People

Leslie D. Gonzales is an associate professor in the Higher, Adult, and Lifelong Learning unit at Michigan State University in the College of Education. She also serves as an affiliate faculty member in the Center for Gender in a Global Context and Chicano/Latinx studies. As a working class, Latina, and first-generation-college-student-turned academic who earned all three of her academic degrees from Hispanic Serving Institutions, Gonzales understands how relations of power, privilege, and prestige operate in ways that can be detrimental to people that have been historically underrepresented in the academic profession. With the realization that the effects are both individual and collective, Gonzales' research aims to expose these relations of power in hopes of shaping departmental, disciplinary, and organizational cultures that are more just and inclusive of historically minoritized persons. In practice, Gonzales often examines how academics appraise one another in peer review contexts, such as hiring, tenure, and publishing. Gonzales pays particularly close attention to how such appraisals are detrimental to historically underrepresented scholars, to scholars whose work challenges conventional norms of knowledge production, and to scholars situated in historically marginalized disciplinary and organizational spaces within the academy. Gonzales is currently the co-PI on Aspire, a multi-million dollar project sponsored by the National Science Foundation.