"Plantation politics" refers to the lingering impact of slavery's afterlife or how vestiges of enslavement permeate contemporary culture, including institutions of higher education (IHEs; Hartman, 2008; Squire et al., 2018; Williams et al., 2021). For Black women administrators (admins), the enduring legacy of caretaking, bodily control,…

Frontline student affairs educators' work puts them in close contact with students, both socially and emotionally, meaning that they may experience a unique pressure to balance and represent both the priorities of their organizations and students' needs and interests (Perez, 2016). Given that institutional policies and practices to respond to…

Prior scholarship has documented the experiences of white students engaging in racial dialogues in curricular and co-curricular contexts, however less research considers their conversations about race within their white peer and family networks, specifically within the context of anti-racist practice. This constructivist grounded theory study…

National movements, including Black Lives Matter and Abolish Greek Life, have resurfaced attention to racial dynamics within sorority and fraternity life (SFL) communities. Often, these discussions frame SFL as a homogenous entity and ignore crucial distinctions among organizations, such as the fact that historically white sororities and…

This critical narrative inquiry explored how white women's racialized emotions are structured by whiteness as a technology of affect (Leonardo & Zembylas, 2013) and connected to particular college experiences. Specifically, white women college students used claims of niceness and demands for emotional comfort as cover for racial harm, while…

The organizational settings and subcultures in which Latine mid-level student affairs administrators are employed obscure the covert nature and permeation of racialized processes throughout the academic organization. Such processes determine who is promoted and who can lead. I used a constructivist grounded theory approach to challenge current…

College-educated white women across social classes support and uphold racism. Using narrative methods in a secondary analysis, we, as two white women, explored how white non-trans women make meaning of social class using the revised model of multiple dimensions of identity (RMMDI; Abes et al., 2007) as positioned within the context of white…

The field of student affairs has seen an exodus of staff members over the past few years. Employee attrition, however, is not a new problem in student affairs. This grounded theory study aimed to understand why student affairs professionals leave the field. Based on interviews with student affairs professionals who left the field between March…

Through a narrative inquiry study, we sought to understand how 12 student affairs professionals (SAPs) experienced whiteness and perceived the influence of whiteness on campus responses to racialized incidents. We used components of critical whiteness studies (CWS) and critical race theory (CRT) as a theoretical underpinning to disrupt the…