Negotiating A Seat at the Table: Understanding Student Affairs Practitioners Orientations to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Work

Abstract

DEI has been understood as the necessary response to alleviating issues of marginalization within higher education. However, if DEI work is a university-sanctioned response to the naming of hegemony and white supremacy, then we are continuing to use the masters’ tools to shore up or repaint the master's house (Lorde, 1984). This study helps understand minoritized student affairs professionals and their relationships toward making more equitable and just college campuses while navigating the institutional (ill)logics around diversity, equity, and inclusion. Despite declarations over the last 10 years of increased diversity amongst staff and students, there continues to be a prevalence of oppressive structures and ideologies within institutions of higher education. As an attempt to address inclusion concerns from marginalized students on campus and university stakeholders, colleges and university campuses have built resource centers and implemented diversity initiatives to provide increased support and advocacy for marginalized folks and improve the campus climate (Ahmed, 2012). Despite the university-funded centers, workshops, and trainings created to increase institutional, college campuses are still rife with racism, transphobia, and homophobia (Marine & Nicolazzo, 2014; Nicolazzo, 2017). This study seeks to understand how student affairs practitioners (SA Pros) orient themselves to doing DEI work on college campuses and their relationship to university ideologies and practices. I question the nature of university diversity work as is being done by an institution that is built off of plantation politics – white supremacy, settler colonialism, and antiblackness. This study sought to find out why then student affairs practitioners continue to do DEI work in institutions that are built on logics of marginalization. Using data collected from a qualitative queer, phenomenological study, I use queer of color critique and queer phenomenology to illustrate three ways student affairs practitioners can be oriented to DEI work. They are a) an orientation to the students, b) an orientation to diversity work, and C) an orientation towards the undercommons. These findings complicate the way that DEI work is understood, presenting DEI work as a strategy for maintaining the status quo rather than a wholehearted effort by colleges and universities to make space for marginalized people.