Convergent Meanings of Race and Space: The Spatial Duality of Higher Education for Asian American Students

• In Event: Roundtable Session 66
  In Roundtable Session: Transformational Spaces: Marginalized School Communities’ Projects of Resistance

Abstract

OBJECTIVES/PURPOSE
This paper offers an updated framework for understanding the complex relationship between Asian Americans and higher education. More specifically, I argue that higher education operates as a spatial duality for Asian American students. Thus, Asian American students experience college as a space of possibility and mobility but also as a persistent socializing tool. They are no longer bound by their racial identities, yet they also find that racialization is inescapable.

PERSPECTIVES/THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS
Critical spatial theory (e.g., Lipsitz, 2007; Knowles, 2003; Delaney, 2002; Massey, 1994) provides an effective way of locating and talking about processes of racial identity formation, race-making, and race-relating on campuses. A spatial approach also reveals how spaces of higher education (i.e. past and present meanings of particular places, concrete environments, and various types and levels of social relations) contribute to and are impacted by meanings of students’ racial identities. Symbolic interactionism (Blumer,1969) reveals individuals’ agency in processes of race-making. For Asian American students, in particular, a symbolic interactionist perspective also uncovers the processes by which meanings of higher education space and meanings of Asian American racial identities may become conflated.

METHODS AND DATA
This paper draws on approaches from a larger mixed methods study on how Asian American students navigate and negotiate college campus spaces. Asian American college students’ experiences were examined in depth through qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews (Kvale, 1996) and student-created photo journals (Collier & Collier, 1986; Knowles, 2004) and quantitative analysis of data from a large-scale longitudinal survey of undergraduate students’ experiences.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
Findings from the larger study reveal meanings of higher education space transposed onto meanings of Asian American racial identity. This results in a view of Asian American racial identity as meaning freedom, choice, and possibility. A version of “Asian American-ness” that is primarily characterized by individual choice seems to be emerging from college campuses. At the same time, many Asian American college students indicate that they wrestle with a variety of dilemmas and tensions that result from conflicting meanings of higher education and varying levels of salience of their Asian American racial identities. These contradictory experiences suggest that Asian American college students are in a transitional moment and Asian American-ness is a transitional identity. Unlike previous generations, they have greater access and opportunity. At the same time, they are not yet in a “post-racial” period. Due to the spatial duality of higher education, Asian American students, to greater or lesser extents, are able to choose how to position themselves in relation to these ideas and even reinvent and transform meanings of Asian American-ness.

SIGNIFICANCE
This research offers a framework for understanding how Asian American college students understand what it means to be Asian American. In addition to contributing to existing empirical research that extends racial formation theory, especially regarding Asian Americans, this study adds to a growing body of research that makes crucial connections between race and space.

Author

• Michelle Samura, Chapman University