Trans and Non-Binary Students Navigating Community and Activism amid Restrictions on DEI

• In Event: 30865 - Centering Child and Youth Perspectives: Young people as social thinkers and actors

Abstract

In recent years, many colleges and universities have curtailed their efforts at diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), defunding centers, cancelling courses, and ending hiring policies under the DEI umbrella. Using qualitative, in-depth interviews with students at one campus affected by these changes, this project explores how transgender and non-binary students experienced the closure of these centers and how they adapted their strategies for building communities and counterstructures. Trans and non-binary students are an important group to study because their identities can be especially at odds with the heterogendered organization of higher education (Preston and Hoffman 2015; Pryor 2018). Our research shows that students experienced their campus’s LGBTQ+ center as both a tangible and a symbolic resource. Although respondents noted that student-led efforts to build formal and informal efforts counterspaces facilitated autonomy and leadership development, they argued that formal institutional backing of such spaces is essential for true belonging in higher education. Our findings contribute to conversations on the state of higher education and student well-being. Additionally, findings suggest that the closure of DEI centers, while politically attractive in some state contexts, may compromise other institutional goals, including those the state has explicitly espoused.

Author

• Jenny M. Stuber, University of North Florida