Elyana Matos (Acadia University) and Juan Carlos López (Maple League of Universities)

As part of the 2025 SoTL Speaker Series at Yorkville U + TFS, CTEI was honoured to host Elyana Matos and Juan Carlos López for their talk on We Matter: Together We Can Resist Imposterization.

SoTL Speaker Session Description: In this session, we will be framing our experiences navigating academic spaces by articulating how the intersectionalities of our identities have shaped our academic careers as migrant scholars. We will argue that instead of placing the onus on academics belonging to equity deserving groups for ‘feeling’ as imposters, many of the common practices in academia are the root cause of these feelings. Rather than having imposter syndrome, these academics are being made imposters…have been imposterized. We will then describe how these feelings may also be experienced by learners with marginalized identities as they navigate university and, later, professional life. We will discuss how to dismantle the barriers that keep marginalized people from fully participating in academic spaces. We advocate for recognizing such barriers by sharing our experiences – among ourselves as well as with others – and naming them for what they are. We propose the creation of focused groups and communities of practice, as well as inviting allies in the process of empowering marginalized learners and scholars and fostering their rightful sense of more than belonging, actually really mattering in academic spaces.

__________

• Additional information, research, and scholarship:
  • PDF of Slide Deck: [forthcoming]
  • [addition resources coming soon, too!]