Dissertation
Vignette
This vignette was the precursor to my dissertation proposal. It gives the reader a sense of the research problematic that I am exploring in my dissertation. This project is tentatively titled:
'Our' Place On Campus: An Institutional Ethnography of Queer and Trans Work and Life in Higher Education.
As an undergraduate student I was heavily invested in queer and trans life at my mid-size, regional comprehensive university in Pennsylvania. I joined a small, yet established, queer student organization that became – as I perceived it - a large, eager, contested, feisty, powerful, active, and challenging organization. That group led me to other undergraduate experiences as a part-time student worker in the LGBTQ resource center, as a participant and presenter at queer conferences, as an organizer of queer and trans events, as a member of an executive committee for queer life that was accountable to the university president, as a volunteer with a national crisis center for queer youth, and as an intern at a national queer non-profit organization. It inspired a dream: I wanted to be an LGBTQ Resource Center director. But there were other experiences, too. There were incidences of violence related to me, there were protests against conservative alt-right Christian street preachers who were talking about me, there were campus-wide debates over queer spaces that were made for use by me, and there were policy changes that influenced me. These instances weren’t ‘actually’ about me in the material sense of the phrase, but the discursive and textual elements involved in these events rendered and (il)legitimized my body and experiences.
I was beginning to understand the ways that my identity as a black gay man were made (in)visible by the institution of education; an institution that I was betting on as a first-generation college student. And each time we fought for a policy change or for administrative acknowledgment of our grievances, I believed that our demands weren’t being met because we didn’t see the bigger picture. ‘Fine,’ I thought, ‘I’ll get a graduate degree in student affairs administration.’ And that’s what I did. But when I was 24-years old, and just about to begin my second year as a graduate student finishing my degree in higher education administration, I was appointed as the interim director of my university’s LGBTQ resource center – a dream come true. Yet, the precarity I felt during my one year in this role was intimately linked to my not-so-distant role as an undergraduate student looking to change the world… or, at the very least, my former university.
As the director, I was left to contend with the push-and-pull between wanting to realize what had been described as the students’ ‘radical’ objectives, and the institution’s intervening priorities: budget crises related to the national decline in enrollment, doing less with more, and not being viewed as ‘making a political statement’ within a highly politicized national climate. The discursive weight of the institution (internally and externally) bore down on me and shifted the way that the students and I approached our work and our collective understanding for being there. And now, as a sociologist, I am grappling with those experiences and questioning: How are the dynamic everyday world, work, and lives of queer and trans people at colleges and universities coordinated by institutional texts, discourse, and processes? And how do these relations of ruling shape the experiences of queer and trans people of color in higher education?
