Multiracial Women Students' Discursive Construction of Racial Identity on the College Campus

• In Event: Roundtable Session 55
  In Roundtable Session: Female Adolescent Transitions: Accomplishments and Challenges

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to challenge the biological belief in multiracial identity, while simultaneously destabilizing Whiteness in higher education. In order to achieve this task, critical discourse analysis (CDA) is utilized to explore how multiracial women undergraduate students discursively construct their multiracial identity in relation to monoracial women students at a predominantly White institution (PWI). CDA allows for an analysis of multiracial women students’ discursive constructions of monoracial students by exposing “processes of racialization and racism” (Osei-Kofi, 2012, p. 254), challenging biological understandings of multiracial identity, and critiquing the normalcy of Whiteness in higher education.

Author

• Jessica C. Harris, The University of Kansas