Episodes

In this season finale, I share a speculative fiction counterstory inspired by themes that emerged from my research on the experiences of Black professional staff in higher education. Grounded in Critical Race Theory and the tradition of counterstorytelling, this narrative invites listeners to consider how power, resistance, silence, and possibility operate within institutions. The counterstory draws upon realities that many will recognize and serves as an opportunity to imagine what might be pos...

This two-part conversation with Dr. Fredrika Cowley, explores the intersection of lived experience, scholarship, and the current state of higher education. Dr. C is a Black feminist scholar whose research focuses on Black women professional staff and how they engage in acts of everyday resistance. In Part 2, Policy, Power, & the Dear Colleague Letter, we expand the conversation to the structural level, exploring policy, institutional response, and the impact of the Dear Colleague Letter on Bl...

This two-part conversation with Dr. Fredrika Cowley, explores the intersection of lived experience, scholarship, and the current state of higher education. Dr. C is a Black feminist scholar whose research focuses on Black women professional staff and how they engage in acts of everyday resistance. In Part 1, Scholarship, Work, & Lived Experience, we ground ourselves in the experiences of a Black scholar-practitioner, examining identity, professional navigation, and the realities of working wi...

In this episode, Dr. Shea pulls back the curtain on the quiet, surgical removal of Black professional staff from the American academy. Following the 2025 "Dear Colleague" letter, institutions engaged in "Preemptive Compliance," sacrificing the very people who function as the university's "Invisible Engine" to protect federal funding and institutional "property." Using the lens of Critical Race Theory, we deconstruct the factual "Massacre" of Black labor and the scholarship of Interest Divergence...

In this episode, we move beyond individual experiences to examine how higher education institutions maintain power and reproduce inequality, often without appearing overtly racist. This conversation centers the experiences of Black professional staff, whose labor sustains institutions while protections and decision-making power remain unevenly distributed. Drawing from critical race theory and lived experience, Dr. Shea explores how shared governance, institutional history, policy, funding stru...

In this episode, we examine how institutions maintain power not only through policy and structure, but through psychological and cultural mechanisms. Centering the experiences of Black professional staff in higher education, this conversation explores how respectability, expectations of gratitude, and institutional gaslighting function together to regulate behavior, redirect critique, and preserve organizational stability. Rather than framing these experiences as individual misunderstandings, ...

In this episode, we examine how white supremacy is maintained not only through institutional policy and formal authority, but through relational dynamics shaped by history, gender, and credibility. Building on earlier conversations about structural control and institutional gaslighting, this episode explores how white womanhood has historically been positioned within systems of racial hierarchy, from slave plantations to modern higher education, as a form of relational authority that helps stab...

In this episode, a counterstory examines how institutional procedures can maintain the appearance of fairness while preserving predetermined outcomes. Drawing on Critical Race Theory and plantation politics, this episode explores how shifting criteria, professional delay, and procedural legitimacy operate within higher education institutions. Rather than focusing on individual intent, the conversation centers structural patterns that shape advancement, credibility, and professional mobility for...

In this episode, Dr. Shea reflects on what it means to work inside systems that were never designed with Black folks in mind. This conversation isn’t about discovering harm, it’s about naming what many Black professional staff already know. Dr. Shea explores silence as survival, the emotional labor of navigating higher education, and the frustration of being expected to endure systems that continue to rely on Black labor without offering protection. This episode holds space for clarity, fatigu...

In this episode, Dr. Shea examines professionalism not as a neutral workplace standard, but as a mechanism of control that shapes belonging, visibility, and survival for Black professional staff in higher education. This conversation centers the lived reality of already knowing when professionalism is being applied differently when the rules shift, when tone is policed, and when excellence is still not enough. Dr. Shea explores how professionalism operates alongside tokenism, hypervisibility,...

Episode 1: Welcome to The Discourse: Why Truth-Telling in Higher Education Matters Welcome to The Discourse with Dr. Shea. In this first episode, Dr. Shea introduces herself and the purpose of The Discourse, a podcast where storytelling meets scholarship and where honest conversations unfold at the intersections of race, power, identity, and institutions. Drawing from her experience as a higher education scholar and practitioner, Dr. Shea explains why this podcast centers truth-telling, lived...