The Community-Joy-Justice Matrix: Creating Spaces of Belonging for Racially Minoritized and Former Foster Youth Students

• In Event: Grounded in Justice and Joy: Critical Empirical and Conceptual Explorations of Affect

Abstract

Structural racism resulting in the marginalization of students of color and former foster youth at predominantly white universities is well documented. From epistemological hierarchies that determine whose knowledge is legitimized to the daily experience of navigating campus, students of color suffer racial battle fatigue (Fasching-Varner et al., 2015). Former foster youth—who are disproportionately Black, Latinx, and Indigenous—typically lack the financial and familial support that are linked to strong higher education outcomes, and frequently experience additional layers of injustice in their interactions with the foster care and carceral systems (e.g., Cutuli et al., 2016; Harris, 2014). A sense of “non-belonging” is linked to poor educational outcomes (O’Meara et al., 2017). For decades, universities have designed programs aimed at improving minoritized student experiences, and researchers theorize the concept of belonging to analyze these interventions (e.g., Araujo et al., 2014). This paper contributes to the literature by investigating the co-constitutive relationships between community, joy, and justice in creating spaces where minoritized students feel that they belong. We bring together two case studies that analyze programs designed with the normative goals of addressing injustices that former foster youth and racially-minoritized students experience in higher education at an R1 public university in California. We focus on how program participants articulate their experiences of the community-joy-justice matrix and which program components facilitated belonging.

Case 1 consists of 34 in-depth interviews and participant observation across two offerings of a semester-long, mixed-position course on anti-racism and environmental science in which traditional academic hierarchies are flattened: instructors are a team of graduate students and course participants are faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students. Case 2 draws on in-depth interviews to understand the experiences of ten former foster youth who are enrolled as undergraduate and graduate students at the same university who all belong to a campus support program for former foster youth. Themes emerged from inductive coding of interview transcripts.

Preliminary findings indicate that participants in both programs used the language of “community” to describe how program components resulted in experiences of belonging. They understood community to be a network of relationships among members which supported joyous encounters and a sense of justice. Participants experienced togetherness toward a common cause, being seen, and compersion in the celebration of each other’s existence, which we identify as components of joy. In turn, these joyous elements framed their understanding of the programs contributing to addressing injustices in their university lives. Participants named program components that contributed to this community-joy-justice matrix: non-hierarchy and multi-positionality among participants; pedagogical methods demonstrating anti-racist praxis, and concrete action projects aimed at changing departmental structures (Case 1); access to material financial supports, academic mentorship, and spaces of community with others who lacked familial supports that research has indicated are critical to higher education success (Case 2). Articulating the co-constitution of community, joy, and justice and analyzing how programmatic elements facilitate this matrix can support universities in designing programs aimed at increasing belonging for racially minoritized and former foster youth students.

Authors

• Astha Agarwal, University of California - Berkeley

• Rosalie Zdzienicka Fanshel, University of California - Berkeley