Search

This article presents initiatives undertaken by the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine (GHSM) at King's College London (KCL), exploring avenues to decolonise higher education institutions (HEI). HEI must integrate anti-racism agendas, challenge the European-centric academic knowledge domination, and dismantle power asymmetries. During the academic year 2021, GHSM executed (1) a gap analysis of undergraduate modules, (2) a course on decolonising research methods taught by global scholars to 40 Global South and North university students who completed pre- and post-course surveys, and (3) semi-structured interviews with 11 academics, and a focus group with four students exploring decolonising HEI; findings were thematically analysed. (1) Gap analysis revealed a tokenistic use of Black and minority ethnic and women authors across modules' readings. (2) The post-course survey showed that 68% strongly agreed the course enhanced their decolonisation knowledge. (3) The thematic analysis identified themes: (1) Decolonisation is about challenging colonial legacies, racism, and knowledge production norms. (2) Decolonisation is about care, inclusivity, and compensation. (3) A decolonised curriculum should embed an anti-racism agenda, reflexive pedagogies, and life experiences involving students and communities. (4) HEI are colonial, exclusionary constructs that should shift to transformative and collaborative ways of thinking and knowing. (5) To decolonise research, we must rethink the hierarchy of knowledge production and dissemination and the politics of North-South research collaborations. Decolonising HEI must be placed within a human rights framework. HEI should integrate anti-racism agendas, give prominence to indigenous and marginalised histories and ways of knowing, and create a non-hierarchical educational environment, with students leading the decolonisation process.

This exploratory study provides an overview of prominent themes pertaining to portrayals of sign languages (SLs) and Deaf people in the South African press (2011-2019), as well as an analysis of a subset of articles to illustrate the discursive constructions of each of the prominent ideological framings. The findings of the paper suggest that many ways of representing South African Sign Language (SASL) and their users align with international trends. The two most prominent ideological framings are the medical/disability model and the linguistic minority model. Within the medical model, SLs are seen as inferior means of communication used by a disabled minority. Within the linguistic minority framework SLs are regarded as natural, legitimate languages deserving equal status to spoken languages. The paper also identifies an ideological framing that is not predicted by the international literature, coined here as 'diversity tokenism'. Diversity tokenism is when SL is mentioned only to increase perceived diversity, where diversity is a commodity that holds social capital. This portrayal of SASL seems to be increasing and holds a warning: although SASL users have received official recognition and rights through the recent declaration of SASL as an official language, it might not be the end of the battle to ensure that users of SASL can live out their linguistic citizenship.

Borrowing the participation level typology from civic participation literature, in the study reported on here, we explored the level of learner participation in school governance in 1 girls' high school in South Africa. We demonstrate that despite the schools' self-claimed progressive stance, its learner participation still exhibits numerous nuanced examples of tokenism. Using a qualitative research design and purposive sampling, we collected data from interviews and observation to examine the possible causes for, as well as consequences of this tokenism. The findings indicate that adults' beliefs about minors' limited capacity remain a structural barrier to learners' genuine participation. This belief threatens the credibility and legitimacy of the Representative Council of Learners (RCL) and this threat to legitimacy, in turn, reinforces the structural beliefs that adults hold and thus perpetuates a cycle whereby genuine participation is compromised and token participation is entrenched. We conclude this article with recommendations to address, mitigate and transcend token participation.

In this article, the author argues that Black women have experienced heightened levels of tokenism and hypervisibility since the 2016 election. By engaging with Black Feminist Theory and Kanter's tokenism framework, the author outlines how tokenism impacts the esteem and well-being of Black women student affairs professionals. More specifically, this study examines how tokenism is used to contain stereotypes, using Black energy, identities, and painful experiences for institutional gain and social justice mirage. The author contends that Black women have been tokenized in the following themes: a single expert on Blackness, an ideal worker or placeholder for diversity initiatives, and an agenda keeper to sustain the white agenda. This article concludes with a reflection on what white academic spaces should consider implementing to welcome Black women's voices and presence while dismantling embedded racism.

