Academic Outsider with Victoria Reyes

About the Talk: Victoria Reyes presents her essential book, Academic Outsider, in this talk.

Many enter the academy with dreams of doing good; this is a book about how the institution fails them, especially if they are considered “outsiders.”

Tenure-track, published author, recipient of prestigious fellowships and awards—these credentials mark Victoria Reyes as somebody who has achieved the status of insider in the academy. Woman of color, family history of sexual violence, first generation, mother—these qualities place Reyes on the margins of the academy; a person who does not see herself reflected in its models of excellence.

This contradiction allows Reyes to theorize the conditional citizenship of academic life—a liminal status occupied by a rapidly growing proportion of the academy, as the majority white, male, and affluent space simultaneously transforms and resists transformation. Reyes blends her own personal experiences with the tools of sociology to lay bare the ways in which the structures of the university and the people working within it continue to keep their traditionally marginalized members relegated to symbolic status, somewhere outside the center.

Reyes confronts the impossibility of success in the midst of competing and contradictory needs—from navigating coded language, to balancing professional expectations with care-taking responsibilities, to combating the literal exclusions of outmoded and hierarchical rules. Her searing commentary takes on, with sensitivity and fury, the urgent call for academic justice.

About the Speaker: Victoria Reyes is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender and Sexuality Studies at University of California, Riverside. She is the author of two multiple award-winning books: Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines (Stanford University Press, 2019) and Academic Outsider: Stories of Exclusion and Hope (Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2022). She received her PhD in Sociology at Princeton University, and has been supported by the Institute for International Education, American Association of University Women, Institute for Citizens & Scholars, National Science Foundation, and the National Center for Institutional Diversity, among others. Her work has been published in Social Forces, Ethnography, City & Community, Sociological Research & Methods, Sociology of Race & Ethnicity, Sociology Compass, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Theory and Society, among additional peer reviewed outlets, and she has also written for the LA Times, Washington Post, Inside Higher Ed, and The Conversation. She most recently received the William Foote Whyte Career Award from the American Sociological Association’s Sociological Practice and Public Sociology section for her contributions to public sociology.

If you require an accommodation for effective communication (ASL interpreting/CART captioning, alternative media formats, etc.) or information about campus mobility access features in order to fully participate in this event, please contact Alexandra Dalferro at adalferro@berkeley.edu with as much advance notice as possible and at least 7-10 days before the event.