How do we envision the future in community? The authors in this issue of Reflections: A Journal of Community Engaged Writing and Rhetoric help us interrogate this critical question. At a time when humanity is being attacked and challenged on multiple levels across institutions and borders, the articles in this issue provide a small glimpse into how community work can continue grounding us as scholars, practitioners, and humans seeking ulterior alternatives.

This article explores the intersections of queer subjectivity, community storytelling, and recovery literacy through the digital storytelling project, Voices from Rock Bottom (VFRB). Drawing on feminist and queer theoretical frameworks, including queerstory of recovery (Bacibianco) and the concept of rhetorical velocity (DeVoss and Ridolfo), this research highlights how VFRB creates an inclusive multimodal platform for recovering alcoholics and addicts to share their stories beyond the privatized, hegemonic spaces of Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). This article argues that VFRB’s feminist construct creates a civic space where queer recovering alcoholics and addicts can resist institutionalized constraints, perform their stories, and engage in collective knowledge-making. Ultimately, this study advocates for a broader understanding of recovery storytelling as a communal act of dissent that empowers queer individuals to challenge hegemonic frameworks and offer new ways of knowing, being, and narrating recovery experiences in the public sphere, through what the author terms as “queerstory of recovery.” Keywords: Voices from Rock Bottom, queerstory of recovery, recovery literacy, queer subjectivity, queerstory, queer rhetoric, recovery rhetoric

Volume 25, Issue 1, Fall 2026

This paper highlights the reflective experiences of five graduate students who emerged as practitioner-scholars in the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) through their participation in the Spring 2025 graduate course, Writing Grants and Proposals, at Sam Houston State University. The semi-simulated, Better Sam Program assignment, grounded in a community-engaged and social justice framework, required students to develop unsolicited full proposals addressing local issues or opportunities within SHSU or the Huntsville community. This assignment challenged students to align their proposals with community needs while engaging in ethical, research-driven practices. Drawing on extensive community engagement, students developed proposals that were not only realistic and contextually grounded but also reflective of broader social justice concerns. The reflective process, guided by structured questions, encouraged students to critically analyze their proposal development experiences and consider the broader implications of their work for community advocacy and social responsibility. This paper presents these reflections, offering insights into how grant writing can be a transformative educational experience that fosters critical thinking, ethical engagement, and social impact.

The rise of mass incarceration since the 1970s in the United States and the many ways that prisons touch our lives have positioned prisons as inevitable—even essential–-institutions (e.g., Davis, 2003). Prison abolitionists challenge this norm by offering alternatives that do not rely on prisons to solve social problems and address violence. Drawing from a collection of over 500 letters from the LGBT Books to Prisoners archive, we examine the many ways that abolitionist literacy practices contribute to envisioning this future. The literacy practices of the incarcerated letter writers, we argue, challenge the ways that incarcerated people are meant to engage and what they are meant to know, allowing for the building of new immaterial and material worlds. These queer immaterial worlds are the textual worlds where queer lives, experiences, and desires exist within the prison system; they are often ephemeral, leaving ghost-like traces as people navigate both the affirming and community-building role of literacy practices in prison, as well as the dangers associated with those same practices. The imaginative practice that these letter writers engage in is essential to the broader work that envisions a more abolitionist future. As acts of worldmaking, these literacy practices have much to teach us about what it means to imagine an abolitionist future, and to practice worldmaking in a world of impossibility.

Chicanx filmmakers are consciously aware of negative reproductions or unproductions (meaning no representations) of themselves in mainstream motion pictures. It is a fact that Chicanx are underrepresented in mainstream cinema. Although Hispanics represent 18% of the U.S. population and contribute 21% percent of U.S. box office revenue, only about 5% percent of actors in top Hollywood films are Hispanic (Ryan 2017). Hispanic representation behind the camera is just as dismal. Unsurprisingly, Latinas in the U.S. are near non-existent in the director’s chair (Smith, Choueiti, & Pieper 2018). In order to provide a counter-narrative or to fill the absence of Chicanx on screen and behind the camera, Chicanx filmmakers are called on, now more than ever, to produce films through any means necessary. By doing so, we may advance our own knowledge about ourselves, our culture, experiences, and history, which may contribute to a new generation of Chicanx films.

Review of Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy by April Baker-Bell.

