Identity-Based Student Activism

Power and Oppression on College Campuses

Chris Linder, Stephen John Quaye, Alex C. Lange, Meg E. Evans, Terah J. Stewart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429557071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Historically and contemporarily, student activists have worked to address oppression on college and university campuses. This book explores the experiences of students engaged in identity-based activism today as it relates to racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and other forms of oppression. Grounded by a national study on student activism and the authors' combined 40 years of experience working in higher education, Identity-Based Student Activism uses a critical, power-conscious lens to unpack the history of identity-based activism, relationships between activists and administrators, and student activism as labor. This book provides an opportunity for administrators, educators, faculty, and student activists to reflect on their current ideas and behaviors around activism and consider new ways for improving their relationships with each other, and ultimately, their campus climates.

Part I

Setting the Stage

Foundations, History, and Contexts

Identity

Piecing together the pieces of me

Like a puzzle with no edges

Trying to find the whole me

And yet

As I search, the light gets dimmer

So I resist the piecing together

And embrace the intersections

Not akin to an equation needing to be solved

Power

What happens

When you pay attention?

How does it feel?

Like the first crisp winter day

That send chills down your spine

Like seeing parked vehicles

Enveloped with the first spring pollen

Like the autumn leaves

Hues of bright and muted oranges and reds

When you stop

You notice the things you stopped noticing

Power works in this way

You see it when it’s never been yours

You feel it engulf those around you

You seek its presence

Wishing you had an inkling of it

But, also not

For you see the way it bruises

How it crushes everything around you

How it takes without giving

How unforgiving it is

How it cheats life

1
Introduction

Although student activism is not a new phenomenon (Ferguson, 2017; Rhoads, 1997), a recent resurgence in public, visible activism across college and university campuses has resulted in renewed attention to student activism in scholarship and popular media (Campbell, 2016; Linder, Myers, Riggle, & Lacy, 2016; Lowery, 2017). Many student activists organize to hold their institutions accountable for the oppression perpetuated on college and university campuses; students organize to address racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, and sexism, to name a few. Identity-based student activists seldom separate their experiences on campus from issues impacting them in the larger community. They do not have the luxury of “just being a student” (Linder et al., 2019, p. 37); instead, they must address issues of inequity on their campuses while navigating going to classes, working, and participating in co-curricular activities.

Combining findings of a national study on student activism and the authors’ experiences working in higher education, we provide insight for student activists, educators, and administrators about the role of power and dominance in campus-based student activism. We use a critical, power-conscious lens to problematize dominant narratives about student activism, including the notion that activists cause trouble, and highlight ways students engaged in identity-based activism contribute to improving campus climates through their labor. Further, we interrogate labels and traditional notions of what constitutes activism as a strategy to validate and support current student activists. Finally, we share strategies for educators, administrators, and faculty to engage more effectively with and learn from student activists on their campuses.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the language and terminology we use throughout the book, followed by our researcher perspectives and an overview of the theoretical framework that guides our work. We also share the context for our study, including how we collected data and information about the participants of the study.

Language and Terminology

Language constantly evolves, requiring researchers to clearly and explicitly define and describe specific terms on which they rely in their writing. In this book, we use several terms that have multiple meanings, depending on context, so here we describe how we use these specific terms.

Identity-Based Activism

Identity-based activism is organizing, resisting, and engaging with issues directly tied to oppression and identity. Although some students may engage around issues in which they do not experience oppression (e.g., some white people may engage in racial justice activism), many activists engage in resistance related to an identity in which they experience systemic oppression.

Identity-Based Centers

Identity-based centers are spaces on campus that center the experiences of students with a particular identity or set of identities, including women’s centers; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) centers; cultural centers; and similar organizations and offices. Although identity-based centers may provide programming focused on a particular identity, generally these centers do not exclude other people; rather, they seek to engage all people to improve the campus climate for minoritized students. Additionally, many identity-based centers intentionally address intersectionality, or the ways that systems of oppression interact to influence people’s experiences at the core of more than one minoritized identity.

