"Expect Delays: At the Crossroads of Higher Education," analyzes the cultural representations of higher education that shape personhood for minoritized identities. It argues that an emphasis on linear logics, spatial temporalities, and hegemonic visual culture impact self-fashioning for historically marginalized populations. This project turns to literary and visual culture and how these promote, contest, and complicate how identities are represented and negotiated within higher education. This design offers an epistemological scaffolding of educational practices, traditions, and discourses that have strengthened individualism, citizenship, upward mobility, linear progress, American exceptionalism, and post-racialist values amongst minoritized populations in the United States. "Expect Delays" also shows how historical developments have shaped students' desires, demands, and negotiations via the spatial and visual imaginaries of higher education and how these are subverted beyond. This project includes a performative archive that challenges the universality of minoritized student experiences in higher education. Overall, this dissertation addresses the cultural aspects of education and its impact primarily on self-fashioning. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]