About

Dr. Tonia Floramaria Guida is an Assistant Professor of Instruction in the College of Pharmacy at The University of Texas at Austin. Her academic background includes a B.A. in Sociology and Education Studies from UCLA, an M.Ed. in Higher Education and Student Affairs from The University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. in Social Science and Comparative Education with a concentration in Race and Ethnicity from UCLA. Her work specializes in equity-minded teaching, student development, and interdisciplinary approaches to pharmacy and STEM education. She is trained as a subject matter expert in creating inclusive learning environments and intergroup dialogue, and is recognized for her strengths in consensus-building, reflective communication, and guiding complex conversations. Dr. Guida's research focuses on theorizing around whiteness in higher education and developing more racially and socially just campus environments. Her scholarship has been featured in various academic journals, and she has contributed to national conversations on inclusive pedagogy, STEM student success, and learning innovation. Beyond her teaching and scholarship, she has engaged in educational leadership and program development, previously serving in a college-level leadership role focused on student thriving and organizational climate. Her projects have been supported by significant external funding, and she has been recognized with numerous awards and fellowships. Across her work, Dr. Guida is committed to fostering educational spaces where learners feel supported, valued, and able to thrive.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Gender studies
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Art
• Medical education
• Pedagogy
• Criminology
• Communication
• Medicine
• History

Selected publications

• Critical Qualitative Approaches to Examine Whiteness

  2025-06-06 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Scholars in education use various critical qualitative approaches to examine and critique whiteness, which is the key mechanism that normalizes white supremacy. This chapter traces the founding of critical whiteness, as well as it’s trajectory over time. As the utilization of critical qualitative methodologies to examine the nature and impacts of whiteness in the social sciences has evolved, scholars have started to take up questions that consider the impacts whiteness has on the qualitative research process more broadly (e.g., how one’s racial positionality impacts the processes of data collection and analysis). In this area of work, scholars have begun to question how the racial identity of the researcher impacts each aspect of the research process and how the multiple, intersecting identities of the researcher influence their analysis and critique of whiteness.

  PublisherDOI

• Increasing Access, Measuring Impact: 4 years of a Pre-Pharmacy Pathway Program for Racially Minoritized Students

  American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education · 2024-09-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Picturing white women on campus: risks and possibilities of critical whiteness photo elicitation

  International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education · 2024-10-22

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Book Review: White Guys on Campus: Racism, White Immunity, and the Myth of "Post-Racial" Higher Education

  InterActions UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies · 2023-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• White Racial Ignorance

  2023-06-21 · 2 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  This chapter thoroughly explores the intricacies of Mills’s theorization of the racial contract and his conceptualization of epistemologies of ignorance in order to better understand the concept of white racial ignorance and how it can be applied to research and practice in higher education and student affairs. Moreover, the relationship between white racial ignorance and systemic racism and white supremacy is symbiotic in that racist structures are necessary to maintain a society rooted in an epistemology of ignorance, and this inverted epistemology simultaneously allows for the maintenance of racist structures. Lastly, white racial ignorance functions as the mechanism that allows white students to participate in a historical amnesia, which becomes particularly important as practitioners attempt to apply student development research and theory to their work with students. Through the institutional epistemology of ignorance, white-serving institutions might advance the idea that change can happen by ensuring that institutions uphold their promises to hire more Faculty of Color.

  PublisherDOI

• W.A.A.C.K. C.S.P.: the tensions and overlaps between Whiteness and culturally sustaining pedagogies

  International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education · 2022-01-28 · 3 citations

  article

  This article takes up the questions: How does Whiteness affect conceptions of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP)? Specifically, when it comes to Whiteness, is there a culture worth sustaining? To begin this examination, we first outline what CSP and Whiteness are. Second, we review the literature within Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) that takes up pedagogical questions. Third, we theorize the tensions and places of overlap across CSP and CWS—specifically that when it comes to Whiteness there is not a culture worth sustaining, but there is space for White people within CSP as long as they take account of Whiteness. Fourth, we propose a framework for merging CSP and CWS, W.A.A.C.K. C.S.P. (White folks Applying Anti-Racist Cultural Knowledge for Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies). We conclude with implications of this framework for future educational research and practical implications for White teachers and White students.

