Frontline student affairs educators' work puts them in close contact with students, both socially and emotionally, meaning that they may experience a unique pressure to balance and represent both the priorities of their organizations and students' needs and interests (Perez, 2016). Given that institutional policies and practices to respond to…

Students involved in social justice activist groups and activities encounter several potentially negative consequences in advocating for issues that are important to them. Through duo ethnographic interviews with scholar-activists, former youth activists describe the barriers they experienced as socially engaged young people, including dealing…

We interrogated a students as partners (SaP), co-curricular program that focuses on supporting student learning. To center power and equity in SaP, the program was grounded in social design-based experiment methodology. We considered the manifestation of power and equity beyond higher education, to that of broader socio-political contexts.…

Student activists, like all activists, need space to organise, take part in actions, and educate their peers. On many campuses, these spaces can be a refuge for progressive students who may not find support for their activism in other spaces on campus. This article examines the development, function, and demise of one such space. In particular,…

This practitioner research study examines one critical race media literacy (CRML) activity that invited students to digitally redact deficit framings of youth from minoritized and historically marginalized backgrounds. I illustrate how Latinx and Asian students used the project to re-articulate deficit narratives of themselves, their friends, and…

In this article, the authors make a case for the need for scholar activism--activism by faculty members on college campuses. Through an activist group, The Mobilizing Anger Collective, this article documents the challenges, tensions, and radical potential of scholar activism as a means of addressing injustices. Using duoethnography, the authors…

Service-learning is a method of teaching that is increasingly used in higher education. Studies are few though on how local placements in service-learning can bring about global citizenship and promote social justice. Hence, this study used multi-sited ethnography to examine the teaching-learning process of service-learning to better understand…

This article explores the strategies transgender college students use to navigate gender-dichotomous collegiate environments. Using a critical collaborative ethnographic methodology (Bhattacharya, 2008), this 18-month ethnographic study alongside 9 transgender students elucidated how gender operates as a discourse to regulate the collegiate life…

With Critical Race Theory (CRT) and social justice serving as complementary conceptual frames, this ethnographic study investigates the learning and living experiences of ten African American students of a predominantly White university in the Midwest. While several studies have investigated Black students' experiences at PWIs, most notably…

In 2012, the State of Connecticut enacted Public Act 12-40, legislation that dramatically changed the way remedial education was theorized, designed, and delivered at community colleges and regional state universities in Connecticut. One of the most controversial features of this legislative movement was that it appeared to establish a…

This article examines staff and faculty allies working to help meet the needs of undocumented students at a large research university in the western region of the U.S. Drawing on scholarly work rooted in critical race theory and ethnic studies, the authors highlight forms of transformative resistance. They focus on four key findings: (1) student…

This ethnographic project explored the extent to which the campus culture at a small liberal arts college was open to student experiences and expressions of the spiritual and the religious. The authors found that despite the college's reputation for valuing diversity and a commitment to social justice, students shared a narrative of religious…

University educators are charged with preparing pre- and in-service teachers for today's school populations; however, university faculty may assume the role of fostering and evaluating their students' dispositions toward diversity without having first examined their dispositions toward their own students. In this critical autoethnographic…

In this article, the authors present a narrative that illuminates alternative visions for connecting K12/college collaborations, exploring the potential for social justice work at the intersection of K12 teaching and academia. Told as a collective autoethnography in narrative form, they recount their decisions to teach in K12 spaces, while…

Based on an ethnographic study of a writing course taught by a talented instructor who integrated process and critical pedagogy approaches, I argue that many students actively engage with the concerns of critical pedagogy when the classroom ethos strongly supports their agency--their ownership of their developing ideas and texts. (Contains 10…