Complexities and Opportunities of Conceptualizing Race as Multidimensional

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This symposium offers frameworks reflecting a multi-dimensional conceptualization of racial identity and how such frameworks have been addressed to design school based interventions and how such frameworks can be measured. This symposium conceptualizes race along three dimensions: political positioning, cultural continuity of ethnicity, and normative variation in human communities. These three dimensions of understanding race are examined from a cultural-ecological framework that views human learning and development as the outgrowth of dynamic relations among the cognitive, phenomenological, social, emotional and physiological at both the level of individual functioning and the organization of the multiple settings in which people operate, and resists homogenizing racial groups.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Research Focus on Black Education

Chair

• Yolanda J. Majors, The University of Minnesota

Papers

• The Impact of Different Conceptions of Racial Identity on Academic Well-Being Among African American Youth - Jelani Mandara, Northwestern University

• Contributions of Skin Tone Self-Assessment to Ego Resiliency for Multiracial Adolescents - Margaret Beale Spencer, University of Chicago

• Impact of a Multidimensional Design Framework on Racial Identity and Academic Competence - Carol D. Lee, Northwestern University

• Developing Identities as Learners in Context: The Identity Consequences of Racial Stratification in Learning Academies - Nailah Suad Nasir, University of California - Berkeley; kihana miraya ross, University of California - Berkeley; Sepehr Vakil, University of California - Berkeley; David Philoxene, University of California - Berkeley

Discussant

• Phillip J. Bowman, University of Michigan