Review of Postcomposition by Sidney I. Dobrin. Southern Illinois Press, 2011.

Review of The Language of Experience: Literate Practices and Social Change by Gwen Gorzelsk. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

This piece explores a recent change in pedagogy for a professional communication program at a U.S. university. The Covid-19 pandemic prompted a reevaluation of the program’s service-learning curricula. Students’ pre-pandemic challenges are described and compared to their exacerbated struggles post-Covid, especially the impact of misinformation and artificial intelligence upon critical thinking skills. Service- learning clients’ struggles too are analyzed. Intersecting service-learning pedagogy with thought from public pedagogy scholarship can address these challenges by enhancing reciprocity in service-learning relationships. A nuanced understanding of reciprocity in service-learning roles can address power dynamics and break free from restrictive academic conventions, fostering a more equitable learning environment. The piece includes an example of how a revised service-learning curriculum in grant writing affected students’ critical thinking skills and enabled client partners to advocate for their organizations’ constituents.

This issue of Reflections: A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric includes perspectives from students, faculty, and community members who illustrate the power of community in classrooms, medical centers, churches, and kitchens.

Drawing from my experiences as a Haitian Church of God (HCG) member, this article explores multilingual linguistic acquisition practices that support literacy development among church members (of multiple generations) of the Haitian diaspora. I examine how languaging and translanguaging shape identity, expression, and resistance across generations in the HCG. By sharing five moments of multilingual linguistic acquisition, I show how academic pedagogical theories inherently unfold in HCG settings, revealing the church as a preexisting informal literacy space. This work recognizes HCGs as sites of linguistic resistance, where heritage languages are preserved, adapted, and passed down.

Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language, has attracted small pockets of learners in the U.S. This essay explores the complicated, contradictory, and affective reasons Scottish Gaelic learners in the US take up their learning practices, examining the love stories at the heart of learner’s accounts of learning activity. The author argues that cultural and community-based love stories have much to teach community literacy scholars as they help us to understand the deeply emotional bonds language learners build within the linguistic communities they seek to join. These stories traffic in the concept of the “New Gael” (Dunmore, 2025) a product of Gaelic diaspora, a figure that provides a road map for countering the effects of historical erasures in the U.S. as it foregrounds the post-vernacular and translingual realities of Indigenous language revitalization within global movements for cultural and linguistic sovereignty.

This article is a case study of the fatal consequences of epistemic violence perpetrated against members of the Black community during encounters with white “professionals” such as healthcare workers and law enforcement officers. Informed by my own family’s experiences of the healthcare system in the U.S., I analyze two public cases—the neonatal death of a renowned Black scholar’s baby, and the gruesome murder of George Floyd—as twenty-first century examples of how racialized rhetorics of knowledge-making threaten the survival of Black communities, including babies. Using Dotson’s epistemic violence as a critical framework, I theorize how the disregard for a pregnant Black woman’s articulation of pain at a hospital in the white side of town and the gasps of “I can’t breathe” in Black men’s encounters with white police officers instantiate the denial of Black people’s epistemic status about their bodies, highlighting the fatal consequences of such denials for Black lives.

To advance our understanding of how community engagement is actualized in writing classes, I use qualitative content analysis to analyze how community partners and community partnerships are described on all 26 English syllabi posted on Campus Compact’s syllabus library. The findings reveal a wide range of terms that English instructors use to describe community work in their courses, a diverse array of the types of projects that are taught, and the types of community organizations that instructors partner with, as well as a noticeable disconnect between students’ community projects and the course’s learning objectives and assigned readings. This exploratory survey of syllabi in the field of community writing offers an opportunity for instructors to notice trends in their own syllabi, and this article offers recommendations for how instructors can redevelop their syllabi to center community perspectives and community work on this important contractual document.

In this reflective piece, poet and Writing Studies scholar Saurabh Anand honors the legacy of Peter Elbow's student-centered pedagogy. Through a villanelle poem, Anand explores Elbow's enduring impact on his development as a teacher and scholar. Written in the wake of Elbow's passing, this poetic tribute from an Anglophone writer and writing center personnel working in the US highlights the enduring impact of Elbow's work on inclusive, writer-centered classrooms globally. The piece invites writing educators to reflect on how Elbow's legacy shapes their teaching practices today.

