Theorizing Supportive Campus Climates in the Transatlantic Context in the BLM Era: US and UK perspectives

• In Event: Belonging and inclusion in higher education: Students' experiences at home and abroad (II)

Proposal

PHILOSOPHICAL, THEORETICAL, AND PRACTICAL ARGUMENT
The second decade of the 21st century has seen a long-overdue confrontation with White supremacy and an inclusive societal vision embracing all (Kruse & Calderon, 2020). Sparked by the murder of George Floyd and other BIPOC folx at the hands of state-sanctioned actors, a new chapter in student activism and protest emerged on college campuses in the US and worldwide (Kamenetz et a., 2020; Pittam, 2020).
The strong cultural and political ties between the US and the UK has presented opportunities for dialogue between students and staff at American and British institutions. Courageous conversations and parallelism between campus climate, racial microaggressions, and representation in leadership are needed for institutions to lead, rather than follow, in the conversation and structural change necessary to usher in the “beloved community” that Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned (Joseph, 2019, Reddick, 2018).
In our session, two research projects approach the issue of transatlantic racial reckoning through phenomenography and qualitative filmmaking, manifested in a research collaboration in which both projects inform and respond to the question of how BIPOC students, staff, and students achieve success in their institutional environments. We will theorize how historically minoritzed communities create sense of belonging in spaces imbued with neocolonial and racially discriminatory practices. We take into account the intersectional identities that students/staff/faculty embody, and how these inform our research in both the US and UK as we co-create analytic frameworks to address our communities and the institutions in which they work and learn.
LITERATURE AND CONTEXT BACKGROUND
Transitions is a film funded through a UT-Austin President’s Award for Global Learning which deploys an innovative approach to conventional DEI programming (Texas Global, 2023). While many initiatives in the past have used a teacher-student approach (e.g., workshops), this approach deconstructs formal boundaries between undergraduates, PhD candidates, professors and administrators (Gordon et al., 2021). By creating a visual program crafted to encourage conversation, the film moves outside of a “teacher knows best” approach to DEI (Dougherty, 2022) — which often leaves BIPOC students/faculty doing uncompensated emotional labor (Reddick, 2021) — and towards community knowledge and healing.
After screening 175 interviewees, the researchers collected 30-minute in-person semi-structured interviews from twenty individuals, ten each in the UK and US. Interviewees represented diverse racial backgrounds, education levels, and institutions. This cross-section of participants allowed the film to cover a wide range of experiences and a more fulsome understanding of participants’ transitions in HE. The questions covered three types of relationships that the literature illuminated as essential for student success: peer-to-peer, peer-to- professor, and peer-to-campus culture (Healey, Flint, & Harrington, 2014; Jayakumar & Museus, 2012).
Concurrently, and in close synergy with the US project, the UK study funded by the British Educational Research Association (BERA) contested the ‘Black minority ethnic (BME)’ lens of subjectification that clusters heterogeneous groups of minoritized students on account of their non-whiteness. The labelling of diverse groups as ‘ethnic’, renders whiteness invisible, unscrutinised while ‘other’ identities are seen as powerless, their positions, motives, and aspirations scrutinised, and their legitimacy interrogated. Previous empirical accounts pointed to unmet expectations, financial and family difficulties, institutional factors, and feelings of isolation, hostility, and lack of belonging (Mirza, 2018), remote teaching staff, Islamophobia, and wider perceptions of exclusion (Osler, 1999). Through 20 phenomenographic interviews participants offered rich accounts of their experiences of academic support and how these enhanced or hindered their academic progress.
PROPOSITIONS AND IMPLICATIONS OF THE PROJECTS
The award-winning Transitions film interrogates the push and pull factors that determine whether Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) and minoritised students in the British higher education progress and succeed in their studies. Specifically, examining three key relationships within students' decisions: their peer-to-peer, peer-to-professor, and peer-to-campus interactions, to determine the turning points within students’ journeys. Transitions is a three-part short film focusing on each of the aforementioned relationships, intended to be viewed alongside interactive questions. The qualitative film project can enhance understanding and illuminate structural needs in HE institutions - a particularly critical and salient need given the conservative attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the US and “post-race racisms” among Brexit voters in the UK (Patel & Connally, 2019; Reddick, 2023). While the existing literature discusses transitions through HE and its effects on BIPOC/BAME students, there is a gap in covering how the issue manifests in a transatlantic context. Transitions responds to Reddick and Joseph’s (2021) call for this inquiry, and contributes to the emerging literature on these interactions (Krouwel, 2022; Tsungai, 2019).
On the other hand, the project on Black students conceptions of academic support identified aspects of content in the university context from Black students’ perspective, rather than in the university context that are relevant and meaningful to the students’ relationship with academic support and the wider academic life. Students’ accounts underline the importance of supporting students in their understanding of their object of learning. The centrality of this understanding means that a renewed focus may go beyond current initiatives such as decolonising the curriculum and examine with rigour all aspects of curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment. Black students highlighted the importance of positive relationships with their lecturers in their academic and emotional motivation, also linking ‘belongingness’ with relationships with lecturers. Therefore, a direct implication of this study is related to how the PWI structure can provide academics with support in daily tasks and in understanding students’ alternative worldviews; allowing them to meet students’ needs and clarity related to mentorship and guidance. Finally, academic support was intertwined with issues of equality, personal/social well-being, and respecting all students as part of the university community. Black students participants discerned racial/ethnic aspects of their university experiences as intrinsic to their development and success. These were significant regarding how they were academically supported and will be contrasted with the UoT project. Drawing on a comparison of emerging aspects of the two projects, we conclude by contrasting and comparing conditions for supportive campus climates in both contexts and addressing why sense of belonging matters, and how equitable support can transform students’ lives though agentially effective processes and structures.

Authors

• Mike Mimirinis, University of West London

• Vidhyasai Annem, The University of Texas at Austin

• Breigh Plat

• Zia Kinzy