  PublisherDOI

• Two Woke Beckys?: A Fan Fiction Conversation and Critique of Derek Bell’s White Women

  Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education · 2021 · 2 citations

  • Sociology
  • History
  • Art

  Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) as method, through counternarrative and fan fiction, two prominent white women characters from Bell's 1992 book, Faces At the Bottom of the Well, engage in discussion and reflection around their whiteness, anti-racist work, and experience with patriarchy.Through radical contextualization, their narrative is ultimately addressed by a Black woman character from Bell's same book to re-center a Black woman's critique.We address white saviority, white complacency, and white innocence and how they manifest in white women's performance of whiteness, and complicate their role as oppressed oppressor, as they are oppressed by patriarchy and oppressors in white supremacism. A Fan-Fiction CounternarrativeSheila Warfield parked her rental car in one of the many open spots at the National Park in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.Sheila had come out to stay with her cousin under the guise of some business meetings in Portland.

  PublisherOA PDF

• White College Women, Race, and Place Matters: White Undergraduate Women’s Experiences and Perceptions of whiteness at UCLA

  2020 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies
  • Sociology

  Author(s): Guida, Tonia Floramaria | Advisor(s): Solorzano, Daniel G | Abstract: Research in the field of critical whiteness studies in higher education has often been normed around white college men and white college students at large. Thus, white supremacy has been examined through a masculinist or gender-neutral lens. The lack of a gendered lens in the critical whiteness studies higher education literature and the ways in which we associate white supremacy with masculinity has contributed to allowing white cisgendered women who use whiteness to their own gains less visible. If we do not begin to connect white undergraduate women’s experiences and perception of whiteness to the systemic forms of whiteness in higher education contexts, we will continue to allow interrogations of white womanhood to remain insidious and in turn harder to disrupt and challenge. Thus, the purpose of this research is to examine and theorize about whiteness, gender, and the lived environment for white undergraduate women at UCLA. Drawing on critical whiteness and critical race studies concepts, I explore how 11 UCLA white undergraduate women understand their whiteness and perceive their campus environment through 31 60-minute interviews featuring photo elicitation and walking interviews. This study uses UCLA as one illustrative case to theorize more broadly about transferable trends and patterns related to how whiteness manifests across the higher education landscape. In this study, I found that white undergraduate women interpret whiteness in their own lives through three themes: a) understanding whiteness through one-up one-down social identities, including socioeconomic status and gender, b) utilizing white ignorance and white complicity, and c) upholding racism through color-evasiveness and racial victimization. Additionally, the three findings which pertain to how white undergraduate women perceive their campus environment include: a) race was visible for participants in subenvironments where predominantly People of Color frequented, b) participants were able to feel like white women everywhere on campus, and c) participants were both aware and unaware of how they were taking up space at UCLA. This study provides new theoretical contributions to understanding the complexity of whiteness and womanhood for college students and provides groundbreaking methods by operationalizing critical whiteness concepts in data collection to theorize around race, gender, and the lived environment in higher education. Additionally, this study provides implications for policy and practice in the field of higher education to ensure we are challenging whiteness and womanhood.

  Publisher

• How Community College Staff Inflict Pervasive Microaggressions: The Experiences of Latino Men attending Urban Community Colleges in Texas

  Urban Education · 2020 · 14 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Psychology
  • Sociology

  In this qualitative research study we illustrate how implicit biases held by college personnel hinders the educational success of Latino men attending urban community colleges in Texas. In particular, we identify how often well-intentioned educators are (un)aware of how often they perpetrate racial microaggressions against Latino men. Interviews with community college faculty, staff, administers, as well as Latino men were conducted in order to triangulate findings. Findings illustrate racial microaggressions and subtractive schooling were evident through deficit based assumptions educators held about Latino men, their family and culture.

  PublisherDOI

• Book Review: Backlash: What happens when we talk honestly about racism in America

  InterActions UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies · 2020-03-30

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  N/A

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ryan A. Miller

  University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  5 shared

• S. Kiersten Ferguson

  5 shared

• Elizabeth Medina

  San Diego State University

  3 shared

• Stella Smith

  3 shared

• Chris Corces‐Zimmerman

  3 shared

• Victor B. Sáenz

  2 shared

• Claudia García‐Louis

  2 shared

• Florian Reith

  Helmut Schmidt University

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Academic Diversity Officer Fellowship
• Center for Teaching and Learning Collaborative Learning Comm…
• UCLA Wasserman Dean Fellowship Award
• UCLA SSCE Departmental Fellowship
• UCLA Graduate Summer Research Mentorship Fellowship