This talk was given at the American Sociological Association meetings in 2019 in New York City My mother called me one day, during my first semester of graduate school. She was curious about this mysterious world of academia that I had committed myself to. She wanted to know how it was going. “Are there oth...
Last month, I attended the Sociologists for Women in Society conference in Denver, CO. My colleagues and I gathered and discussed the current conditions at our respective institutions. We discussed racism, microaggressions, gender inequities in pay and workload distribution. We vented, we raged, we continue … “Whe...
Fresh from the American Sociological Association meetings on Feeling Race, I have been thinking a lot about the many areas in which I engage in emotional labor for the betterment of my discipline. Through the years, I’ve become more cognizant of this labor, tried to guard myself from overdoing it and to protect mysel...
The first on-campus interview I ever got was at a school in the Midwest. After giving a job talk and teaching demo I was scheduled to go to dinner with two white men faculty members. I was informed that one faculty member would meet us at the restaurant and I was to ride to the restaurant with the other. In the car rid...
I gave this presentation at the Southern Sociological Society 2018 annual meeting. At the request of attendees, I am posting it here for all who are interested. Advice for the newly minted So much of what you can do to increase your prospects on the academic job market occurs long before you are actually on the marke...
In my first week of graduate school, I got a phone call from my grandmother. Up until then, I’d spent a lot of time accompanying her to doctor’s appointments, translating and advocating for her, fighting with insurance companies that wanted to cut off her benefits or refused to approve the latest medication prescri...
When I was applying for tenure, I had to compile all of my teaching evaluations. I have rarely found teaching evaluations helpful, but as I looked at the evaluations across semesters and across years, I started to see an interesting pattern. As happens with many of us, my evaluations show very little middle ground. The...
On Moving Past the White-Washed Academy The first time I went on the job market I became acutely aware of the unique space faculty members of color inhabit within it. I had spent years preparing for that first tenure-track job; taken all the right classes, focused on publishing and followed the rules of networking. I h...
I remember the day when I realized that the Academy was not going to be a safe space for me. I was a graduate student and still painfully naïve. I had spent several years working in the corporate world where I had been truly miserable for a number of reasons and I had envisioned that academia would be this wonderful p...
Katie L Acosta This post originally appeared in Write Where it Hurts. I recently attended a meeting designed to explain the boundaries of academic freedom to faculty members and to brainstorm best practices for creating a non-hostile classroom environment that presents students with a balanced picture of contemp...
