Institutional Wearies and Woes: A Black Queer Doctoral Student's Experience With Activism and Resistance

• In Event: Black Collectivity and Institutional Dynamics: Perspectives on Resistance, Representation, and Navigation of Doctoral Training

Abstract

This presentation examines and reflects on the author's graduate student experience with student activism as a doctoral student. Graduate students experience compassion fatigue, burnout, exhaustion, and racial battle fatigue due to organizing, combatting, and addressing campus issues in higher education (Linder et al., 2019). Additionally, queer and trans student activists also experience similar issues on college campuses while navigating campus environments that are hostile due to their intersecting identities (Renn, 2010). This work is theoretically foregrounded by connecting Ferguson’s (2004) queer of color critique, which examines knowledge production, policies, and practices within state and racial formations, and disidentification from the origins of historical materialism. In employing queer of color critique as a theoretical and epistemological framework, the author aims to address how Black queer activism is forged as a resistance and healing conduit to address institutional campus climate concerns that directly impact Black students in higher education.

The author utilizes autoethnography as a research method to analyze their personal, professional, and academic experiences. Autoethnography is a deepened reflexive, personal, political, and methodological process that aims to enact social justice change (Adams et al., 2015). Autoethnography aims to acknowledge cultural ideals, identity politics, and troubling societal norms for researchers to make meaning, reflect, and process their lived experiences through narrative and storytelling (Adams et al., 2015). The author’s methods consist of a letter shared to a social media platform (i.e., Facebook) that outlined their experience as a doctoral student during the summer of 2020. The author’s decision to write the letter and share it on a social media site derived from years of experiencing mistrust and exploitation at the institutions' expense. During the summer of 2020, the institution failed to send any messaging or acknowledgment of the murder of George Floyd. As a result, this caused an uprising of students demanding the institution address issues of anti-Blackness that Black undergraduate and graduate students endured. Once the letter was posted on Facebook, it was shared by other students expressing similar concerns about the institution's lack of response.

As the letter circulated throughout the institution, the author was also serving as a Diversity Coordinator at the institution aiming to address issues of diversity and campus climate among faculty. The author was asked to consult with an academic department to facilitate faculty training derived from a faculty member who deleted the author's Facebook post on the academic department's course management site. This led the author to navigate a personal, professional, and political challenge in consulting and facilitating the training while grappling with the academic’s department stating, “the Facebook post does not align with the departments' values and beliefs.” The purpose of this scholarship is to explore how the author’s navigated the challenges of addressing campus climate issues at their doctoral program institution while serving in a professional role.

Author

• Quortne R. Hutchings, Northern Illinois University
  Presenting Author