Fall Issue

If you use any material from articles that have appeared in the Working Paper series and need to cite it, please use the recommended citation which is at the bottom of the first page of each article in an issue. Please contact  butler-advance@purdue.edu if you have any questions.

1. Editor's Note
   Mangala Subramaniam
   
   
2. Institutional Climates and Women Faculty of Color: Overcoming Aversive Racism and Microaggressions in the Academy
   Aparajita Sagar 
   

   This paper grew from remarks the author offered at a Roundtable on Diversity and Excellence organized by the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence on April 24, 2019.  The author argues that while for the most part, the U.S. academy has overtly committed to building diversity and inclusion, it has not solved the problem of hostile institutional racial climates. The gap between the ideal of diversity and its execution creates optimal conditions for aversive racism and microaggressions, two contemporary and formidable faces of racism. The author has suggested that though they tend to be trivialized, the effect of these racisms on victims—and on the institutional drive for excellence through diversity—is damaging.  At the same time, because they tend to fly under the radar, these forms of racism make it difficult for institutions and individuals to be vigilant and hold ourselves accountable. The author concludes with some thoughts on what efforts, at both the institutional and the individual level, can be made to can push back against aversive racism and microaggressions.

3. Excellence and Diversity: Prioritizing an Inclusive Academy for the Twenty-first Century
   Laura Zanotti

   This working paper is based on comments made at the Butler Center Roundtable III:  Excellence and Diversity. In dialogue with the articles reviewed for the roundtable, it considers how and in what way institutional commemorations are not only important for their celebratory power but also critical historical moments to take stock of the issues that institutions face. The normative structures and practices that perpetuate inequity and injustice across institutional campuses need to be better evaluated and assessed. Specifically, often hard to record forms of oppression on campus continue to remain invisible and disproportionally burden faculty of color all the while cultivating climates of exclusion and discrimination. Calling for change, the paper highlights several institutional shifts that should take place to advance recognition and reconciliation, disrupt invisibility and silencing, and confront symbolic homogeneity.

4. Success and Silences: Diversifying the Purdue Archives and Special Collections
   Katey Watson and Sammie L. Morris
   

   This paper addresses how the Purdue University Archives and Special Collections staff are altering their practices as collectors of the historical record and forming partnerships with underrepresented communities to diversify collections. The authors begin the paper by discussing how and why archival institutions and archivists collect materials, the implications this has for the representation of women and people of color in archives, and how these practices have excluded women’s experiences in the Purdue Archives. They discuss the development of the Susan Bulkeley Butler Women’s Archives as a response to the underrepresentation of women in the Archives, as well as how the collection is used to support teaching and research. Finally, the authors address how the initial focus of the Women's Archives on “notable” women led to the absence of minority women’s experiences, and the recent steps archivists have taken to address these silences and diversify perspectives in the historical record.

5. Women in Aviation: Identifying Trends in Industry and Higher Education
   Joseph Sobieralski and Sarah Hubbard

   Aviation connects people, supports economic development, and enables humanitarian missions around the globe; however, despite the global reach of aviation, the industry lacks diversity and women comprise less than 5% of the global pilot population. Research aimed at providing a better understanding of the diversity issues in aviation has been minimal, in sharp contrast to the diversity research in the fields of engineering, medicine and law. This paper contributes to the small body of literature examining women in aviation by investigating the gender trends in the aviation workforce and higher education. This paper also discusses the known gender issues in male dominated careers like aviation and serves as a motivating primer and foundation for the identification of factors that contribute to success and inclusion at the higher education and industry levels.

6. Work-Life Balance in the Neoliberal University
   Megha Anwer
   

   This essay poses three theoretical and philosophical questions that might help us reconfigure the work-life equation. It challenges us to comprehend the ways in which our intersectional identities under a neoliberal academic regime complicate any easy one-stop-shop type of strategizing for solving the surmounting sense of imbalance that pervades the lives of academic faculty.