Examining the Experiences of Racialized and Indigenous Graduate Students as Emerging Researchers

Abstract

In this article, we explore the experiences of graduate students as researchers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) in the social sciences and humanities in Canada. This analysis is based on 22 semistructured qualitative interviews with BIPOC students and explores their experiences using critical race theory and an analysis of color-blind racism. The participants in our study narrate four dimensions of experience in relation to being researchers. (1) Supervision: Participants express positive relationships with supervisors who are intellectually open, engaged in critical scholarship, politically engaged, and who recognize the impact of larger forces on BIPOC students’ lives. (2) Funding: Participants describe unequal access to funding and to grant-writing skills development. (3) Self-tokenization: Some participants confront pressures to carry out voyeuristic, deficit-focused research on their own communities. (4) Responsibilities to community: Some participants want authentically to research their own communities, which entails additional responsibilities to avoid reproducing colonial and racist dynamics. Despite the ways in which racism and colonialism shape BIPOC students’ experiences as researchers, participants are clear that they are not victims of the university. Rather, they find meaning in knowledge creation and offer proactive recommendations on how to improve the experiences of BIPOC graduate student researchers.