This article utilizes an empowerment framework to provide a reflection from social work professors on how they met the challenges of a Doctor of Social Work (DSW) program. The program began with student orientation and learning at a scholarship-intensive retreat designed to prepare students for academic rigor and enforce the importance of a cohort community. The authors present information about how the cohort empowered themselves and each other through nurturing community experiences and relationships. Furthermore, authors share their individual experiences as members of the DSW cohort community. This article will provide insights for structuring social work programs on building a supportive community within the graduate program whether it be in-person, online, or hybrid.

This article introduces and explores a cultural rhetorics project created by Clara Lechowski, a then-senior English Education major, with guidance from Alexander Slotkin, an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Composition. Clara’s honors project—a zine-style cookbook—blends storytelling, family history, and culinary tradition, code-meshing Polish and English to reflect the author’s Polish American identity. We situate Clara’s work within the pedagogical framework of the course in which it originated and present her zine as a model for culturally responsive writing practices. Her zine not only showcases recipes from her community but also serves as a rhetorical space where cultural identity, memory, and writing intersect. By sharing this work, we invite educators and students to see writing as a means of honoring and engaging with their own home communities.

Our lives are moving images and sounds. Shapes and textures. Rhythm and truths...

Front matter for Reflections Volume 24, Issue 1, Fall 2024 issue.

VOICES is a digital, student-led publication at Morehouse College that showcases the rhetorical choices African American men in an HBCU setting make in communicating issues of importance to them. I believe that activism, like leadership, begins at home. For these Morehouse College students, activism and leadership begin at “The House,” inside the Composition Classroom, where these young men engage in the writing process—from brainstorming to outlining, to drafting, to peer review and revision, and ultimately to publishing their work. From their choice of photos to the essays, short stories, poetry, and sketches they chose to include in this publication, VOICES shows how writing communities foster confidence, nurture scholarship, and provide a positive space for Black male voices, which is where Black activism ultimately begins.

Controversies generated by the subjugation of man by man do not come without questioning or challenges to such a drive that would transform one faction of the human race into beasts of burden as a result of the hue of the skin. Both the questioning of and challenges to that heinous system aim at reestablishing an ideal egalitarianism among men. This paper strives to shed light on how Quaker advocacy for polyvocality at the inception of slavery, during and after the “abolition” of the same, has come to be one of the places of memory from which HBCUs could tap and enrich their wealth of peaceful, nonviolent resistance to make Black voices resonate in the 21st century and beyond with committed writing and activism that speak truth to power.

In the fall of 2023, Jackson State University hosted the 5th annual HBCU Symposium on Composition and Rhetoric. The goal of this symposium is to center the research and scholarship occurring in HBCUs within the discipline of rhetoric and composition. This special issue of Reflections highlights the work of those scholars who presented or intended to present at this symposium. The theme of the conference, Re-Imagining Activism, Literacy, and Rhetoric in a Woke White America, was intended to present ideas and scholarship that challenged white perceptions of wokeness and explored how this perception is rooted in anti-Blackness, and how Black scholars at HBCUs responded to this recent form off anti-Blackness.

In this article, we provide a reflection on a community storytelling project that took place at Kūtha Primary School, located in Kitui, Kenya in August of 2023. The project brought together faculty members at two Florida institutions in the U.S. with students and teachers at Kūtha Primary to develop and publish stories written by youth in grades sixth through eighth. By working together to develop the project objectives, mentor youth to write, edit, and illustrate their stories, and collaborate with a visual designer to publish the stories into a book that was shared with the community, our team learned about the value of collaboration and sustainability in developing transnational community-engaged projects. The article also emphasizes the need to embrace a multi-epistemological framework when developing and implementing community-engagement literacy projects.

The origin of self-efficacy and academic self-efficacy are essential for self-identity and must be pioneered within the public education comprehensive curriculum to enhance academic success for Black male students. If our systems remain stagnant without the promotion of self-efficacy, the Cave Experience for African American males will continue to impact their social-emotional well-being from kindergarten unto adulthood. Black males must gain a deeper understanding of their cultural and historical contributions to promote, preserve, and gain a perspective of what perseverance and progress looks like while embracing high academic self-efficacy standards.