The topic of affirmative action has been a subject of intense debate, with both proponents and opponents offering compelling arguments. Justice Clarence Thomas, an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, has consistently expressed strong reservations about affirmative-action policies, viewing them as a form of reverse discrimination that may "hinder the principles of meritocracy and equal treatment under the law." However, it is crucial to examine the personalized experiences and consider the nuances, such as underrepresentation and microaggressions, that surround affirmative action. This study utilizes a symbolic interactionist and phenomenological approach that pulls from the individualized/collective experiences of Black students/faculty at historically White colleges and universities (HWCUs) and examines their sociocultural experiences on campus. Findings from this study highlight the continuing discriminative practices and "peer to peer" interactions that Black students/faculty must navigate at HWCUs and the strategies utilized to circumvent mistreatment and institutional adversities. Data from this study provide more context for the ongoing conversation pertaining to affirmative action, "peer to peer," and institutional discrimination that Black students and faculty experience at HWCUs. In this article, I examine the concept of "leveraging tokenism," a strategy that Black students and faculty utilize to circumvent underrepresentation and racial microaggressions.

Student voice can be a powerful tool in urban schools. Student voice programs engage students in the educational policies and practices that impact their lives and provides educators a glimpse into the experiences and needs of students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds. However, successful student voice programs rely upon adult partnership and too often educators and administrators act in ways that stifle the voice of youth. In this article I employed narrative inquiry to examine the experiences of a group of students of color in an urban school district as they advocated for student voice in school safety policies in their district. As these young people attempted to work with school leaders, district administrators and school board members, they encountered manipulation, threats, and tokenism. This article highlights the importance of youth learning to navigate adult agendas, the strategies educational leaders use to silence student voice, and the importance of supportive adult relationships in promoting student voice.

When women enter occupations that have historically and traditionally been the realm of men, they face a multitude of barriers that make their experience difficult and that contribute to a gender-segregated workforce. Vocational Education and Training (VET) is the entryway to employment in the skilled trades, and VET providers have a role in introducing students to the industry, in the formation of occupational identity and occupational behaviours, establishing workplace cultures and standards of professionalism. Furthermore, VET has a moral and legal obligation to provide a safe classroom for all students. This paper reflects on the role of VET in perpetuating gender segregation in the skilled trades in Australia. We report on a qualitative research project with tradeswomen, apprentices, industry and government representatives that found that significant barriers confront tradeswomen apprentices in VET institutions. The study found that VET has the capacity to normalise the tokenism of women and contribute to gender harassment. We argue that a VET classroom environment where gender inequalities and harassment are normalised, and a gender biased apprenticeship system, contribute to gender segregation in the skilled trades.

In many ways the school music curriculum has become increasingly diverse since the 1970s. For example, 'pop' and 'world' musics have been listed in UK curricula and syllabuses with an aim of becoming more inclusive. However, this article argues that such approaches to curriculum as content have confounded social justice in school music, and in particular when perpetuating a prejudicial discourse. To understand this discourse, three 'distortions' of the material nature of musical knowledge are explored as potential sources of ongoing student alienation from school music: reification, hegemonic appropriation and the loss of meaning. These distortions are also exemplified through a case study critique of social realism and the UK government's Model Music Curriculum. By way of conclusion, and as a possible resolution to the distortions, some characteristics of a curriculum as process are proposed that have implications for decolonisation and wider issues of social justice, such as class and gender.

The question of SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) diasporic identity formation has been widely debated in area studies, ethnic studies, and the burgeoning field of Arab American Studies with scholars such as Sarah Gualtieri (2009), Nadine Naber (2012), and Neda Maghbouleh (2017) arguing that people of SWANA descent are racial minorities even though the U.S. government classifies them as white. However, these works have not adequately addressed SWANA racialization in the context of higher education following 9/11. This co-authored paper closely examines institutionalized SWANA erasure from the shared intersectional perspective of one faculty member, one graduate student, and two undergraduate students at a California State University campus in Southern California. Specifically, in this co-authored paper, we draw on our individual and collective co-organizing experiences to illustrate (a) the persistence of specific structural inequities that SWANA heritage people face in the academy, (b) the multilayered impact of these educational barriers, and (c) our wide range of ongoing activist responses to them. We say "khalas!" (enough!) to systemic oppression and argue that the ultimate antidote to institutionalized SWANA erasure is solidarity within and between marginalized subjects at every level of academia in the service of anti-racist and anti-colonial education. This co-authored paper uplifts SWANA resilience and resistance in California's most diverse public university system to shed new light on the understudied issue of how higher education perpetuates SWANA racialization.

