, became a pivotal moment in Bertrand Jones’ career. They set up a meeting to talk through feedback and what Bertrand Jones should be doing to prepare for tenure and promotion. “[Herrington] read my statement that I had submitted to the tenure and promotion committee and said, ‘Your work is about Black women, right?’ I said, yes, and she said, ‘Well, that’s not what you said in this statement. You talked about your work being about all students, and that’s not who you are. That’s not what your work does. Own your work, because that’s the contribution that you’re making. Your perspective on this work is needed, and I need you to feel comfortable and confident in it.’”

From that point on, Bertrand Jones took that to heart. “She affirmed me. My work is about underrepresentation; it’s about equity and diversity and inclusion, and I have a particular focus on Black women. That doesn’t mean that I cannot speak to different types of underrepresentation or oppression, but this is my focus. And so, doing that was very freeing. I’m grateful to her for having that conversation with me to help me to be okay with doing the work that I wanted to do.” For Bertrand Jones, that experience has not only contributed to her own development as a scholar but has also led her to encourage her students to do the same. “I want them to be able to articulate why they have an interest in these topics and their personal experiences,” she said. “That’s what research is; it’s about how we view our world around us that generates these questions that we then go to explore and being unapologetic in that.”

Bertrand Jones often talks to her students about debunking the myth of unbiased research. “All of our research comes from our personal experiences, whether it’s questions that we’ve had from observations that we made of our environments or questions that have come up from something that we’ve read in our personal experiences. It’s all biased in that way; it comes from individual people who’ve come up with these questions and so they’ve designed these pathways to understand them.”

The next research pathway Bertrand Jones plans to head down is related to mindfulness and contemplative practices. As work and home are starting to blur even more with the COVID-19 pandemic, she believes it’s even more important now for individuals to ensure they are developing themselves as a complete person—physically, mentally and spiritually.

The idea for this research was sparked by the work of a former doctoral student of hers, Estée Hernandez (higher education Ph.D. ‘19). Hernandez was doing research on women and their scholarly identity development, and she came across the story of Coyolxauhqui, the goddess of the moon who was dismembered by her brother according to Aztec mythology. This idea of the female being in parts and pieces resonated with Bertrand Jones.

“[Before the pandemic] it was very easy to separate ‘home Tamara’ and ‘work Tamara,’ and never the two shall meet. And especially as a woman and a Black woman, that’s largely how I’ve lived my life. Many women in academia feel that we’re in these parts and pieces and not fully whole. I can’t be all ‘home Tamara’ in this space. I don’t want to fully show up here because that might be too much or offensive or someone may not like it. So, we put up these boundaries and we create these separations, these parts and pieces of ourselves.”

The mindfulness research has helped Bertrand Jones think about how women can bring their full selves to the academy rather than split themselves into these parts and pieces. “I’ve learned that it’s not just the individual work that we need to do, but the systemic and the institutional work to address the notion that we have to separate these parts of ourselves.”

This summer, Bertrand Jones was able to incorporate some mindfulness activities during the virtual SOTA research boot camps with daily affirmations and meditation as well as physical movement each day. “The women acknowledged the fact that this professional development was holistic and spoke to all of the parts of themselves that typical professional development doesn’t,” she said.

Bertrand Jones is excited about the direction her work is heading. “I want to talk about how women can be fully embodied, how they can bring their full selves to these spaces and not be bound by sexism, racism, ableism or any other types of oppression that we experience on a daily basis. I want to know how we can transform the systems that we are working within as fully embodied women so that other women who are coming behind us don’t feel that they have to be disembodied in order to engage in this work. That, to me, is femina perfecta.”