African writers need to publish their own books in their own home countries. The silencing of ideas and elimination of dominant narratives from Black authors was not something that was supposed to happen. Black writers in the Diaspora and those on the African Continent want to tell a new and different story. Such an approach will allow new voices to transform negative coverage in Western media into a new form of reportage that tells a brand-new story. People of Color should not be left at the margin. It should not matter where an author comes from. The purpose here is to unearth biases that exist in publishing houses. This kind of external validation is not necessary. African literature exists within parameters that are drawn by someone else who is somewhere else. Somehow the literature that someone might read in the West (in regards to Africa) tends to emphasize violence and corruption with an inaccurate image of inferiority.

Students are often clamoring for assignments that connect to real-life situations. This paper will highlight various projects assigned in my classes, including the midterm and minor writing submissions, which cover both modern and historical cases, student responses, and student feedback regarding the assignments, along with how and why I continue to incorporate the importance of resistance in my first- year writing courses as well as the role that exploring social justice continues to play in my pedagogy.

It’s an absolute honor to publish Volume 24.1 of Reflections, which features articles stemming from the 5th Annual HBCU Symposium on Composition and Rhetoric. This symposium was hosted at Jackson State University, and the theme of the conference was “Re-imagining Activism, Literacy, and Rhetoric in a ‘Woke’ White America.” I am incredibly grateful to Dr. Wonderful Faison, Director of the Richard Wright Center for Writing, Rhetoric, and Research at Jackson State University, who served as editor of this special issue.

Articles in the Spring 2024 issue of Reflections engage with the concepts of positionality and collaboration. The authors in this issue recognize their own positionalities as researchers, and they also interrogate the interactions between their own positionalities and those of their respective institutions and communities. As community-engaged researchers, we should consistently recognize how our identities, and our positionality (how we embody and interact with the world), influence how we will be able to conduct research in community. I hope these articles help teachers, researchers, and practitioners to ask important questions about how power structures shape how academics collaborate, or should collaborate, with community partners across contexts.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 23, Issue 2, Spring 2024 issue.

This paper examines the written, spoken, and performed texts at The Alamo to quantify and analyze the white narratives that are presented. Through the use of a content and discourse analysis, we evaluate the rhetorical strategies The Alamo uses as it communicates Texas history to visitors. Our findings indicate that Anglo/white people are labeled as heroes and Mexican people are labeled as enemies. Narratives of Indigenous, Black, and Tejano people are virtually nonexistent in spite of the vibrant community organizations like the Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation who are fighting for an accurate and thorough rendering of the site.

This article interrogates the political contexts leading up to the University of Arizona’s designation as a land grant and Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). As a white settler teacher, I reflect on how researching this history helped me confront how increasing access to the university was met by exclusionary gatekeeping mechanisms that function more generally in higher education. While historicizing this tension between access and exclusion at the University of Arizona, I recognized how racist and classist gatekeeping mechanisms emerged in the nineteenth century in ways that are continually recycled in the composition classroom. This case study provides an example of the sort of local historical research that encourages educators to unearth the colonial and racist infrastructure of FYW born from nineteenth-century educational policies and engage with the collective responses of BIPOC student activists from the civil rights movement. In this way, composition instructors can interrogate their universities’ institutional history to reimagine the role they might play in creating a more socially and linguistically just future.

The Youth Research Council (YRC) is a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project in which high school students, undergraduate and graduate students, and university-affiliated professors and administrators collaborate on consequential, justice- oriented research projects in their community. In this article, twelve members of the YRC reflect on our reasons for joining and remaining active participants in this community-engaged research project. Our discussion and analysis of “what brought us here” and “what keeps us here” offers a window into strategies and struggles for cultivating transformational reciprocity and sustainability within research partnerships.

This study examines strategies for emphasizing collaborative writing in a community engagement project. Doing so can enrich students’ experiences with ethical community engagement. Successful collaborative writing provides students with competencies—rhetorical knowledge, confidence, understanding of transfer, and appreciation for diverse perspectives—that are key building blocks in supporting students as they deepen their engagement with social issues. Current research demonstrates how collaborative writing and community engagement experiences provide overlapping benefits. Pairing them has the potential to amplify students’ learning, including their understanding of their ability and responsibility to use writing as a tool to affect meaningful change.

