Nomadic thresholds: Engaging in the liminal spaces of belonging, race, and place

video installation presented at the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) conference, November 2019

This video is an outgrowth of my dissertation research, which explored how college students navigate the sociohistorical context of race on campus. Specifically, I examined how students navigate the tangle of discourses surrounding race on a college campus from the history of buildings and monuments, the perceptions and stereotypes of the campus students had before arriving, and how they resist and reproduce those discourses and rhetoric while on campus. My inquiry is informed by research from higher education, which has demonstrated not only a gap in experiences between historically marginalized students and their majority peers but a persistent culture of white supremacy that is reified through formal and informal policies and systems.

The narratives you hear are shared from thirteen college students representing a range of demographic identities who took part in my dissertation research. My research was guided by Doreen’s Massey’s (2005) theories of critical feminist geography and Rosi Braidotti’s (2006, 2013) nomadic philosophy. Both Braidotti and Massey emphasize the importance of the here-and-now as an entry point for global action, a way to produce different configurations and constellations of material and spatial practices. Thus, my presentation explores the specificity of a particular place, in the instance of my research, the University of Alabama campus located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. My presentation today is one example of the ways in which I have explored how space, belonging, higher education and students are (co) produced and to invite what Tom Barone described as “conspiratorial conversations” inspired through artful methods to engender empathy, connections, altered perceptions, and disturbed equilibria (p. 39). Specifically, the representation of my research which you will see today seeks to enact the nomadic philosophy of Braidotti, which emphasizes an ethics oriented toward positive difference creating unfolding, non-linear mappings.

As an entry point for this presentation, I want to share a few thoughts and recollections that might further situate how you engage with what will come. My research starts with the assumption, following Doreen Massey, that spaces are never neutral, that they are always under production and being produced. It follows then, that the production of campus does not suddenly begin when students arrive, but rather, spaces are being produced and encountered even before students physically join up campus, and these productions matter for how students experience campus and the outcomes, such as belongingness, student success, and retention that follow.  

The not-neutral-ness of campus, and how that intersected with conceptions of Alabama and ideas of the South became a refrain that echoed through the narratives of the students who took part in my study. “Alabama,” in their narratives, resonated as the university, as a state, as an idea that materially affected the ways that they navigated the campus. For example, Annaliese, a Black international relations major in her senior year, noted that her mother had told her, “you don’t want to sound like you’re from Alabama.” Similarly, Clark, a Black communications major in her junior year, and Kate, a white English major in her senior year, described how, before arriving on campus they had conflated and congealed ideas of Alabama as a backward and racist place, despite both having family connections to the state, and expressed surprise when they arrived on campus and their experiences did not match the caricatured version of the South they had pictured. In my dissertation research, I explored how these associations are not entirely accidental or serendipitous, how the university capitalizes on narratives of ‘tradition’ and ‘southernness’ in their recruitment strategies, and actively resists or dismantles student and faculty initiatives to draw attention to the history of race, enslavement, and white supremacy on campus.

Through the intersecting discourses and materialities of institutional interventions, intentions, national perceptions, media, and student memories and associations, the idea of Alabama becomes sticky, it holds on to other materials and discourses. And in that stickiness, Alabama, as sticky to the idea of the Deep South, the South, small southern town, becomes inherently racialized at the same time as that racialization is immanently tied to place – both on campus, as well as in the state and the South more broadly. In other words, what this stickiness means is that as students talk about Alabama, the campus, their descriptions slip and slide into understandings of the south. These slippages are entangled with how students encounter campus, how they think about how they belong.

In this video, I pick up some of the threads of this slippage to follow the tensions between perceptions of campus and the South and the history of place. This makes possible an inquiry into what the intersection of these narratives does and makes possible, following the theoretical guide of Rosi Braidotti, who described a process of “forgetting to forget,” a political project of cartographic accuracy, mapping, recognizing, and empowering efforts of resistance through affirmative difference.

So, in the short video compilation, you hear and read the narratives of students talking about their perception of campus, and in the background you will see images of a building on campus that narratives of white supremacy and racism congeal around in often contradictory ways. The building is Foster Auditorium, or the site of the “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” where in 1963 then governor of Alabama George Wallace attempted to bar access to registration for classes to Vivian Malone and James Hood, who ultimately were the first Black students to enroll at the university. I say contradictorily, because in my research, the building, and the marker that stands with it – stands as both a marker of what has changed, as well as what has stayed the same – how white supremacy has persisted. As you watch, and listen, and read, I invite you to consider critical questions about what materialities do to spaces and how they work. What does a monument or a materiality do to the space of campus and how does it matter and to whom? Who does it serve? How do discourses about place circulate and intersect with outcomes like belonging? How does place and history matter in outcomes like belongingness? These questions, enacted as countermemories and resistances are asked not to have answers, or to create codable themes or categories, but rather to produce proliferation and possibilities, transformative potential to imagine our relations in place differently. As Massey reminded us: “in understanding how our past continues in our present we understand also the demands of responsibility for the past we carry with us, the past in which our identities are formed.” And so, as you watch the video, I invite you to wonder how we might stand in solidarity with students, how we might seek radical relationality, how we might forget to forget.