Underlife: Peer socialization agents’ resistance to higher education diversity narratives.

What is it about?

At college campuses across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of students work for their schools as resident assistants, orientation leaders, peer mentors, and tour guides. We call these students ‘peer socialization agents’ (PSAs), because one of the main functions of their job is to provide welcome and orientation to the norms and culture of the institution. We wanted to understand how these PSAs perceived the climate for diversity on their campuses, how the expectations of their roles included messaging about diversity and inclusion, and how they felt about and navigated those expectations. To explore this, we conducted interviews with 70 PSAs from 42 different campuses across the U.S. It became clear that expectations to communicate the campus’s messages about diversity created tension for many of the PSAs we talked to, though the sources of tension differed for white students and Students of Color (as well as other marginalized groups). To navigate these tensions, PSAs developed rich “underlives” (a concept we borrow from Goffman, 1961), or a set of symbolic, behavioral, and linguistic strategies used to resist or work around their expectations. Most of these strategies were ‘contained,’ meaning they attempted to create distance from the surveillance and pressures of their institutional expectations. Very few students used ‘disruptive’ strategies that attempted to create systemic change. In this paper, we illuminate the underlife strategies PSAs shared with us, and then offer two narrative vignettes that more deeply explore the roles of identity, relationships, environment, and expectations in influencing PSAs’ strategic decisions. We conclude the paper with a discussion about the ways—both productive and harmful—PSA underlives affect campus potential for inclusion.

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Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash

Photo by Belinda Fewings on Unsplash