This paper emphasizes the importance of mêtis—adaptable and responsive rhetorical action—in achieving responsible, sustainable, and access-based community action for social justice. It specifically connects this concept to disability and access, arguing that centering disability and the embodied material experiences of disabled people are central to sustainable, effective, and ethical civic engagement practices for all. By drawing on the author’s experience working with the Latino Leadership Institute (LLI) in Orlando, Florida, this paper details the challenges encountered and the responsive decisions made, emphasizing how integrating disability-centered methodologies foster inclusivity and accessibility. Ultimately, this paper argues that a mêtis approach informed by disability perspectives allows for effective and ethical civic engagement that prioritizes access and empowers marginalized communities.

COVID-19 has disproportionately affected Latinx/a/o communities as people face interlocking global pandemics: “COVID-19, economic recession, global warming, and structural racism” (Solorzano, 2021, xvi). While popular discussions have focused on how these systemic inequities have resulted in learning loss, we have found the focus on school-based learning loss also obscures experiential knowledge students have gained from home, work, and community activities (Delgado Bernal, 2001; González et al., 1995; Pacheco, 2012; Vossoughi & Gutiérrez, 2014; Yosso, 2006). In this article, we, a group of working student-researchers of Peruvian, Mexican, and Bolivian heritage and our research mentors, share six digital testimonios that examine how we learned during the ongoing pandemic. This multi-authored, multilingual, and multimodal article uses digital testimonio (Benmayor, 2012; Medina, 2016) as methodology (Pérez Huber, 2009, 2021) to demonstrate how, in addition to any learning losses and barriers we had experienced in our formal education, we also learned from our lived experience of the pandemic and wish to see that learning valued in formal education.

In this article, I chart my efforts in teaching a first-year writing class centered around mutual aid at a predominantly white institution. After contextualizing mutual aid and explaining my local institutional context, I describe the course I taught, “Rhetorics and Literacies of Mutual Aid.” In particular, I detail the Mini Solidarity Campaign, one major assignment that asks students to work collaboratively as an entire class to engage a campus issue in their lives. After doing so, I conclude by reflecting on the limits and challenges of doing mutual aid work in mainstream educational settings.

Front matter for Reflections Volume 23, Issue 1, Fall 2023 issue.

This article focuses on the lived experiences of multilingual writing teachers and presents what we, the authors, call “A Rhetoric of Accent Fear,” which introduces accent fear as a form of linguistic racism. Through this framework, we reflect on our stories of accent fear as multilingual writing teachers; we practice forming relational connections across our experiences; and we use this relational connection to offer strategies for other multilingual rhetoric and writing scholars and teachers to navigate these sites of tension and in turn, challenge students’ accent fears.

Drawing on their embodied experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing a student-founded, student-led community literacy program, this article foregrounds queercrip embodied experiences to reinterpret normative notions of failure in community literacy programs. Using our own experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing the community literacy program, queer and disability theory, and community literacy studies scholarship, the authors unpack their own stories of failure and argue, through queercrip readings of that failure, that failure should be seen as generative, as relational, and as bound by institutional perspective.

In our changing educational environment, understanding the way students experience community-engaged writing pedagogy has become more important than ever. Following a semester-long qualitative study examining the reflective writing of students and conducting interviews with those students about their experiences, three students were invited to elaborate on their experiences with a critical community-engaged writing and oral communication course. This article will detail the course, discuss the role of emotion in community-engaged writing pedagogy, and share the experiences of these three students. Each student will discuss their experience with critical community-engaged writing, focusing on the impact, both positive and negative, of working in a group community-engaged writing and oral communication project and on the impact, both positive and negative, of previous life experiences and worldviews on community-engagement.

For Reflections readers, the lines between “teaching,” “research,” and “service” have always been fluid. The community-engaged work that some consider “service” is central to the research identity and trajectory of many Reflections readers. In the same way, Reflections readers also understand that  “teaching,” and pedagogy more broadly, takes place in many areas beyond a single classroom.

