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Discussions of how race complicates the already complex dual role of student-instructor that graduate students take on are not new. Scholarship like Das, Flahive, Zhang, and Fariz (2023) and Alam (2024) highlight how race, alongside the authors’ other intersecting identities (sexuality, disability, citizenship), adds additional considerations that graduate students of color need to navigate in their journeys in academia. With these ongoing conversations, we felt the importance of contributing our stories to the conversation as to shed more light on what we believe are important factors to consider regarding how race (and our other identities) shapes our experiences as graduate student-instructors of color. Our work, then, seeks to add to these conversations by discussing how we negotiate our racialized identities while balancing the responsibilities of the dual roles that we have as graduate student-instructors. Our goal in recounting our stories is to think through the precarity and vulnerability (both institutional and personal) we experience and how that has shaped our relationships to our identities as graduate student-instructors of color.
To situate our discussion, we plan to provide a brief introduction to ourselves and the context we are currently situated in as a way to offer some background for how we fit into the conversations about race and graduate student-instructors. We then plan to share some of our experiences as graduate student-instructors of color, utilizing scholarship to make sense of our stories, to showcase the complexities that race brings to our responsibilities and how that has shaped who we are within the student-instructor dual role. We conclude by discussing how we see our experiences complicating the dual role of student-instructor (with the goal of potentially connecting to those who feel similarly) in addition to further prompting discussion amongst administrators/faculty supporting graduate student-instructors about how to account for the additional challenges that graduate students of color encounter.