Date on Master's Thesis/Doctoral Dissertation

5-2025

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph. D.

Department

English

Degree Program

English Rhetoric and Composition, PhD

Committee Chair

Williams, Bronwyn T.

Committee Member

Olinger, Andrea

Committee Member

Mattes, Mark

Committee Member

Moss, Beverly

Author's Keywords

DEI; belonging; first-year writing; extracurricular; community literacy

Abstract

This dissertation began as a study into how students interpret and engage language and actions from their institutions of higher education which allege to be supporting and supportive of universally diverse, equitable, and inclusive campus community belonging. Occurring within a locally and globally turbid context of exponential and variable challenges to diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts by institutions of power – like those of higher and public education – this dissertation seeks to understand how, within and without institutional support for DEI, students self-sponsor and community-sponsor their ways of knowing and being to claim space for their belonging on campus. In order to explore student experiences with narratives of dis/belonging and interpretations of institutional discourse and affects, I conducted an IRB approved Participatory Action Research model supported by audio and video recorded interviews. Resulting from participant interviews, this study spotlights the means and modes of how undergraduate and graduate students alike are surveying their present and future horizon in higher education, navigating institutional terrains toward that horizon, and terraforming it into more hospitable soil. More so, they are finding each other and carving out community-built paths along the way. Across Chapter Three, participants reveal that there are discursively and materially wide gaps between what institutions of higher education state they value (like DEI) and the affective, interpersonal experience of being in that community and not feeling welcome or like they belong. Therefore, participants narrate being motivated to act in student-created coalitions in the extracurricular spaces on campus to amplify and enact the missing feelings of belonging for themselves. So doing, they hope to push the larger institution of UofL closer to its stated values by rejecting its blanket representation of their individual and unique ways of knowing and being, rather, they are self-sponsoring authentic expressions of and actions for their belonging. Chapter Four’s case studies reveal that social fields with influence, like Composition Programs, that are nestled within institutional networks are more and more responsive the more local the agents and actions. For a composition program, the first-year writing classroom is one such atomic internal social field, the hyper-locale wherein instructors and students refract their unique experiences through the course prism to evaluate the convergent and divergent kaleidoscope of perspectives and materials that populate the socio-cultural landscape of higher education. As Keri Facer (2011) argues, creating structures of teaching that afford rather than limit the responsivity of their agents can cultivate an institutional affect where many avenues toward justice are carved and tread and supported. For UofL’s Composition Program, this means a continuation of structures protecting and amplifying instructorial agency, but it also means further exploration of what other socio-materials, expectations, and structures have been, are, and can be used in the creative, reactive, responsive teaching and learning for community belonging that go on across our classrooms. Another important result from this study comes from the ways that participants talk about their work as continually and complexly entrenched in local and long histories of practice. Participants and the communities they swim in and across on campus (and their characterization of those figures and relationships) point to the longevity of the work – the future in it. Participant narratives show how DEI without belonging is limited to the present where, with action – with coalition, belonging can create and sustain a future. And given the future of DEI is threated more and more by the day, this study reveals that students are already and have been acting within and without institutional, state, or federal support for their rights to belong in college.

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