This critical qualitative study illuminates how racially minoritized LGBTQ + faculty in the field of higher education navigate racist and heterosexist systems, leading to inordinate challenges related to tenure and promotion and deteriorating health and well-being. This system of higher education fosters isolation, hostility, racial battle fatigue, and LGBTQ + erasure offering limited support, negative institutional environments, and insufficient mentoring for faculty with multiple minoritized identities. With intersectionality as the theoretical foundation of this research, three themes emerged from the data including "problematizing productivity," "exposing tokenization," and the "costs of staying in the academy." I posit that refusal is a necessary strategy for racially minoritized LGBTQ + faculty who navigate the neoliberal institution.

Through the lens of the school board, this essay examines school governance dynamics as a southern, historically white public school district struggled to implement school desegregation. In 1976, the city of Waco simultaneously elected its school district's first trustees of Color, Dr. Emma Louise Harrison and Rev. Robert Lewis Gilbert. Harrison and Gilbert used distinctly different political strategies to navigate the racially hostile school board environment, but ultimately, as this article demonstrates, neither strategy enabled them to overcome white supremacy in Waco. This seemingly obvious point reveals a notable yet underemphasized drawback of school desegregation: that it failed to upend structural racial injustice. The case of Harrison and Gilbert illustrates that this limitation was reflected in the token number of Black trustees on the boards of desegregated schools and the concerted white resistance they met in working to spur meaningful racial change.

Women of Color in higher education often experience cultural taxation alongside feelings of invisibility and hypervisibility. In this paper, two women faculty of color use duoethnography, a dialogic research method, to unpack a shared journal that documented their own experiences of navigating and negotiating predominantly White academic spaces. By analyzing their experiences, the researchers discovered that their shared journal revealed similar patterns documented by other women faculty of color. The dialogic nature of duoethnography also led to transformational understandings of their positionality in the academy, self-healing, and development of strategies for moving forward. Vignettes from their shared journal and dialogic excerpts are discussed.

Globally, there has been a campaign to promote participation of females in the entire development agenda in general, but specifically in the higher education sector. Public universities in Uganda have attempted to ensure that female stakeholders are given a platform to participate in leadership and governance of their respective universities, though still seemingly scanty. The study therefore explored perceptions of female student representative participation in leadership on public university councils in Uganda. The Ladder of Citizen Participation was utilised to get meanings and understandings from the perceptions regarding levels of participation. The study deployed a phenomenological research design with unstructured interview, transect walks and letter writing methods and a two-level narrative analysis technique used to capture plots and themes from the narratives. Findings reveal that female students do not have sufficient ground to effectively participate in leadership and governance due to several constraints. The revealed constraints include lack of sufficient leadership capacity, insufficient resources and gender stereotypes. It is therefore concluded that participation of female student representatives on public university councils in Uganda was mere tokenism! It is therefore recommended that the higher education sector should deliberately support female students towards effective participation in leadership. This can be done through building their capacity in leadership and governance and providing sufficient resources to enable them easily pursue their leadership and governance mandate, among others.

This paper argues for a Black epistemological literacy education by centering Black equity in the process of teaching literacy methods. I offer a pedagogical model that stems from my own experiences disrupting required elementary literacy methods courses. My approach utilizes Black Language to illustrate the linguistic, sociocultural, and cognitive dimensions of literacy, and therein draws awareness for how white monolingual norms are thoroughly normalized in literacy instruction. While the linguistic legitimacy of Black Language, particularly its phonological systems, have been well established, in our current state, phonics instruction belongs to White Mainstream English. I contend that any cognitive literacy instruction for Black Language speakers must leverage the tacit knowledge of their own language. Pre-service teachers must receive explicit instruction on understanding societal hierarchies, especially as anti-Blackness and white supremacist views of Black Language are intertwined. A Black epistemological literacy education is necessary in modeling for pre-service teachers how literacy curricula must move beyond tokens of diversity.

