Power, Race, and Higher Education is a parallel narrative written by two scholars. Kakali Bhattacharya, who is a South Asian woman who immigrated to the United States to pursue her graduate degrees and eventually became an academic. Kent Gillen is a White man who focuses on completing his doctoral studies under Kakali’s supervision. Kent comes to a crossroad where he has to interrogate his sociocultural position, how he benefits from a White supremacist system, even if he did not ask for any of the benefits or had his personal plights. Embedded in the dilemmas are implications for cross-cultural qualitative research, understanding of how whiteness functions, and how we attend to our deepest wounds as we work to become allies and build bridges.
This award-winning book can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses in race and culture studies in the social sciences and humanities, qualitative methods courses, and graduate classes that help students with writing up qualitative research. Individual graduate students and professors who advise graduate students may benefit from this text.