Dominant Identities

Dominant identities refer to the identities in which a person experiences privilege, or systemic access to resources and experiences that people without that identity may not experience. Other words that people may use to describe dominant identity include agent or privileged identities (Adams et al., 2013). For example, white people have access to racial privilege, cisgender men have access to gender privilege, and people without disabilities have access to ability privilege.

Minoritized Identities

Minoritized identities refer to the identities in which a person experiences systemic oppression or marginalization. In some instances, people may refer to these identities as target or marginalized identities (Adams et al., 2013). We intentionally use minoritized rather than minority to indicate that people with power enact oppression on other people; oppression does not happen with no actors to enact it (Smith, 2016). Examples of minoritized identities include women, transgender people, People of Color, and people with disabilities.

Power

In this text, we use the word power to refer to the ability to influence or significantly alter one’s own life or the life of others. Power may be formal or informal. Formal power refers to power one has access to by way of a position in an organizational structure (e.g., a faculty member has power over a student); informal power refers to power one has by way of identity or other non-organizationally related structures (e.g., a man has informal power over a woman in dominant U.S. culture).

Faculty, Staff, Administrators, and Educators

Researchers use a variety of terms to describe the various roles that non-students play on college and university campuses. Some scholars use the language of faculty and staff (Kezar, 2010), while others use institutional agents (Bensimon, 2007; Museus & Neville, 2012) to describe people whose roles involve supporting students on campus. Although most scholars do not explicitly define faculty or administrators, faculty frequently includes people who are employed by the institution primarily as classroom instructors and researchers and administrators include “any non-faculty member who held power within the university to enable student activists to accomplish their goals or to prevent them from doing so” (Ropers-Huilman, Carwile, & Barnett, 2005, p. 299). The term staff is less clear, as it refers to anyone who is not faculty or an administrator, but sometimes also includes administrators. This includes custodial staff, people who work in entry-level positions in student services offices, mid-level managers, and a number of other positions. In this study, we use the term educators to describe the people who engage in supporting student activists to highlight the ways that people across the institution work to support students’ education. We did not distinguish between faculty, staff, and administrators as we collected data for this study, although we do discuss the ways educators’ positionality, including their role at the institution, influences their relationship to student activism.

Study Context and Researcher Positionalities

A number of events converged to bring this work to the forefront of our lives at this time. An increase in attention to police murders of Black and Brown bodies, increased awareness about sexual violence, and an ongoing struggle for the recognition of all of us as our full, complex selves brought us together to embark on this work. Each of us has engaged in some level with activism and resistance throughout our lives and careers, and the renewed attention to student activism brought us together for this project. In fall 2015, as Chris and Stephen observed the uptick in visible, public student activism around issues of racism and sexual violence on college and university campuses, we began to discuss developing a national study to examine the relationships between student activists and administrators on college campuses. Specifically, we wanted to know how students engaged in activism related to identity and oppression experienced their campus administrations and what influenced ways administrators engaged with student activists. Reading national news stories during this time led us to believe that some administrators engaged with activists as collaborators and change makers, while others resisted student activism as it related to addressing climate issues on their campuses. To explore these questions, we invited some graduate students and colleagues working in identity-based centers on college and university campuses to engage in a comprehensive study on identity-based student activism. Different from many previous studies on student activism, we sought to intentionally and explicitly examine identity and power in student activism.

