Creating Resource Pathways: Considering Opportunities and Funding Sources for Women of Color in the Discipline

Creating Resource Pathways: Considering Opportunities and Funding Sources for Women of Color in the Discipline

By Danielle Casarez Lemi, Southern Methodist University, Jamil Scott, Georgetown University, and Diane Wong, Rutgers University–Newark

According to a 2013 report by the American Political Science Association (APSA), less than 15% of political scientists are women of color. This underrepresentation is especially notable when the group is disaggregated by race and ethnicity. Many reasons exist for this underrepresentation (Bedolla 2014; Hero 2015; Lavariega Monforti and Michelson 2008; Sinclair-Chapman 2015), one of which is the extreme social and intellectual isolation that women of color may feel with so few of us located at institutions across the country. To generate the existence of community within the discipline takes time and resources to which most of us simply do not have access; therefore, we use conferences as a space to connect, create, and collaborate. However, the energy retained from conferences quickly dissipates as many of us return to the demands of administrative work, service requests, and teaching that reduce the time we have available for new research and cross-institutional collaborations.