Based on ethnographic and archival research, we explore how 10 students asserted their rights to belong and secure a space where they felt safe at UC Davis. We examine the activities and practices of 10 undergraduate Chicanxs and Latinxs students: members of "Radical Academics for Pedagogy" (RAP) and RESISTENCIA. Our interest lies on examining how they enacted cultural citizenship--a process by which they defined themselves, interpreted their histories, constructed their own symbols and political rhetoric, and claimed rights through speeches, actions, cultural discourses, and dialogues. We contend that the students challenged the definitions of belonging and citizenship at UC Davis.

Student populations at institutions of higher education are increasingly diverse. To maximize students' feelings of inclusivity and belongingness within heterogeneous communities -- both of which have been linked with greater educational outcomes -- it is imperative for faculty to create and maintain inclusive classroom spaces. The aim of this qualitative study is to analyze student feedback regarding what creates a sense of inclusiveness and belonging inside undergraduate classrooms. The researcher conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with students at a diverse, highly selective, private research university in the American South. Interview transcripts were coded using inductive analysis methods. Findings indicate students' self-reported sense of inclusivity and belongingness are predominately within a professor's control. For example, students' senses of belonging increase when faculty members use diverse examples in class, relate course content to the real world, enable small-group discussions during class, model open and inclusive language in the classroom, and eliminate (or mitigate) tokenism. Student feedback was consistent across demographic diversity of respondents.

China is a multi-ethnic nation. However, formal education often neglects differences in ethnicity, and school music education tends to marginalize the musics of ethnic minorities, owing to the government's political ideology of maintaining national unity. Thus, ethnic musics incorporated in teaching materials are often politicized and tokenized, and pedagogies used for teaching ethnic musics in classroom teaching tend to be oversimplified. Addressing social justice in music education is centrally concerned with equity, which I suggest can be promoted by positive changes, including institutional changes, education for music teachers that incorporates learning ethnic musics and pedagogies appropriate to teaching these musics.

This article reports on a study in which the legitimisation of shared governance in the Chinese higher education sector was investigated. Norman Fairclough's three-level discourse analysis was used for analysing documents and interviews. The research materials consist of thirteen Chinese university statutes and qualitative semi-structured interviews with 22 university administrators, faculty members, students and social representatives. The research focused on how university statute texts articulate shared governance, and how shared governance is practically implemented. Study findings demonstrate that Chinese university statute discourses officially legitimise shared governance in various manifestations, by replacing the term "management" with the term "governance" in statute texts, explicitly using democracy-related phrases, especially establishing a "joint meeting mechanism" at both institutional and departmental levels, and by using the wording "multiple-stakeholder participation" in university affairs. In practice, shared governance is a recognised ideal of governance structures to embrace among all different stakeholders. Chinese universities have, more than ever before, taken up shared governance practices. Yet, the degree of participation, or "sharing," in policy implementation in general, remains to be further improved compared with the ideal state stipulated in discourses. Findings identify tokenism as a feature of policy implementation. Insufficient administrative professionalism is identified as a catalyst for such tokenism--a reason for why shared governance efforts remain incomplete thus far.

