Liminal Knowledge: Positioning Intersectionality in Academia

This qualitative inquiry explores what Chicana/o doctoral students in an Educational Leadership program perceive about the positioning of the intersection of their gender, race, and ethnicity in relationship to their academic advancement and leadership development. Chicana feminist epistemology (CFE) grounds this study to invigorate the interrogation of dualities imposed by binary social constructs of male/female, Chicana/Chicano, and Chicana/o/White. Testimonio accounts of three Chicana/o doctoral students reveal a liminal space of knowledge where the daily experiences of choques or cultural collisions are revealed as the norm of academic life. We assert, that by tapping this vital source of liminal knowledge, we can re-position the intersections of our identity as aspiring educational leaders to re-articulate, re-imagine, and claim spaces of leadership informed by a mestiza consciousness1 that is inclusive of the many layers of our intersectionality