Institutional and Agentic Mechanisms of Educational Mobility Justice

• In Event: Higher Education, Mobility and Study Abroad

Proposal

Introduction
This paper brings attention to how participants mobilize to subvert power structures that have governed their families and individual rights to move. This mobilization leads participants to discover a sense of freedom through emancipatory forms of movement. I find that participants gain mobility in the educational context through the intervention of those in their network who disrupt the dominance of the idea that they cannot move and consider the possibility of travel outside of conditions of economic exploitation, seeking refuge from political violence and displacement among other negative associations to mobility. Participants consistently reported that family members and higher education administrators (particularly TRIO Program support ), among others in participant communities, intervene in their lives and assume instrumental roles in their reimagining of possibilities of mobility. TRIO program support provides the organizational infrastructures that social movement resource mobilization scholarship expects will enable and sustain mobilization. Upon gaining recognition of the possibility of altering their material circumstances and developing imaginations of alternative mobility futures, the once hegemonic ideas of immobility are disrupted, and potentiality for movement is generated.

Theoretical Strands
Discussing first-generation, low-income minoritized students in study abroad requires a theoretical framework that accounts for the impact of race and structural inequity on differential participation in study abroad. Four theoretical bodies inform the following section: Critical Race Theory (CRT), Intersectional Analysis, Educational Mobility Justice, and Community Cultural Wealth. CRT provides space for researchers to acknowledge, challenge, and respond to the historical inequalities that existed and currently persist (Bell, 1992; Bonilla-Silva, 2018; DeCuir & Dixson, 2004; Delgado & Stefancic, 2001; Ladson-Billings, 1998; Solórzano, 1997). An educational mobility justice framework challenges dominant assumptions within the field of education by seeking to understand and trace histories of the uneven and unequal mobility of students (Acevedo, 2021). Applying an intersectional lens account for the multidimensional impacts of power, privilege, and oppression on students’ mobilities and their sense of self before, during, and after studying abroad (Crenshaw, 1991; Hill Collins, 1998). Community Cultural Wealth shifts the scholarship lens from a deficit perspective toward a lens that acknowledges, recognizes, and highlights students’ strengths (Yosso, 2005). Within the context of this critical framework, the following questions guide my research when examining U.S. minoritized first-generation, low-income students participating in study abroad: How do universalist assumptions about the benefits of study abroad that dominate literature compare and contrast with the lived experiences abroad of minoritized students?

Methodology
I employed Fairclough’s three-dimension approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA) of interviews with study abroad participants to investigate the social issues manifested in the use of language, such as forms of oppression and domination. By employing a methodology such as CDA that accounts for ideology, hegemony, and power as manifested in language, I was able to analyze structures that can enable and constrain educational mobility at micro and macro levels.

Findings
Participants in this study created pathways that allowed them to navigate issues of mobility through the support and guidance of their TRIO programs, TRIO administrators, their community networks, and through an extraordinary amount of agency to cope with the status quo in study abroad. Study abroad participants from ethnoracial-class subjugated positions are agents who must negotiate between their aspirations and material constraints. Their ability to imagine an alternative to the constraints of their material realities is central to developing pathways by which they can go abroad. These imaginaries of mobility inform their agency and emancipatory praxis. In this study, I find that participants do not passively accept the ideational and structural dynamics that produce their immobility, but rather they actively confront these obstructions to their mobility. Accordingly, I argue that they should be seen as agents (or agentive) as opposed to “deficient” recipients of universally distributed educational goods and services. Participants in this study do not simply accept the status quo of immobility. Instead, they mobilize and draw from their existing networks to create and seize opportunities where others may not see them. In examining their lived experiences, this study brings attention to how participants creatively subvert power structures that have governed their family and individual rights to move. This subversion leads participants to discover a sense of freedom through emancipatory forms of movement.

In this study, I will discuss the findings that TRIO administrators are able to disrupt the dominant idea of the immutability of immobility in the minds of participants and cultivate new mobility imaginaries. TRIO administrators contribute to disrupting hegemony on college campuses by confronting the day-to-day understanding of hegemonic power relations on campus; understanding how institutional hegemony universalizes and generates deficit-driven discourse and reproduces educational inequalities for marginalized students on campus; engaging in the construction of knowledge, skills, agency, and possibilities for ethnoracial and socioeconomically marginalized students within higher education; and developing trust and a community of belonging and inclusion. This study finds that TRIO administrators help intervene and disrupt prevalent understandings of mobility and cultivate mobility imaginaries. Implications for research suggests that higher education programs on campuses can strive to integrate and enact critical practices aimed at uncovering institutional hegemony that provides “structurally preferential treatment” for students from privileged social backgrounds (Robbins, 1993, p. 153).

Author

• Rosa Maria Acevedo, The University of Texas at Austin