Conditional Belonging: Examining the Construction of Belonging in Higher Educational Institutions in the United States and Brazil

• In Event: Organizational Theory: Promise, Practice, and Policy

Abstract

Despite policies aimed to diversify higher educational spaces, interlocking systems of racial domination, heteropatriarchy, and vestiges of anti-Blackness, construct notions of who belongs in academia and in what capacity across geographic borders (Ahmed, 2012; Gomes, 2018). Puwar (2004) details how the arrival of marginalized groups into historically white spaces shines light on “how spaces have been formed through what has been constructed out” (p. 1). Drawing on theories of belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2011) and global anti-Blackness (Sawyer and Paschel, 2007), this paper centers in-depth interview and observational data from self-identified Black women in the US and Brazil to critically examine how anti-Black and gendered institutional, cultural, and social mechanisms of exclusion operate to construct notions of who belongs in universities.

Author

• Tarsha I. Herelle, Johns Hopkins University