Educational leaders throughout the United States have repeatedly emphasized the importance of increasing the number of Black and Latinx teachers in American schools. Prior qualitative work suggests that Black and Latinx teachers who are demographically isolated in their schools often report negative experiences. Drawing on theories of proportional representation in organizations, we use Tennessee statewide survey and administrative data to examine whether self-reported professional experiences of Black and Latinx teachers are different when they are demographically isolated. We estimate models using two measures of demographic isolation: a continuous measure and a theoretically generated ordinal measure. We find that, for Black teachers, the percentage of Black teachers in the school is positively associated with teachers' perceived satisfaction and support and with the frequency of collaboration. There is also some evidence of threshold effects of demographic isolation for Black teachers, as Black teachers in schools in which at least 60% of fellow teachers are Black report significantly higher satisfaction and support than other Black teachers. Our models do not find any associations between isolation and professional experience for Latinx teachers, but a small sample size and lack of variation in demographic isolation among Latinx teachers makes it difficult to estimate these associations. Our findings suggest that both ordinal and continuous measures of demographic isolation may be useful when examining relationships between demographic isolation and workplace experiences. Because we study factors linked to turnover in prior research, these analyses can contribute to the broader discussion about the retention of Black and Latinx teachers.

Faculty diversity has received increased attention from researchers and institutions of higher education, yet faculty demographics have not changed substantially for many underrepresented groups. Several barriers to the retention of women and faculty of color have been offered, including a lack of belonging, discrimination, social exclusion, and tokenism. Epistemic exclusion, scholarly marginalization rooted in disciplinary and identity-based biases, is theorized to act as another barrier to the retention of these faculty. The present study examines the effect of scholarly devaluation, a primary component of epistemic exclusion, on faculty workplace outcomes using data from 1,341 tenure-track faculty from a predominantly White, research-intensive institution. We found that women and underrepresented faculty of color reported higher perceptions of scholarly devaluation. Further, scholarly devaluation was associated with higher intentions to leave the university and this relationship was mediated by lower job satisfaction and poorer perceptions of the workplace climate. Notably, the negative consequences of perceiving scholarly devaluation were found for all faculty, not just women and faculty of color. We discuss the implications of these findings for retaining marginalized faculty and for institutions of higher education more broadly.

The purpose of this article is to address how teaching in learning communities can be an effective tool for the retention of faculty of color. The article outlines the on-going, concerning issue of higher education's lack of faculty diversity. Through their shared lens as tenure-track faculty of color at an urban community college, the authors identify common barriers for retention of faculty of color, and types of learning community models. They also recommend the most effective learning community model for faculty of color collaboration, and explain how this model addresses the trends of tokenism, isolation, marginalization and lack of mentorship frequently experienced by faculty of color in higher education.

This qualitative study examines how Black undergraduate students attending a predominately White institution (PWI) assess and interpret their university's diversity and inclusion initiatives given their everyday experiences with campus-based racism. Using critical race theory (CRT) this article illuminates how Black students at a PWI interpret their university's implementation of diversity and inclusion initiatives. The article illustrates how the students interpreted the rationale behind the university's implementation of the diversity and inclusion initiatives, questioned who benefits from the implementation of the initiatives, and called attention to how the ineffectiveness of the PWIs initiatives impacted their sense of belonging. By employing the concept of interest-convergence as an analytical tool, this article used the students' narratives to illustrate what happens when initiatives aimed at promoting a more equitable and inclusive campus racial climate converge with the interests of an institution that centers Whiteness. The findings from this study illustrate the ways in which White supremacy undergirds the university's implementation of its diversity and inclusion initiatives and the reality it creates for Black students.

The purpose of this paper, which is part of a three-year EU Erasmus+-funded study titled 'Distributed Evaluation and Planning in Schools' (DEAPS), is to provide an analysis of policies, structures, processes, supports and barriers that exist to enable or inhibit the involvement of students and parents in school evaluation in four European countries (Belgium, Ireland, Portugal and Turkey). Document analysis was used for this study and some 348 peer-reviewed articles, and 28 national and transnational policy documents were included in the analysis. Based on this review it would be reasonable to suggest that the student/parent voice agenda around evaluation in schools remains, by and large, aspirational. It is extolled in policy but in practice is mainly tokenistic with very little evidence of impact on the work of schools. In light of this, it is argued that government and school-level policies and strategies need to be reconsidered to enhance students' and parents' engagement in school evaluation. As a first step, significant further empirical research on the limitations on and conditions necessary for stakeholder voice in education is required.

