Navigating the (Im)Possibilities of Antiracist Organizational Learning: Insights From Graduate Students’ Experiences With ARIS

• In Event: Studies of Equity-Minded Organizational Learning in Educational Contexts

Abstract

Antiracist organizational change efforts remain a significant topic in higher education. Indeed, a growing body of impactful scholarship theorizing generative ways to conceptualize and enact antiracism in educational settings (e.g., Beatty et al., 2020; Squire et al., 2018). Welton and colleagues (2018) posited that antiracist change initiatives should “force institutional members to call into question…the norms, practices, and routinization they have long grown comfortable with…” (p. 2). Put simply, meaningful antiracist change demands a process of organizational un/learning.

However, possibilities for organizational un/learning with/in antiracist initiatives are undermined when they reflect the cultures of the hostile environments they are meant to transform. Ironically, many antiracism initiatives rely on the racialized and gendered intellectual, emotional, and physical labor of people who are already marginalized and overtaxed (Lantz et al., 2016; Linder et al., 2019). Recognizing that organizational learning is often “rel[iant] on the labor and expertise of marginalized individuals and departments to lead equity-oriented learning projects” (Rodgers et al., 2022), we synthesize insights from graduate students involved in antiracism efforts to emphasize the myriad ways that organizational learning and change initiatives contribute to or mitigate the un/doing of antiracism in higher education.

We focus on graduate students for a few reasons: Research has shown that student antiracist activism can be pivotal in efforts toward organizational change within higher education institutions (Chu et al., 2021; Linder et al., 2019; Morgan et al., 2019). Additionally, given their status within the institution as both students and employees, graduate students occupy a unique position within the institution (Park & Bahia, 2022). Their liminality can be revelatory in understanding how power functions in antiracism initiatives.

This data comes from a larger project exploring how faculty, staff, and students affiliated with ARIS (pseudoynm), an interdisciplinary antiracist change initiative, understood their roles and managed pedagogical dimensions of their labor (e.g., classroom teaching, research assistantships, curricular development, community involvement with educational initiatives). This project took place at a large, midwestern, historically white-serving, land-grab university. Our team facilitated a series of 90-minute focus group interviews (Nyumba et al., 2018) where collaborators discussed their journey to and experience with antiracism and how they went about doing the work of antiracist pedagogy in their department, discipline, and ARIS.

Analyses of data from four focus groups with nine students (five Black women, two Latinas, one Native woman, and one white woman) affiliated with ARIS as research assistants reveal the many ways they labor on behalf of antiracism for the university. From pushing for pedagogical and curricular change efforts in their departments to leading institution-wide policy changes, our collaborators were intimately involved in organizational learning efforts. Yet, students did not perceive ARIS to be a mechanism for distributing the labor of antiracist work across the many stakeholders at the institution. What ARIS was able to contribute, however, was material resources and legitimacy. Our paper highlights how the labor of antiracist work in higher education remains inequitable and what it means to do that work is still contested.

Authors

• Aireale J. Rodgers, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Brittney Pemberton, University of Wisconsin - Madison