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Power imbalance and whiteness in faculty-led diasporic academic collaborations: An application of Network Analysis of Qualitative Data

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Abstract

We offer insights into the factors impacting faculty-led academic/research collaborations between Mexican scholars employed in the USA and their Mexican colleagues working in Mexico. Founded on the idea that diasporic relationships include people involved in cross-border migrations yet maintaining ties with their homeland, we are referring to these faculty-led collaborations as diasporic. To offer nuanced understandings, data analyzed were obtained from 25 semi-structured interviews exploring collaboration in different professional, institutional, disciplinary, and regional contexts. Relying on Network Analysis of Qualitative Data, we were able to identify the most relevant drivers (e.g., personal relationships, common research interests, and cross-cultural understandings) and deterrents (e.g., political and legal challenges and institutional contexts) of diasporic collaborations influenced by institutional, national, and sociopolitical power dynamics. Our use of diasporic academic collaborations is intended to transcend this study; that is, although our analytic sample is comprised by diasporic Mexican academics, we argue that similar barriers and drivers may apply to academics from other countries who may be interested in participating in diasporic academic collaborations. Accordingly, we invite other researchers to expand this understudied research topic by providing access to our interview protocols and the detailed list of codes used to apply Network Analysis of Qualitative Data.

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Data availability

Data is not available due to confidentiality.

Code availability

Codes are available.

Notes

  1. Note that when contacting participants, one of the academics included in Helms’s and Griffin’s report was a scholar born in the USA who was married to a Mexican woman. This American academic did not earn a degree in Mexico but was actively collaborating with Mexican colleagues, which is why we decided to include him in the analytic sample. Moreover, after coding his interview, the resulting concerns, barriers, and drivers that he shared were similar to those expressed by our participants who obtained a degree in a Mexican university. In sum, keeping or removing the experiences and contributions of this scholar did not change our findings nor conclusions.

  2. The specific number of contributions (i.e., degree), influence (i.e., eigenvector), and betweenness centrality values for codes and participants are in Table B1 in Appendix. Similar tables showing centrality values by STEM and border status are in Tables B2 and B3, respectively.

  3. Non-STEM fields include disciplines in both social science (e.g., education, sociology) and humanities (language, design). We did not separate humanities with social science, as there were very few (n = 2) participants whose major can be categorized as humanities.

  4. Six codes per each of the groups (STEM, non-STEM, border, no border) analyzed capture the top 25% of factors per group. Our selection of this number was based on rendering plots that are clear to read, rather than containing too many nodes.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the American Council of Education for their collaboration on this project.

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  1. University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA

    Manuel S. González Canché, Chelsea Zhang & Ji Yeon Bae

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  1. Manuel S. González Canché
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Correspondence to Manuel S. González Canché.

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González Canché, M.S., Zhang, C. & Bae, J.Y. Power imbalance and whiteness in faculty-led diasporic academic collaborations: An application of Network Analysis of Qualitative Data. High Educ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01159-w

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