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Abstract

This essay outlines how Black placemaking, a sociological framework used to study Black residents in urban contexts, might be used to study Black students’ experiences at historically White institutions (HWIs) of higher education. Black placemaking engages with the intersection of Blackness, place, structure, and agency. The author argues that this framework has the potential to more expansively study Black students’ lives, experiences, and mechanisms of engagement without discounting realities of oppression. Drawing from research on Black students attending HWIs and data from an ethnography conducted by the author, this essay conceptualizes a Black placemaking approach for higher education.

Keywords

race identity African American students Urban Education postsecondary education

Black collegians have the potential to create sites of belonging, joy, and support even in the otherwise constricting contexts of historically White institutions (HWIs)¹ of higher education. Yet, how do Black students create places for themselves in such environments? From a sociological lens, HWIs are White spaces (Anderson, 2015) with campus cultures steeped in Whiteness where being White is implicitly constructed as the norm (Allen et al., 1991; Dache-Gerbino & White, 2016). Despite the dominance of Whiteness on historically White campuses, Black students find moments and spaces to come together—sometimes only for hour-long meetings—and create Black places. I know this to be true from my experience as an undergraduate at Brown University. Beautiful moments of Black congregation sometimes happened organically. These moments were special, partly because they were few and far between. At Brown and other universities with marginal Black populations, moments of Black congregation are often orchestrated and facilitated by students, themselves (Gilkes Borr, 2019). During my time at Brown, Black students used the Harambee House as a vehicle for Black congregation.

In 2009, Brown threatened to revoke the status of Harambee as the official residence hall for students interested in Black culture. Eleven students, far below the minimum required to maintain program house status, initially planned on living in Harambee. I was part of the wave of students who rushed to commit to living in Harambee in order to maintain the house’s status. Again, in 2013, Harambee was in danger of losing its status (Nickens, 2014). Again, Black students organized to maintain Harambee’s status. Were it not for students’ agency and valuation of Black places, Brown would be without a Black-affinity residence hall and a mainstay of the Black student community. I include this reflection to suggest that Black places and lively Black communities at HWIs are not a given.

How do students co-create and maintain Black places? Why are Black places, and the people who make them, important in shaping the lives of Black students? I suggest that Black placemaking (Hunter et al., 2016), a sociological framework, usefully engages with such questions in ways that might provide novel and rich insight to campus life and experiences of Black collegians. Black placemaking is defined as “the ways that urban Black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance” (Hunter et al., 2016, p. 31). As such, the purpose of this essay is:

To make a case for why a Black placemaking framework can serve as a useful analytical tool to understand, interpret, and classify Black student experiences, especially at HWIs.

To outline how a Black placemaking approach—an approach centered upon how Black people create places of their own—can be used to study Black students’ experiences.

By studying the creation of Black places, I argue that this framework has the analytic potential to more expansively study the lives, experiences, and mechanisms of engagement of Black students without discounting realities of oppression.

I draw upon original data from an ethnography I conducted at an HWI as well as research on Black students in higher education in order to (1) illustrate limitations and tensions in conventional frameworks used to study Black college life and (2) make sense of how Black placemaking can be applied in the HWI context. To be clear, the purpose of this essay is to advance the theory of Black placemaking in higher education research. The empirical data I hearken to is in service of this goal, providing brief, concrete, examples of the beginnings of a Black placemaking analysis. In what follows, I outline the significance of this work before describing the theoretical roots and propositions of Black placemaking as outlined by Hunter et al. (2016). I then begin theorizing a Black placemaking approach for higher education. I conclude with three short examples of how one might approach a Black placemaking analysis using data points from my ethnography.

Outlining the Significance of the Essay

A Black placemaking framework, originally used to study Black life in Chicago, has the analytic flexibility to study Black students across education levels as well as in various higher education contexts. As suggested by Hunter et al. (2016), Black placemaking might be applied to any setting where Black people are present and congregate to create communities, places, and events for themselves. In this paper, I only describe its potential usefulness in the unique HWI context.