Review of Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change by Aimée Knight. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2022; 125 pp.: 9781646423149, $19.95 (pbk)

We offer an in-depth look at how a Black-led nonprofit, Life Pieces To Masterpieces (Washington, DC), stepped up to the challenges of 2020 – the devastation of the pandemic and of yet another wave of anti- Black violence. We place this story alongside scholarship about democratic education and the value of generative reciprocal relationships. While much of the scholarship focuses on university- community partnerships, we extend the analysis to look at the broader networks of relationships that nonprofits like LPTM cultivate. We argue that in the journey to equity and shared humanity, concepts like generative and transformative relationships need to account for the tremendous weight of systemic racism; this can be accomplished by explicitly centering the experiences and epistemology of Black communities. We show how these concepts were deployed and extended in LPTM’s activities from March–July 2020.

Reciprocity often forms the ideological core of community engagement, and discussions around reciprocity have encouraged researchers to pursue ethical and mutually beneficial collaborations with community partners. This article suggests that current conversations around reciprocity often presume a tacit level of difference between researchers and communities that they partner with, and that this unstated premise of difference obscures practices of reciprocity that emerge when academics and communities share similar identities or social locations. This article highlights two forms of reciprocity—deprioritizing academic outcomes and relational sustainability—that emerge when researchers work with their home communities or when their positionalities overlap. Attending more closely to similarity and positionality can add complexity to current vocabulary around community-based research and give language to the reciprocal practices that emerge when academics work with communities they are a part of.

This article discusses the program and goals that were instituted at our new community-based medical school to increase the representation of underrepresented minorities (URM) as faculty. We rely heavily on mentorship of the students for their research, and also employ community physicians for teaching and to serve as role models for the students. In addition, we collaborate with nonprofit organizations in our community, and offer pipeline programs for URM students. The combination of these programs serve to provide a pathway to academic medicine for URM students.

I reflect on my year-long experience as a South Korean researcher conducting a community-based oral history of North Korean migration during my master’s degree. Against an historical backdrop of two warring countries and numerous divides between my interlocutors, the academic establishment, and me, I explore the methodological significance and challenges of conducting a North Korean oral history. In the hopes of greater solidarity and reflexivity, I discuss the lessons learned through this process and the need to keep resisting against established ways of researching and knowing.

Since joining Reflections as Editor in December of 2022, I’ve been learning first-hand how much work and collaboration goes into producing an academic journal. As a community-engaged researcher and practitioner, I approach editorial work as a community-sustained endeavor. Every piece of writing you engage with in this issue was made possible by a team of people: 1) The authors, their community partners, their institutions, their families and support networks; and 2) Our team—the reviewers and editorial board, as well as Associate Editor Heather Lang, Assistant Editor Alexander Slotkin, Design Editor Heather Noel Turner, Book Review Editor Romeo García, and Copy Editor Victoria Scholz. All of these people contributed their expertise, time, resources, and labor to bring you this issue, and to maintaining and expanding the legacy of Reflections as a community-driven journal. I’m so grateful to be a part of this team, and I invite you to join us by contributing your expertise by sending us submissions, serving as a reviewer, and/or writing to us to share an idea for a special issue. We are here and are very excited to keep pushing Reflections’ innovative work forward.

This article argues that latrinalia is an important and potentially beneficial source of public writing deserving of educators’ and researchers’ attention. I start by comprehensively reviewing the research record of latrinalia in order to demonstrate its status as a legitimate academic field while surfacing the major trends, questions, and fault lines of latrinalic scholarship. Then, after outlining how most research on latrinalia takes place on college campuses, I trace recent work on spatial practice which implicitly advocates for public discourses like latrinalia in order to make the case that bathroom graffiti is an important but often neglected source of public writing and rhetoric that aligns with contemporary conceptions of composition theory and holds pedagogic potential for the teaching of writing. Lastly, I discuss the limitations and unresolved questions of the field of latrinalia before sketching future directions for research. “The slight scratching of many of the Maeshowe Runes, and the consequent irregularity and want of precision in the forms… of what, it must be remembered, are mere graffiti.” (D. Wilson, Britanno—Roman Inscriptions: With Critical Notes, 1863)

In this paper, two African American administrators share their experiences navigating and negotiating the White patriarchal dominance at two large, Southern, predominately White institutions (PWIs). Analyzing and trying to make sense of their shared experiences led us to discover that their challenges navigating the patriarchal society stemmed from failing to adhere to White cultural norms that permeate the fabric of these institutions. Our understanding has also led to the development of strategies for existing Black administrators and women of color who aspire to advance within and become successful in the Academy.