The Black Student’s Pathway to Graduate Study and Beyond: The Making of a Scholar is an informative and ambitious book designed to help Black prospective and current graduate students pursue graduate degrees successfully. The book covers broad topics ranging from admissions policies, standardized tests, networking, mentorship, financial options, qualifying and comprehensive exams, proposal and dissertation writing, publishing, gender and race, socialization, and campus culture. This volume is organized into five graduate pathways: Pathway I: Embarking on the Graduate Admissions Process; Pathway II: Confronting Race and Gender Disparities in Graduate Education; Pathway III: Persevering to the Graduate Degree; Pathway IV: Adjusting to the Socialization of Graduate Education; and Pathway V: Preparing for Success Beyond Graduate Education. The book calls Black students’ attention to some of the barriers they may encounter along the pathway to a graduate degree. The pathway to success can be linear or nonlinear since students travel different journeys and are at different vectors on the continuum. The primary audience for this book consists of Black prospective and current graduate students, graduate deans, admissions counselors, recruiters, and faculty advisors in both black and white higher education institutions. The secondary audience includes high school students, guidance counselors, and social and religious organizations. Furthermore, this book can serve as a handy resource for undergraduates who are interested in pursuing a graduate degree. ENDORSEMENTS: "This book will be helpful not only for students seeking a meaningful experience in graduate and professional school, but perhaps more importantly, institutions that desire to create productive pathways for Black students to the advanced-degree workplace. The chapters unpack important lived experiences that should be carefully considered." — Jerlando F. L. Jackson, University of Wisconsin-Madison "The Black Student’s Pathway to Graduate Study and Beyond: The Making of a Scholar makes key contributions to the extant literature. By underscoring Black graduate students’ engagements with Academe, the scholars provide nuanced perspective through an array of contextual lenses (e. g. admissions; race and gender; socialization; transition) that are endemic to higher education in general, and the Historically Black College and University (HBCU) setting in particular. Critical Race Theory is the theoretical framework that provides scaffolding upon which the volume’s scholars theorize best practices, strategies, and solutions that are authentic representations of their experiences. The pathway is an appropriate metaphor for this book—the scholars have provided illumination; it is incumbent upon us to initiate the journey." — Fred A. Bonner II, Prairie View A&M University

In Putting the Humanities PhD to Work Katina L. Rogers grounds practical career advice in a nuanced consideration of the current landscape of the academic workforce. Drawing on surveys, interviews, and personal experience, Rogers explores the evolving rhetoric and practices regarding career preparation and how those changes intersect with admissions practices, scholarly reward structures, and academic labor practices—especially the increasing reliance on contingent labor. Rogers invites readers to consider how graduate training can lead to meaningful and significant careers beyond the academy. She provides graduate students with context and analysis to inform the ways they discern their own potential career paths while taking an activist perspective that moves toward individual success and systemic change. For those in positions to make decisions in humanities departments or programs, Rogers outlines the circumstances and pressures that students face and gives examples of programmatic reform that address career matters in structural ways. Throughout, Rogers highlights the important possibility that different kinds of careers offer engaging, fulfilling, and even unexpected pathways for students who seek them out.

Ask practically any academic department chair why they do not have more African Americans among faculty members and they generally respond with stock stories or folktales. This title provides historical, conceptual, and empirically-based analyses focused on the development of African Americans in STEM fields.

At a time when the bulwarks of the music industry are collapsing, what does it mean to be a successful musician and artist? How might contemporary musicians sustain their artistic communities? Based on interviews with over seventy-five popular-music professionals in Nashville, Beyond the Beat looks at artist activists—those visionaries who create inclusive artist communities in today's individualistic and entrepreneurial art world. Using Nashville as a model, Daniel Cornfield develops a theory of artist activism—the ways that artist peers strengthen and build diverse artist communities. Cornfield discusses how genre-diversifying artist activists have arisen throughout the late twentieth-century musician migration to Nashville, a city that boasts the highest concentration of music jobs in the United States. Music City is now home to diverse recording artists—including Jack White, El Movimiento, the Black Keys, and Paramore. Cornfield identifies three types of artist activists: the artist-producer who produces and distributes his or her own and others' work while mentoring early-career artists, the social entrepreneur who maintains social spaces for artist networking, and arts trade union reformers who are revamping collective bargaining and union functions. Throughout, Cornfield examines enterprising musicians both known and less recognized. He links individual and collective actions taken by artist activists to their orientations toward success, audience, and risk and to their original inspirations for embarking on music careers. Beyond the Beat offers a new model of artistic success based on innovating creative institutions to benefit the society at large.

In an era when black athletes are commonly compared to the African slaves, Dr. Pinckney attempts to draw a connection to William Rhoden’s “Forty Million Dollar Slaves” and Harry Edward’s earlier work about the black athletes’ integration and segregation issues. Furthermore, this book is an attempt to chronicle the past and current history of blacks in sports. This book reads like a hybrid book—part history, part sociology, and part current issues. Dr. Pinckney captures the rise and slow decline of segregation in college and professional athletics. Dr. Pinckney examines how social and political forces imposed policies of racism, and explains the social forces that eventually forced blacks and historical black colleges and universities to accept second class–segregated competition. By some accounts five hundred years ago, our African ancestors were running from the slave catcher and slave ships to avoid slavery; however, today the descendants of slaves are still running. In fact, they are running, jumping, shooting baskets, and catching odd-shaped balls for their masters. Sporting events such as track and field, football, and basketball are mainly dominated by blacks. On any given Saturday afternoon at majority-white institutions, the black athlete can be found entertaining not only their immediate white master, but their white masters in terms of the disproportionate number of white fans, including faculty, staff, and college administrators. This in itself has predated far too many black athletes to slavery and the conditions of modern-day slavery at the hand of athletics. Truly, sports in America today as we know it has psychologically damaged the black athlete.

African American Males in Education: Researching the Convergence of Race and Identity addresses a number of research gaps. This book emerges at a time when new social dynamics of race and other identities are shaping, but also shaped by, education. Educational settings consistently perpetuate racial and other forms of privilege among students, personnel, and other participants in education. For instance, differential access to social networks still visibly cluster by race, continuing the work of systemic privilege by promoting outcome inequalities in education and society. The issues defining the relationship between African American males and education remain complex. Although there has been substantial discussion about the plight of African American male participants and personnel in education, only modest attempts have been made to center analysis of identity and identity intersections in the discourse. Additionally, more attention to African American male teachers and faculty is needed in light of their unique cultural experiences in educational settings and expectations to mentor and/or socialize other African Americans, particularly males.