Studying Black collegians’ experiences at HWIs in new ways is of vital importance. Given the enduring legacies of white supremacy (e.g., Dancy et al., 2018; Patton, 2016; Wilder, 2014) and the relatively small Black representation at HWIs in particular, Black students’ campus experiences are uniquely racialized (e.g., Brooms, 2016; Gilkes Borr, 2019; Harper et al., 2018). Because of inequitable educational experiences and outcomes of Black students at HWIs (e.g., Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Shapiro et al., 2018), scholars engage in much work studying Black student life. Research demonstrates the importance of a positive campus experience in a culturally engaging, racially affirming environment (e.g., Harper & Hurtado, 2007; Hurtado et al., 1998; Tierney, 1999). By learning more about Black students’ lives, higher education stakeholders can develop more culturally appropriate, pragmatic strategies to support Black collegians (Quaye et al., 2020).

A Black placemaking approach, I suggest, extends the analytic potential of research on Black student life at HWIs by engaging with two implicit assumptions evident in much of the research base: (1) Black communities are static and (2) Black students’ agency is best understood through a language of resistance. These assumptions, as I show later, limit our understanding of Black campus life. Black placemaking, however, provides tools to better engage with and understand the expansiveness of Black student life, the dynamism of Black communities, and the agency of Black collegians. Further, by exploring how Black students create and sustain communities, stakeholders will be better equipped to create transformative changes in higher education. From a Black placemaking analysis, we might identify and create new campus structures that facilitate positive campus experiences for Black collegians. In a like manner, we might also identify and work against structures inhibiting a joyous, multifarious Black campus life.

This theoretical essay on Black placemaking’s potential utility in education will also join ongoing theoretical conversations concerning race, resistance, and agency within Urban Education (e.g., Solórzano & Bernal, 2001; Venzant Chambers & McCready, 2011). A Black placemaking approach might be employed as an alternative, complement, or critique of the underlying theoretical frameworks used to study Black students’ experiences at HWIs in this journal (e.g., Dancy et al., 2018; Patton, 2016). While primarily highlighting research at the nexus of K-12 education and urbanicity, Urban Education has also featured field-shaping scholarship in critical research on higher education (e.g., Dancy et al., 2018; Harper et al., 2018; Nicolazzo, 2017; Patton, 2016). I offer in this piece a new perspective in Black placemaking that might extend the work being done by the journal.

Introducing Black Placemaking

What is Black placemaking and what does higher education stand to gain from applying this framework? Scholars, across disciplines, have long studied Black places and communities (e.g., Anderson, 1999; Du Bois, 1899; McKittrick & Woods, 2007). Adopting different frameworks and methods, the study of Black places certainly is not new. Building upon the work of scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and Zora Neale Hurston, Black placemaking provides a useful framework to study Black life.

Four Black scholars of sociology and/or Black studies—Marcus Anthony Hunter, Mary Pattillo, Zandria F. Robinson, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor—introduced the Black placemaking framework (2016). The authors argue that social science research primarily casts Black people in urban settings narrowly as victims, centering on “accounts that depict urban Blacks as bounded, plagued by violence, victims and perpetrators, unproductive, and isolated from one another and the city writ large” (Hunter et al., 2016, p. 31). Black placemaking offers a corrective to one-dimensional depictions of Black people solely as victims without agency and multifaceted lives. They introduce their argument with words from the anthropologist and novelist, Zora Neale Hurston,

Negroes love and hate and fight and play and strive and travel and have a thousand and one interests in life like other humans. When his baby cuts a new tooth, he brags as shamelessly as anyone else without once weeping over the prospect of some Klansman knocking it out if and when the child ever gets grown. (1990/1938, p. 24 as cited by Hunter et al., 31–32).

The devastating reach of racism is a fact. Black life, however, is still life. Black people, either because or in spite of their positions, have interests, goals, and dynamic lives. Despite the multifaceted nature of Black life and communities, Hunter et al. (2016) show that research on Black people often centers the figurative and literal Klansman referred to by Hurston. A similar trend, as I show later, exists in higher education research on Black students at HWIs. Without discounting structural oppression from the outside and oppression and alienation inside the Black community, the authors use Chicago as a case study to illustrate how Black placemaking analyzes the process of Black people creating and maintaining sites of belonging, happiness, and life with other Black people.

