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Accepted Paper:
Feeling the change: An ethnographic exploration of the practices of justice in predominantly White institutions in the United States
Chenyu Wang
(Hamilton College)
A small elite liberal arts college in the northeastern United States provides a context for the proliferation of youth activism. This paper focuses on how higher educational institutions transmute, and therefore depoliticize impulses to action into individualized and depoliticized affect.
Paper long abstract:
A small elite liberal arts college in the northeastern United States provides a context for the proliferation of youth activism. However, the increasing popularity of youth activism in elite PWIs is inherently paradoxical: elite activist-identifying students are structurally located in institutions that entrench the very inequalities these students purport to ameliorate. Taking this paradox seriously, this paper asks: just what is achieved through such practices of change, and how are such practices shaped by the critical, justice-oriented education that proliferates PWIs? Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with racially marked students, I examine two moments of student-led activism: a campaign regarding student-directed resources and a teach-in aiming to confront marginalization on a PWI campus. In doing so, this paper unpacks how justice-oriented education in PWIs ironically encourages students to envision and practice justice through a neoliberal form of agency. Students in elite PWIs therefore become further entangled in the contradictions of their positionalities.