Research that exclusively focuses on pre-tenure racially underrepresented female faculty remains scarce. Our aim is to shed light on these rarely documented experiences in an effort to understand their navigation of the world of academia. Using critical ethnographic methodology, we argue that pre-tenure racially underrepresented female faculty come to understand themselves as academicians through the figured worlds that they participate in. We use the framework of figured worlds to frame these sites of identity production and to describe how they become academicians. Findings reveal that pre-tenure racially underrepresented female faculty enact agency in seemingly benign, yet critical moments within their professional contexts to assert their identities. We conclude by suggesting that it is within these spaces of authoring that they exercise their limited yet meaningful agency in an effort to make sense of the process of becoming academicians. (Contains 2 footnotes.)