Rashné R. Jehangir

My academic work is at the nexus of research and praxis shaped by my early career as a student affairs practitioner and advisor in federally funded TRIO programs. Access and equity remain at the center of my research inquiry with a focus on experiences of first-generation students, Students of Color, and/or immigrant and poor and working-class college students, faculty and practitioners. I employ their narratives to raise questions about institutional systems in higher education that need de-construction and re-imagining. I have employed emancipatory frameworks to challenge the deficit narratives that have often defined minoritized students’ place in higher education. I chose to teach across the curriculum in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary spaces, with first year college students, juniors and seniors, and masters and doctoral students with a recognition of the ways in which students in these different parts of their journey inform and raise questions that shape my research inquiry.

I come to this work as a South Asian immigrant whose lived experience is informed by a bi-cultural, multilingual, post-colonial context and liminality. These lived experiences, and my work in equity programs, raised questions about the (in) equities of structural design of higher education and its commonly employed policies and practices. I see my body of work as an intentional triangulation of community-engaged, research, teaching, and service efforts. I am interested in how research influences practice in student development, policy, and pedagogy and am equally interested in how praxis informs research and illuminates gaps that are worthy of inquiry toward justice and equity.

My scholarly inquiry incorporates these lenses to build greater understanding of the intersectionality of underrepresented students, and the importance of recognizing the power structures that constrain their engagement in higher education. My current work falls into three arenas: Complicating First Generation Identit(ies); Emancipatory Curriculum and Pedagogy; and De-constructing Barriers in the Academy. While each stream has a particular focus, they have informed each other with a focus on exploring ways to create more just and equitable spaces for underrepresented, immigrant, refugee, Black, Indigenous, People of Color and Poor and Working-class students in higher education.  Given the tripartite focus of my research, I am eager to intentionally curate and situate scholarship that rests in a place that attends to both strengths and challenges of underrepresented students, staff and faculty in higher education with implications that remedy systems not designed to serve this new majority.