"In the Middle": Nonbinary and Agender Collegians' Navigations of Campus

• In Event: 64.089 - Sheraton Roundtable 12 - Grand Centre
  In Roundtable Session: 64.089-4 - Student Development in Evolving Diversity

Abstract

From a critical spatial perspective, this paper explores how non-binary and agender college students navigate the space of campus. We move rhizomatically between narratives of comfort, discomfort, disruption and materiality suggesting that for the non-binary and agender students in our study, comfort with campus is a negotiation between their desire to negotiate their internal and external selves. This perspective offers a reading of campus that is needed in higher education, as it moves us from a flat reading of what happens to how it is made possible, offering entry points for change and intervention that consider the dynamism of the complicated, contradictory, dynamic spaces in which non-binary and agender student’s operate and move.

Authors

• Maureen Alice Flint, University of Georgia

• Lauren Bennett, The University of Alabama

• Cindy Ann Kilgo, Indiana University - Bloomington