Epistemic Dynamics and Intersectionality in Faculty Hiring
Who Presents as Engaged Scholars
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8130748 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jessica R Gold (0000-0002-5354-5317, Northeastern University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 99 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 262-283 |
| Publication date | 2026-03-12 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociology of Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0038-0407 • E-ISSN: 1939-8573 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/00380407261424498 |
| OpenAlex | W7135065486 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 46 |
Higher education institutions widely promote engaged scholarship, yet it remains undervalued in academic reward systems, such as hiring and promotion, and it is especially risky for early career scholars. Using a unique data set of 138,738 applications for assistant professor positions, this study links large-scale demographic hiring data with applicants’ substantive presentation of self through the language they use in their materials regarding engaged scholarship. Results show that women of color are the most likely to present themselves as engaged scholars, drawing on long-standing traditions of public-serving epistemologies among historically marginalized scholars, even as such work remains unevenly rewarded. Centering applicants rather than evaluators highlights how scholars navigate disciplinary norms and exercise agency in shaping their professional identities. These patterns reveal how inequalities, epistemic and otherwise, may be reproduced in academic evaluation and show which scholars might be taking early career risks to pursue public-oriented scholarship—a core mission of public institutions
Agency (philosophy · Discipline · Dynamics (music · Higher education · Intersectionality · Presentation (obstetrics · Set (abstract data type · Work (physics · Academic Freedom and Politics · Higher Education Research Studies · Mentoring and Academic Development
An Inclusive Academy
How Professors Think
Inside Graduate Admissions
Race-related service and faculty of color
Epistemic Injustice and Legitimacy in U.S. Doctoral Education
Conceptualizing Epistemic Oppression
Racial Formation in the United States
Framed by Gender
Beyond community engagement
Epistemic exclusion
Community Commitment and Activist Scholarship
Unsettling Universities' Incongruous, Gendered Bureaucratic Structures
Who is meritorious? Gendered and racialized discourse in named award descriptions in professional societies of higher education
Faculty Hiring
Subverting and Minding Boundaries
Ethnic Options
Black Feminist Thought
Can You Hear us Now? Voices from the Margin
Faculty of color in academe
A Theory of Racialized Organizations
When Two Bodies Are (Not) a Problem
Hierarchies, Jobs, Bodies
Race, Empire, and Epistemic Exclusion
The Future of Coding
Computational Grounded Theory
Enlisting Supervised Machine Learning in Mapping Scientific Uncertainty Expressed in Food Risk Analysis
Community-Engaged Scholarship and Its Implications for Public Sociology and the Discipline
| Highly cited | No |
|---|