How Outsiders Within Are Made: Structural Inequalities and the Making of Academic Outsiders

Abstract

Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope, Victoria Reyes claims, ‘‘has been fueled by anger—the fury—that grows from the entrenched racism and sexism I encounter every day in the academy’’ (pp. 101–102). Reyes’s approach to analyzing this entrenched racism and sexism is inspired by Du Boisian and Black feminist epistemologies, based on using ‘‘the personal . . . to critique structures of power’’ (p. xiii). In this regard, Reyes’s Academic Outsider reminds me a lot of Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn, or Patricia Hill Collins’s Fighting Words in the way she cogently weaves between personal narratives, extant sociological theory, and the structural workings of academia and the world in which academia is situated. At a time when there is a plethora of books intended to guide graduate students and faculty through the academic world— what Reyes refers to in her book as sorts of navigational capital and unspoken rules of academic citizenship—Academic Outsider remains unique in the way that it is less a ‘‘how-to’’ guide and more of a ‘‘how does’’ guide. By this, I mean that Reyes’s book draws on her experiences to explain to us how the academy keeps working as it does despite growing recognitions that the academic world is shaped by fundamental inequalities of racism, sexism, classism, and ableism. Reyes’s book thus encompasses a range of discussions—from the politics of citation through to ‘‘overlapping shifts’’ as a mother during the pandemic, academia’s ‘‘motherhood penalty,’’ and reimbursement culture—to show us precisely how, in personal detail, the academy remains a space of deep inequality. A central theme running through Academic Outsider is that there are insiders and outsiders in the U.S. academy and that the academy is designed for the former. From the very language of insiders and outsiders, Reyes deliberately engages with Patricia Hill Collins’s concept of ‘‘the outsider within’’ and a wide range of Black feminist scholarship generated by, to name a few cited figures, Anna Julia Cooper, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde. Reyes connects with this stream of Black feminist scholarship in the way that it highlights ‘‘an invisible barrier separating ‘us’ from ‘them,’ being always on the outside, forever seeing but not fully being a part of that other side’’ (p. 9). Reyes’s book then takes us on a tour of how the insider/outsider boundaries of academia work. As Reyes excavates how insiders and outsiders are made and reproduced in the U.S. academy, we get an array of useful concepts that help name the processes going on. One such concept is academic citizenship, which ‘‘concerns not only the rights and responsibilities of those in the academy, which are differentiated and tied to rank . . . it also encompasses the sense of belonging, access to political participation, and sets of practices and claims-making related to academic life, all of which are racialized, gendered, and classed’’ (p. 43). The rights of academic citizenship, Reyes argues, are Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope, by Victoria Reyes. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2022. 184 pp. $14.00 paper. ISBN: 9781503632998.