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Less is known about the impostor phenomenon in undergraduate students and, more so, racially minoritised students in the UK. Impostorism has a constraining effect on constructing an authentic identity, leading to a feeling of phoniness. When impostorism intersects with a gendered and racially minoritised identity, individuals may face specific challenges, such as managing compound identity labels or struggling to achieve in their academic environment. This paper reports experiences of the phenomenon in Black female undergraduate students. Semi-structured focus group interviews with 10 students were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Four themes were generated: contextual experiences of impostorism, finding sense of belonging, struggling to maintain and value an authentic self, and taming my impostor. The findings point to university environments as both barriers and enablers for taming the effect of the impostor phenomenon on academic and cultural identities and provide novel insights into an underrepresented student population.
Husbands et al. (Wed,) studied this question.