Awareness, evasiveness, and conditional acceptance: What graduate students learn about social identity in their academic departments.

Abstract

Educators struggle to recruit and retain graduate students whose social identities are underrepresented in their disciplines and fields, but few studies explicitly explore what students learn about social identity during their graduate training. In this critical constructivist case study, we explored what a diverse group of 44 graduate students learned in their academic departments about the (ir)relevance of social identity to their disciplines/fields. Participants described departments that (a) deepened their awareness of social identity and its relevance to their disciplines/fields; (b) evaded social identity, suggesting it was irrelevant; and (c) welcomed some identities but not others (i.e., conditional acceptance). Our findings suggest that understanding graduate students' experiences in their academic homes is essential to advancing equity within and beyond graduate education. We offer recommendations for educators and administrators to enact organizational change so that people with a diverse array of social identities may thrive in their institutions, disciplines, and professions.