Through Black placemaking, scholars highlight how Black people in urban settings use their collective agency to reshape the same structures created to restrict them. In the process of living in hostile or oppressive environments, Black people adopt strategies “independently of, in anticipation of, and in response to racist policies to shape their neighborhoods, outcomes, and experiences” (Hunter & Robinson, 2016, p. 397). In this manner, Black placemaking takes seriously the mutually constitutive nature of structure and agency and is attuned to studying Black life without falling into the trap of over-emphasizing structure or free-will.

In the next section I define the taken for granted, yet central, term “place,” followed by a description of how Hunter et al. (2016) theorized Black placemaking to study urban Black Chicagoans. I then show what a Black placemaking analysis is comprised of and what the framework can potentially achieve in higher education.

What Is a Place?

In education research, a space or place might be understood as a site or context of a study. “Space” and “place,” however, are contested terms (e.g., Gieryn, 2000; Tuan, 1977). My aim, however, is not to wade into the fray of ideological debates of defining space and place. Acknowledging the depth of the concepts, I only provide a brief definition of how I understand “place” in a Black placemaking approach. Spaces and places are different. Spaces are measurable in objective terms of distance, size, or volume, holding an a priori status (Casey, 1996). Hunter and colleagues cite the sociologist Gieryn (2000), in defining place: “A spot in the universe becomes a place only when it ensconces history or utopia, danger or security, identity or memory” (as cited in Hunter et al., 2016, p. 32). A place, according to Gieryn (2000), is a “space filled up by people, practices, objects, and representations” (p. 465). For the purposes of this paper, I understand place in the same manner.

Black Placemaking at Work

Black placemaking examines how Black people turn spaces into places and urban residents’ capacity to shape their otherwise oppressive environments into sites of celebration, politics, and play (Hunter et al., 2016, p. 34). Placemaking is the process by which people fashion the spaces they occupy into places where they feel at home. In what follows, I highlight five core assumptions within a Black placemaking approach.

First, Black placemaking assumes that Black people are competent, which is an assumption not always afforded to Black people in urban locales, yet integral to studying agency. Consider, for example, the legacy of research pathologizing Black urban communities, and Black culture more broadly, as deficient and inferior (e.g., Moynihan, 1965). Second, Black placemaking draws from the concepts of linked fate (Dawson, 1995) and secondary marginalization (Cohen, 1999), while also engaging with the tension between the two notions. In other words, while linked fate puts forth the idea that Black people’s outcomes are politically bound together, Black placemaking also analyzes forces such as sexism, classism, and transphobia that occur within Black places. Next, Black placemaking assumes Black social worlds worthy of study often arise from structural racism. For example, residential segregation, while powered by racist structures, can shape unique sites of gathering, creativity, and political consciousness for Black people living within these constraints (Hunter et al., 2016). Lastly, Black placemaking aims to make sense of the agency of Black people in urban locales.

Understanding agency

A Black placemaking analysis recognizes the interplay between structure and agency in the study of Black urban life. Black placemaking, for example, neither discounts research examining the wide-reaching stretch of racism in urban communities nor suggests scholars undertake less research focusing on racism and its ills. Such research provides a necessary backdrop to Black placemaking. In studying the structures of racist policies, violence, and systemic disenfranchisement, agency is often studied less, but not without good reason. The conservative impulse to de-emphasize structures and cite Black culture or individual practices as causes for racial disparities leads to a-contextual, deficit- interpretations of Black peoples’ social standing that race scholars continue to fight (e.g., Solórzano, 1997). As a result, one mode of battling deficit, blame-the-victim narratives, is demonstrating the role of racist structures in Black life. Given the political expediency of battling deficit-narratives, less research centers on Black agency.

