Public Lauding, Private Wounding; Contact Zones, Structured Exclusion, and Unequally Distributed Wounds in/through Higher Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Creative and Critical Approaches in Youth Participatory Action Research

Abstract

This study investigates the affective and epistemic contradictions embedded in higher education through a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) project conducted with marginalized undergraduate students at UCLA. Grounded in critical, decolonial, feminist, and affect theories, the research investigates how students experience elite academic institutions as spaces of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. Using interviews, journaling, and survey methods, findings highlight how institutions rhetorically celebrate diversity while structurally reproducing harm. Students report isolation, silencing, and emotional labor as they navigate unequal contact zones masked as meritocratic. The project calls for a reimagining of belonging in higher education, not as inclusion into dominant structures, but as critical recognition and transformation of the hierarchies they sustain.

Authors

• Ifesinachi J. Ezugwu, University of Alabama

• Miguel Casar, University of Alabama

• Elizabeth Delgado, UCLA

• Andres R. Martinez, Los Angeles Unified School District

• Chisom Okereke, UCLA

• Iris Hinh, University of California - Los Angeles

• Kimberly Guox, UCLA

• Lucy L Flattery-Vickness, University of California - Los Angeles

• Thera Boonyamarn, UCLA

• Claire Li, UCLA