This study used Kanter's (1997) Tokenism theory to analyze the relationship between gender and faculty salaries in Georgia higher education institutions to determine whether pay inequity existed between male and female professors in 2018. Two separate mixed-effect regression models were estimated on a 2018 cross-sectional survey dataset of Georgia higher education faculty members where faculty demographic characteristics (i.e., gender and academic discipline) were regressed on their annual base salaries. When controlling for demographics and occupational characteristics, female faculty received significantly lower salaries than their male counterparts. In addition, when controlling for academic discipline and grouping those disciplines vis-a-vis male dominant and female dominant, males in female-dominant disciplines earned significantly more money than females, and females in male-dominant disciplines earned more money than males. Additional findings support negotiable salaries as a significant contributor to higher pay.

Given contemporary attention to diversity and inclusion on Canadian university campuses, and given human rights protections for sexual orientation and gender identity, it is tempting to believe that marginalization is a thing of the past for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) academics. Our qualitative study (n = 8), focusing on everyday experiences rather than overt discrimination, documents numerous microaggressions, the often-unintended interactions that convey messages of marginality. With colleagues, students and administrators, participants reported isolation, tokenism, invisibility, hyper-visibility, dismissal, exoticization, and lack of institutional support. Maintaining constant vigilance and caution was taxing. The everyday microaggressions that lead to isolation and a sense of dis-ease in pervasively cisgender-normative and heteronormative institutions are very difficult to challenge, as they are not the kinds of experiences anti-discrimination policies and procedures are designed to address.

Sense of belonging has been used to gauge students' adjustment to and persistence within higher education. Social class is associated with sense of belonging and working-class students report lower levels than their middle- and upper-class peers. In this study, I examined how working-class students described their sense of belonging through a critical constructivist narrative inquiry of 24 working-class students across two public research institutions. I found that students developed academic and co-curricular spaces of connectedness to challenge the broader campus culture that they saw as catering to middle- and upper-class students. The same resources were supportive or unsupportive depending on students' circumstances. Belonging was viewed as something that students themselves created rather than was facilitated by institutions. Moreover, while participants expressed varying degrees of support, connectedness, and belonging, they rarely felt valued by institutions that exploited their labor or tokenized their presence under the guise of supporting diversity. Implications from this research suggest the need to revisit conceptualizations of sense of belonging while providing recognition of working-class contributions, increasing cultural competence, and developing additional structural supports for students.

American governmental policy toward Native American people and nations has long taken an exterminatory approach. The relocation era sought to remove American Indian people from reservations and tribal communities into cities to assimilate them into dominant society. The cities were marketed as beacons of economic and academic opportunity, but their realities bore different fruit including unemployment, poor living conditions, and segregated and low-performing schools. Though schools are often depicted as mechanisms of social and economic mobility, for Native children, the continued extermination of their histories, languages, cultures continue to be obstacles to their success. These obstacles are particularly harmful for Natives living in urban areas away from their tribal communities. This study of nine American Indian people from various tribes in North Carolina gathers their stories of trauma and triumph as they navigated urban public K-12 schools. Several themes emerged including the racism endured in school, lack of American Indian representation in curriculum, teachers, and peers, being tokenized as the only American Indian student, and stories of resistance and resilience despite anti-Indian circumstances.

This study centers 26 Multiracial faculty members' voices to explore the research question: What are Multiracial tenured and tenure-track faculty members' experiences with teaching, research, and service within 4-year colleges and universities in the United States? Findings suggest that Multiracial faculty members use their research as a mechanism for social change, but that this research may also be invalidated by monoracial colleagues. Some Multiracial faculty also explored how they hold and use a unique (Multi)racial consciousness to approach their teaching and service work. Finally, some participants perceived that their Multiraciality made them less "threatening" to the institution, which tokenized them in different manners than what is currently known about tokenization for monoracial Faculty of Color. Findings from this research inform institutional policies and procedures that support Multiracial faculty members and contribute to institutional diversity and equity. The research also aims to disrupt the dominant ideology that race exists in strict monoracial-only categories; an ideology that may inform and be upheld by the existing literature on the experiences of Faculty of Color in the academy.

