Transborder Fluidity: Identity Shifts and Spatial Belonging for Queer and Trans Transfronterizx Graduate Students

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 1:45 pm - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Being Queer and Trans on Campus: Leadership, Campus Policies, and Cross-Cultural Mobilization

Abstract

Queer and Trans Transfronterizx students navigate a border ecology that requires them to develop sociocultural, linguistic, and navigational tools to affirm their identities. Their developmental identity process is shaped by the sociocultural context of the borderlands, where tools and signs support identity formation. Drawing on the counternarratives of three QT Transfronterizxs graduate students, this study introduces transborder fluidity as a conceptual lens to understand shifting identities and spatial belonging as these students move away from the borderlands to pursue graduate school. Transborder fluidity comprises (1) complex identity formation, (2) academic uprooting, and (3) the fulfillment of the bodymindspirit. This study offers insights into QT Transfronterizx graduate students’ reimagination of belonging through fluidity and resistance.

Author

• Carlos A Fitch, University of California - Santa Barbara