Negotiating identities and making change: Feminist faculty in higher education

Over the past several decades, scholarship on higher education has expanded to include analyses of the ways that feminists in academic environments experience and construct their work (Dickens & Sagaria, 1997; Griffin, 1992; Middleton, 1993; Neumann & Peterson, 1997; Richardson, 1997; Ropers-Huilman, 1998). A focus on feminist faculty is important to the changing landscape of higher education for several reasons. First, feminist faculty as a group produce vast amounts of scholarship in a wide variety of disciplines (Kramarae & Spender, 1992; Minnich, O'Barr, & Rosenfeld, 1988). Their efforts contribute to a reconstruction of the knowledge that shapes our understanding of the gendered aspects of society. Knowledge by, for, and about women is used in college classrooms and contributes to teaching and learning experiences.