Culturally responsive (CR) leadership permeates all leadership practices and consists of several domains including: developing critical consciousness, supporting cultural knowledge development, and advocating for social justice within and outside of the school walls. This case focuses on the need to ground CR leadership in critical self-reflection and cultural consciousness by exploring the relationship between a White principal and his first leadership team member of Color who brings a different, bicultural perspective to his work. Assumptions that fill the void left by a lack of cultural knowledge lead to damaging effects including tokenism and stereotype threat.

This paper offers new qualitative insights into ongoing internationalization processes in Japanese higher education. Drawing on ideas from migration studies and informed by analysis of junior international faculty members' (JIFs) experiences in Japanese universities, we posit a novel, actor-centered typology of internationalization that delineates between integration, assimilation, and marginalization of mobile actors, and considers their implications in practice. Twenty-three interviews were conducted with JIFs from a variety of disciplines and institutions across Japan. Findings indicated a pattern of disillusionment with their role in internationalization, as many perceived themselves to be tokenized symbols of internationalization rather than valued actors within it. Participants identified various barriers which prevented them from participating in the academic "mainstream" and confined them to peripheral roles. We argue that their experiences are indicative of assimilative and marginalizing forms of internationalization, which pose persistent barriers to reform in Japanese universities despite decades of state-sponsored internationalization.

Since the ratification of the 1981 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) the role of Voice of the Child (VoC) in education has gained significance. Despite various VoC models and methods existing to collect and understand it, it is often critiqued for being tokenistic, rather than meaningful. Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) is a relevant psychological theory which provides a range of methods for exploring VoC. Previous PCP research has utilised art methods to explore primary school pupil's views about various aspects of their educational experience. The current research sought to extend the application of PCP to explore VoC by employing the repertory grid interview method to represent and understand a sample of Year Five pupils' opinions and perspectives on their social relationships. The repertory grid interview method was proposed as a method that would lead to meaningful rather than tokenistic VoC. The findings demonstrated that participants had a strong sense of self in relation to others and reported positive social relationships. Relationships with family members were found to be the most reported and hypothesised to be the most important relationships in participant's social worlds. Participants predominantly utilised the construct categories of 'extroverted/introverted', 'pleasant/unpleasant' and 'sympathetic/unsympathetic' with regards to their social relationships and interactions. These findings are discussed in relation to the argument that repertory grid interviews offer a meaningful rather than tokenistic method for engaging in VoC. Limitations and implications for future research and professional practice are also discussed.

Beyond the statistics, the underlying causes for women's absence as academics and leaders in higher education institutions (HEIs) in sub-Saharan African countries have not been sufficiently understood. Taking Ethiopia as an example, this study offers unique insights into the careers of female academic staff. The study employed exploratory sequential mixed method design using secondary analysis of nationwide data, institutional survey, and a follow-up qualitative in-depth interview with 13 female full-time academic staff purposively selected from three major public HEIs. The findings reveal that relative to men, the likelihood that women academics hold the rank of 'lecturer' decreases by 50% while the probability of assuming assistant professorship or above declines by 72%. Furthermore, it was found that women's entry into, and success in academia is impacted by complex set of factors ranging from hegemonic gender beliefs that trigger the use of double standards disfavoring women to deliberate exclusion during selection, employment, promotion, and appointment in leadership positions. Finally, the implications for policy and human resource management practices of HEIs are identified.

Because Multiracial people are often pressed between socially constructed monoracial categories and forced to navigate a monoracial-only paradigm of race, Multiracial individuals may develop a heightened (Multi)racial consciousness, through which they queer race, or (un)consciously challenge normative, often-oppressive racial constructs. While the word 'queer' has come to signify an essential identity for some, specifically those who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender, it is also a political identity that applies to people at odds with the dominant, such as Multiracial people. This study focuses on 24 Multiracial campus professionals' experiences with frustrating race in post-secondary contexts in the U.S. by exploring the question, "What are Multiracial campus professionals' experiences with queering race in U.S. postsecondary contexts?" In exploring Multiracial professionals' experiences with queering race, this study aims to better inform institutional and individual understandings of advancing racial equity.

