Shifts in Social Justice Discourses and Institutional Critiques among College Women

• In Event: Sociology of Sex and Gender Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 17. Youth, Education, and Socialization

Abstract

Recent work on college-educated members of the middle and upper-middle class often depicts their use of liberal and progressive discourses about social justice as sincere and well-intended but nonetheless oriented more towards in-group status and symbolic capital than in efforts to shift the institutional and organizational practices of which they are a part (al-Gharbi 2024; Reeves 2017; Khan 2011). However, the bulk of research has taken a snapshot approach, limiting our ability to theorize how the use of social justice discourses – and the construction of moral identities associated with them – could shift over time. We also know that, historically, college students and their allies have often mobilized social justice discourses to push for meaningful changes to educational institutions. Examples include the efforts of students and faculty to organize student participation in civil rights protests (McAdams 1988), expand and institutionalize Title IX protections (Reynolds 2022), create new departments of Black and Women’s Studies (Rojas 2007; Boxer 1998), and shift university admission and hiring practices (Stulberg & Chen 2013). Taken together, these two strands of research beg the question of when and how social justice discourses and identities leave the realm of the purely performative and become resources for supporting far-reaching changes to well-established aspects of the higher education institutional infrastructure. To begin to address these gaps, we analyze 103 intensive interviews with 31 women who joined historically white sororities at highly selective college. Our dataset follows these 31 women for five years, from when they moved into their sororities as first-years to the year after college graduation. Our analysis examines within-individual shifts in participants’ meaning-making processes, progressive discursive moves, and perspectives on the institution of Historically White Greek Life (HWGL).

Authors

• Simone Ispa-Landa, Northwestern University

• Max Barte, Northwestern University