Screening Campus Identity Politics: Cultural Studies, Dear White People, and the American University (original) (raw)
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The Review of Higher Education, 2011
This paper examines an often-overlooked contributing factor to minority student collegiate attrition: students’ limited knowledge of—and sometimes resistance to—the kinds of academic discursive practices they need to become “full participants” (Lave and Wenger, 1991) in the university setting. Adopting a Vygotskian view of sociolinguistics, we also posit that linguistic and communicative dissonance from the discourse community of the university prohibits the development of a collegiate academic identify. Rather, because language is so strongly rooted to culture and identity, some minority students openly resist the adoption of the very discursive skills they need to survive and thrive at college.
Conflicts and Crisis in the Faculties: The Humanities in an Age of Identity
How can the Humanities and the social theoretical disciplines respond to the critique of identity politics without reducing its terrain and analytic to the problem of identity? This essay addresses the tasks facing the humanities today, when conservative defenders of these disciplines from within and without the academy hold the Humanities responsible for the social ills that identity-based movements were created to redress. The essay suggests that we must recognize the legitimate social grounds for critique without, at the same time, embracing identitarianism.
Critical Studies in Education, 2021
In higher education, the place of the college campus, as a site of experiences, histories, symbols, and encounters, has important implications for student outcomes. However, the place of campus is often treated as a static or neutral site – a black box within which student outcomes such as belongingness occur. This article argues that excavating the encounters and memories around campus monuments can serve as an entry point for unfolding how systems of colonization and white supremacy persist in higher education, offering a critical re-imagining of the concept of belongingness. Guided by McKittrick and Massey’s feminist decolonial spatial theories and Barad’s conceptualization of memory and re-membering, the article excavates two campus monuments: a boulder commemorating confederate soldiers and a clocktower honoring the legacy of the first Black students at the University. These monuments are memory objects, memorializing particular moments in time on campus, and thus becoming part of the current reproductions of place. Through tracing the memories of campus monuments into the entanglements of the present climate of higher education, this article offers implications and considerations for institutions grappling with their history and responsibility to the past.
Preserving white comfort and safety: the politics of race erasure in academe
Social Identities, 2019
In this paper four critical scholars/ activists reflect on the complex institutional and public responses to recent white supremacist events on Canadian campuses and the equity discussions they have affected. Specifically, we interrogate practices, which reify and reinsure positions of dominance and human/social hierarchy in four ways. To begin, (1) we interrogate freedom of speech and freedom of expression positions, as well as the reliance on critique of neoliberalism to supplant analyses of racism and colonial logics, to identify their role in preserving white fragility. Next, (2) we provide a local media analysis of academe's responses to white supremacy on campus to trace the discursive moves that obscure institutional racism. Following these contextual scaffoldings, (3) we explore the ways equity projects within institutions remain projects protecting and preserving whiteness while exploiting the politics of identity. Finally, (4) we carefully reflect on the various modes of inclusion in the academy, which produce racialized scholars(hip) to be complicit in the reproduction of racial thinking, alongside and occluded by institutional narratives of equity and progress. Critical questions are raised regarding the possibilities, complicities and complexities of achieving equity and transformation in the academy, as well as the role of racialized scholars(hip) in this work.
Identity papers: Literacy and power in higher education
In the literacy theory class I teach, the central touch point for the undergraduate students (many of whom are first generation, "non-traditional," ethnic minorities themselves) has proved to be the James Gee-Lisa Delpit debate about the conflicts between home and academic discourses. While my students argue persuasively for siding with Delpit in this debate, testifying to their own abilities to code-switch, for instance, the essays in the quirky collection Identity Papers: Literacy and Power in Higher Education are unified by a Gee-ian assumption that acculturation into academic discourse (which is, overall, characterized as a homogenous, stable category) demands a complete and painful alienation from home discourses. The work of the collection as a whole, then, is to critique academic discourse and the academic cultures they construct from diverse perspectives. Bronwyn T. Williams has gathered thirteen essays which together act like a prism, bending in different and often-unexpected paths the discussions about the asymmetrical power relations embedded in academic discourse. The book is organized into three parts. Part 1 offers four essays tackling what Williams calls "Institutions and Struggles for Identities." Part 2, also containing four essays, appears under the heading "Identity in the Composition Classroom." Part 3, "Identity Outside the Institutional Walls," offers three essays and Min-Zhan Lu's conclusion-essay that traces concerns about materiality and the body through the collection. As the organizational headings suggest, the collection is highly focused on the "institutionality" of composition and the teaching of an academic discourse which, according to Williams, forces students and teacher to adopt "literacy identities" that "can often run counter to our other identities outside the classroom, leaving us feeling isolated and powerless" (1). The project of the collection is both to identify the definitions of academic literacy-and the pedagogies perpetuating these definitions-that create this isolation and powerlessness. As antidote to this poisonous academic literacy identity, Williams offers the essays to "illustrate how writing helps [the authors] and their students compose alternative identities that may allow the connection of professional identities with internal desires and sense of self" (2). He directly appeals to graduate student readers, urging them to use the collection as a key for unlocking the unspoken about professional identities so that they can knowingly accommodate or resist them. The three essays I most enjoyed in the collection include James T.
?Que Culpa Tengo Yo? Performing Identity and College Teaching
Educational Theory, 1999
A conversation that serves to complicate, inform, and remind us of its democratic character, America's public dialogue should advance democracy by virtue of the experiential heterogeneity of its communities and individuals. But unlike Jean-Jacques Rousseau's homogeneous construction of the "common good," which has served as the animating principle of our modem public conversation, a collectivity of sameness based on an abstract idea of equality, the intellectual center of this, a postmodem conversation, should be animated by the knowledge and meaning of the material, social, and biological complexity of our experiences, and not the presumed unity of that experience or its consequent identities. Higher education, then, as an institution serving the public, should enable us to "think rigorously and creatively," "sensitively and with an open mind," about ourselves and others, about who we have been and have been purported to be, who we are, and who we can become.= How can higher education insure that those who it educates engage in this public conversation as intelligences that have been enlarged and enlightened, whose imaginations have been stimulated and enriched by an intellectual enterprise that has required, as John Dewey would suggest, experimental thinking, experiential data, free inquiry, and reflection13 And perhaps more important, how can higher education be that public-serving institution through which its students learn to trust such knowledge?
Negotiating Academic Identity on a North-American Branch Campus
2017
This paper focuses on transnational education (TNE) and student academic identity development. In recent years many North-American universities opened branch campuses abroad. This phenomenon resulted in growing interest in TNE. However, for the most part, the body of research on TNE reflects the perspective of the home institution, which privileges focus on curriculum design and program administration. There is still need for studies from an ecological perspective. Arguably, more attention needs to be given to the lived experience of students negotiating disparate discourses and conflicting cultural value systems, especially in the Middle East. The author presents a case study of a university on a mega-campus in Doha, Qatar to explore students' perceptions of their identity negotiation in a new complex social and symbolic space of a TNE campus. Discussing the findings of an exploratory research project, she asks what pedagogical practices can best help students to function between languages and cultures.