Reimagining Leadership Through the Everyday Resistance of Faculty of Color

Faculty of color (FOC) engage in important diversity, equity, and inclusion leadership central to a mission of servingness in Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs)-a commitment to serving the holistic needs of growing numbers of racially and economically diverse students (Garcia, 2016). Yet, when engaging in leadership structures (e.g., policies, practices), FOC confront racism and sexism. Such systemic barriers for FOC have been documented extensively in predominantly White institutions (PWIs). No work has examined the barriers in leadership for FOC in a research-intensive HSI context and how they engage in everyday resistance strategies-covert forms of resistance (Casado Perez, 2019)-in response to these barriers. The current research aimed to do this. Specifically, semistructured individual interviews with 16 FOC were conducted to examine the specific resistance responses participants employed to navigate barriers in university leadership. Using latent thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), five themes were constructed to reflect specific responses to overlapping forms of systemic oppression. These acts included prioritizing self-love to resist invisible labor, refusing to take on leadership roles to combat tokenization, being resourceful to maneuver limited resources, pursuing pathways outside of formal leadership to enact change, and preparing the next generation of scholars to counter systemic gatekeeping. Documenting such resistance sheds light on the everyday institutional harms that FOC confront and also highlights a commitment among FOC to eliminate oppression within the academy for minoritized groups.