This study explored the role of race in the negative job acquisition outcomes of African American graduates of a federally funded multi-institution doctoral training program. Because the credentials of African American graduates were similar, equal to, and/or, in some cases, exceeded those of their white peers, qualifications were ruled out as contributing to negative job outcomes. Further examination indicated that among the likely factors accounting for job acquisition outcomes were: tokenism; aversive racism; microaggressions; and inadequate professional development for graduates entering a White-male-dominated field. Recommendations for practice suggest amending graduate programming to include anticipatory socialization relative to being a member of a historically underrepresented group in the field, and mentorship that can help diffuse the impacts of tokenism and facilitate career success in academia.

In classroom settings, students' competence is regularly evaluated through a default practice named Initiation-Response-Feedback (IRF) or Initiation-Response-Evaluation (IRE). In the feedback or evaluation turn, the teacher normally uses acknowledgement tokens (such as uhm, yeah, okay). These tokens perform an active role of maintaining listenership as well as helping the speakers to buy the necessary time to prepare the right answers or expressions, especially in "response" (R) turns. The aim of this paper is to study how the "acknowledgement tokens" are placed within the framework of teacher-nominated IRF sequences and to explore the recognizable pattern of "okay" responses within an IRF framework. The findings suggest an interesting distribution of these tokens, especially with the classifications of "strong acknowledgement tokens" (such as: yeah or okay) and "passive recipiency tokens" (such as: uhm, uhhm, or hmm). Moreover, the findings suggest that the usage of "ok" responses invites further talk as well as an imminent closure. The findings of this study could be used to create a learner-friendly and inclusive classroom.

This qualitative study explored the perceptions and experiences of Black female doctoral students at predominantly White institutions and their impact on academic persistence and overall well-being. Fifteen Black female doctoral students participated in semistructured interviews, and each one was administered a demographic questionnaire and was extended an opportunity to participate in member checking. All data collected from the semistructured interviews, demographic questionnaires, and member-checking exercises were analyzed using Black feminist thought as an interpretive lens. Whereas several themes emerged and are discussed in previous articles (Shavers & Moore, 2014a, 2014b), this article focused on the "Perpetual Outsider" theme, comprising the following subthemes: (a) unwelcoming spaces, (b) tokenism, and (c) outsiders at home. Implications are offered based on identity, support systems, and group counseling.

In this autoethnographic article, I explore my experiences as an early career Academic of Color. Drawing on previous theoretical constructions such as the Strong Black Woman schema (SBW), I present these experiences through the lens of DC Comics' Vixen, a Black female superhero. This research highlights systemic disparities in the treatment of women Faculty of Color and offers suggestions for navigating these challenges.

Student voice literature has been well mapped with a range of participatory frameworks and typologies over the last three decades. These acknowledge neoliberal uses of voice that reflect a pervasive marketised approach to education, where young people are consumers, teachers surveilled, and leaders are wedged between government and community accountability. We draw upon typologies from the field to investigate Principals' conceptions of student voice in Aotearoa/New Zealand schools. Practitioner awareness of the instrumentalism of particular voice strategies and associated critiques of their application provides alignment with a conception of education as a mode of making explicit social and political practice. The article highlights tensions where systemic improvement is prioritised over student agency and the right of young people to democratic participation in their schooling.

In the present study, we examined the experiences of students on a predominantly White college campus in relation to their involvement in a living and learning community (LLC) designed specifically for racial/ ethnic minority (REM) students. The campus on which the present study took place was a mid-sized public university located in the Midwestern United States. Forty-one first year students participated in this study. We conducted six focus group interviews in which we asked participants about their general experiences being a REM on campus and about their participation in the LLC. The focus group data indicated various stressors related to race/ethnicity including marginalization, tokenism, and blatant or subtle communication of derogation. Participants reported diverse coping strategies to address these stressors ranging from passive inaction to cultural empowerment. The participants reported generally positive experiences in the LLC and perceived it as a safe haven with social integration, support, cultural validation, empowerment, and various resources.