Introduction: Presumed Incompetent: Continuing the Conversation (Part II)

On March 8, 2013, the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice hosted an all-day symposium featuring more than forty speakers at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law to celebrate and invite responses to the book entitled, Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, Carmen G. González & Angela P. Harris eds., 2012). Presumed Incompetent presents gripping first-hand accounts of the obstacles encountered by female faculty of color in the academic workplace, and provides specific recommendations to women of color, allies, and academic leaders on ways to eliminate these barriers. The symposium held at Berkeley continued the conversation begun in the book through a series of concurrent and plenary panels, poetry readings, and keynote addresses. Selected papers from the symposium were published in both the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice and the Seattle Journal for Social Justice (SJSJ). This introduction discusses and contextualizes the papers published in SJSJ. These papers, like their counterparts in the Berkeley Journal, enhance our understanding of the hierarchies of the academic workplace and offer additional tools to create a more equitable and inclusive campus environment. The SJSJ papers also break new ground by introducing a topic that was not explored in Presumed Incompetent, namely the intersection of disability with race, gender, and class subordination.