Psychology doctoral student wins national award
Norma Garza Reyes, a doctoral student in experimental psychology at The University of Texas at Arlington, recently earned an award for Best Scholarly Paper from the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE).
Her paper is titled “Nepantla aquí, Nepantla allá: The borderlands of identity from Mexican-origin women in STEM.” Co-authors are Sarah Rodriguez, associate professor of engineering at Virginia Tech, and Maria Espino, a doctoral candidate in higher education at Iowa State University.
Nepantla is a term used by the Nahuatl-speaking people in Mexico that roughly translates to “in the middle of” or “in the space between.” Garza first read about this concept in the works of the late Gloria Anzaldúa, a Latina author, artist and cultural critic who used the word nepantla to describe her feelings of being in between American and Mexican cultures.
“I decided to take this framework and apply it to Latina students in STEM,” Garza said. “Latina students are very underrepresented in STEM fields, as well as other fields, and I thought to apply this framework to see if there was that feeling of being in between their Mexican culture and STEM culture. We found that this phenomenon does come up with Mexican-origin women in STEM fields.”
With their paper, Garza and her co-authors aimed to “understand how Mexican American women in STEM utilized Anzaldua’s borderlands of identity to successfully navigate between Mexican American cultures and STEM cultures.”
“I was extremely excited to win the Best Scholarly Paper award,” Garza said. “This was my first paper submitted to a conference, as well as my first talk at a conference, so it kind of validated the work I did. I am also very grateful to Sarah for guiding me through the experience and Maria for her help and input.”
The paper is under review to be published in the AAHHE Special Section Issue of the Journal of Hispanic Higher Education.
Garza received help funding her research with a grant from UTA’s Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) and its Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) program. CIRTL was founded in 2003 with support from the National Science Foundation and comprises 38 research universities around the nation. Its goal is to improve the teaching skills and increase the diversity of future STEM university faculty members.
AGEP is focused on improving doctoral student experiences with the goal of creating a more inclusive environment for graduate students in order to increase the number of underrepresented graduate students and postdocs interested in and prepared for faculty careers. Panos Shiakolas, associate professor in the UTA Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, is director of UTA’s AGEP program.
“Winning this award would not have been possible without my involvement with the CIRTL AGEP grant at UTA,” Garza said. “I would like to acknowledge and thank Professor Shiakolas for his genuine interest about my personal and professional growth as a Latina student and for his mentoring through the years.”
Garza was born in Monterrey, Mexico, and came to the United States with her family at age 7. She became interested in psychology when she took a class in high school, and the interest grew when she joined two psychology research labs at UT Pan American.
At UTA, she earned an M.S. in experimental psychology in 2018 and then started work on her Ph.D. in experimental psychology. Her doctoral research focuses primarily on political psychology—in particular, attitudes toward immigrants and voting participation. With her dissertation she is developing a scale and a couple of studies to address why Latinos have some of the lowest voter turnouts of any demographic.
“I am interested in these topics because I am an immigrant myself and have not always felt welcomed in this country, so I wanted to research what are some of the causes of these attitudes,” she said. “Also, growing up an immigrant made me extra aware of immigration laws and the political system surrounding them. I feel like I know more about this than the average person and can use it in my career to benefit others.”
- Written by Greg Pederson, College of Science