In fall 2016, we convened a research team consisting of nine graduate students and two full-time student affairs educators. We discussed our collective interests in this topic and developed strategies for collecting data. We collected and read newspaper articles about student activism to help inform our process. We also read previous scholarship about student activism in the higher education literature. Fall 2016 also resulted in one of the most contentious and divisive presidential campaigns in recent U.S. history. The political climate, including the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States, illustrated the level of overt hate and bigotry that fueled many of the movements that students organized around prior to the election. Although many so-called progressive or liberal people credit the 2016 election as another turning point for identity-based activism throughout the United States, many minoritized people knew the level of hatred that existed in the world and were not the least bit surprised by the election results. In fact, they/we had been organizing long before the hate-filled election based on their/our knowledge, understanding, and experiences of hate and harm prior to November 2016. The election was a result of the hatred and bigotry, not the impetus for it. We explore the specific contexts in which these movements occurred more in Chapter 2.

The research team ebbed and flowed over the course of the study. Members’ roles included helping with participant recruitment, conducting interviews, managing and organizing data, analyzing data, and discussing findings as they emerged. Although the process of using a research team is messy and logistically challenging, we believe in this case the number of people involved at various stages of the process resulted in deeper thinking about student activism because of the integration of multiple perspectives and experiences. We regularly met to discuss the process, which resulted in us being able to think as we worked, rather than waiting until the end to analyze the data. Although multiple people participated in the research process over time, five of us came together to write this book. Specifically, the five of us authored this text because of our collective experience working with student activists throughout our careers.

Researcher Positionalities

Each of the authors of this book brings a unique positionality related to student activism, and our perspectives inform our approach to scholarship and practice in higher education. Specifically, four of the five of us have worked in identity-based centers on a variety of college and university campuses, contributing to an in-depth understanding of the ways college students experience identity-based oppression, including racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Additionally, all of us have engaged in multiple research projects about campus activism, examining the ways that identity and power influence student activists’ experiences on campus, faculty experiences as scholar-activists, the roles of educators engaged in identity-based advocacy, and the use of social media as a site for identity-based activism. The work of understanding ourselves and the ways our socialization influences our experiences in the world never ends, yet pausing to reflect and articulate our understanding of our own socialization helps use to make conscious our assumptions, values, and beliefs about how we see the world and how those in the world see us. Below, we share parts of our journeys that led us to collaborating on this research project.

Chris

I am a queer, cisgender, white, educated woman raised in a working-class family. I am non-disabled and do not identify with any religion, though I grew up celebrating Christian holidays and am familiar with Christian traditions. These are my salient identities, those that are important to me and inform how I see the world. Additionally, I am a faculty member in a higher education graduate program and have been full-time faculty for the past eight years. Prior to becoming faculty, I worked in student affairs for 10 years, spending the bulk of my career as the director of a campus-based women’s center, where I advocated for survivors of interpersonal violence and provided education about interpersonal violence for faculty, staff, and students on campus. Although faculty and peers exposed me to issues of equity and inclusion in my master’s program, working in a campus-based women’s center pushed me to have my own racial awakening and develop a deeper understanding of the ways all forms of oppression are connected. As a cisgender white woman, I spent the early part of my student affairs career coming to understand how patriarchy and sexism had impacted my life, including as a secondary survivor of domestic violence. I grew up in a home where violence occurred, but did not understand the depth of how it impacted me until my mid-twenties. As the director of a campus-based women’s center, I quickly learned that my experience with patriarchy and sexism was both similar and different from the people around me. Specifically, I started to understand that my experiences as a white woman situated me differently than my Women of Color colleagues. I began to learn the harmful ways white women had ignored and minimized the unique experiences of Women of Color around issues of interpersonal violence, causing significant pain to Women of Color and failing to adequately address issues of interpersonal violence.

My new-to-me understanding of racism in feminist organizing led me to continually reflecting on the role of race and racism in my life and to interrogating ways I had perpetuated racism in feminist organizing. I devoured intersectional feminist anthologies, including The Color of Violence (Incite, 2006), and participated in as many trainings and workshops as I could to better understand my role in interrupting white dominance in feminist organizing. Additionally, I did my best to interrupt structural power and dominance in the student affairs unit I coordinated and hired the most diverse staf...