This framework challenges readers, asking, is Black social life in the city wholly a reaction to racism, urban poverty, and deindustrialization? Studying Black agency in the midst of racist structures requires a nuanced framing of Black life that Black placemaking can provide. Black placemaking walks the theoretical tightrope of studying agency without discounting structure or over-emphasizing free-will, engaging with the structural constraints and the lives, cultures, and worlds Black people make because or in spite of constraints. The primary goal of a Black placemaking analysis is not to solely illustrate the devastating impact of racism. Rather, the goal is to examine and analyze Black places that exist in otherwise constricting environments. Black placemaking finds the lives, structures, organizations, traditions, and practices that occur in Black places as sociologically interesting and necessary to highlight. Through Black placemaking, scholars might “analyze and recover the agency of urban Black folks often lost in conventional perspectives” (Hunter et al., 2016, p. 35).

Using Black placemaking to study urban residents

Hunter et al. (2016) use an urban intensive context (see Milner, 2012), Chicago, as a unifying case to provide examples of Black placemaking in practice. Examining a gay club, a Facebook group of once-residents of a housing project, little league baseball team, and Black Twitter—the authors, without disregarding structural oppression, provide examples of Black Chicagoans’ agency, heterogeneity, and at base, humanity.

Through a lens of Black placemaking, Black people’s social worlds, wherever they might be, are taken seriously as sociological objects of analysis, providing rich data in often underexplored aspects of Black life. In one example, the authors show how a gay woman, within the context of “marginality, unemployment, and single-motherhood” found social support, friendship, and baby-sitters all in a site of merry-making (Hunter et al., 2016, p. 37). The authors use a Black placemaking analysis to show how Black queer Chicagoans made this club a place of social support, capital, and celebration.

The authors also use a Black placemaking approach to analyze an all-Black Little League Baseball team from the South Side of Chicago and their historic national championship win. While mainstream media constructed a pathological narrative of exceptional Black urban youth beating the odds of deprivation and poverty, a Black placemaking analysis told a different story, more true to reality. The authors challenge the “against all odds” narrative pushed by the media by questioning deeper theoretical assumptions, asking what might happen if we assume that the little league team won the championship “. . .because of their relationship to their communities on the South Side, not in spite of them?” (Hunter at al., 2016, p. 44). The truth, the authors show, ran counter to the deficit narrative pushed by the media. In addition to being comprised of boys coming from various socioeconomic backgrounds, the team’s rise was a product of a rich, historical tradition of Black baseball in the South Side of Chicago.

Through Black placemaking, Hunter et al. (2016) studied these Black social worlds within the larger context of South Side Chicago. In both examples, Black people are understood as a diverse group. Further, they were able to examine how spaces, albeit in different ways, became Black places through the effort of Black Chicagoans. In doing so, the authors demonstrate how Black people exert collective agency in sites that might otherwise go unobserved.

Black Placemaking’s Potential for Higher Education Research

Black placemaking gives analytic primacy to Black places. Du Bois (1899) described the Black community in Philadelphia as a dynamic “city within a city” (as cited by Hunter & Robinson, 2016, p. 389). Similar to studying Black urban locales as cities within cities, Black placemaking compels scholars to explore Black campus communities within the larger campus community. Black social worlds, or places, on HWIs, for example, might include student groups, Black Greek Letter Organizations (BGLOs), digital spaces, or, more generally, the Black community on campus. A Black placemaking approach in higher education acknowledges the permanence of racism on campus (Bell, 1992) while also attempting to make sense of Black students’ collective agency. Given the importance of community and belonging for Black students’ educational experiences and outcomes (e.g., Brooms, 2016), Black places at HWIs can be useful sites of study to better understand topics such as campus racial climates, student engagement, and persistence. To be sure, a Black placemaking approach might be used to study Black students in other higher education contexts such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (see Allen, 2020). In this paper, however, I specifically apply Black placemaking to the HWI context.

Based on the core assumptions of Black placemaking, a Black placemaking analysis in higher education does five things:

Identifies Black places on campus as dynamic and rich sites of study.

Examines the labor of stakeholders to create and sustain Black places on campus.

Analyzes how Black students co-create Black places to meet their needs and desires.

Investigates the inner workings, politics, practices, and organizational structures of Black places on campus.

Highlights the diversity within Blackness and marginalized identities within Black places.

With these five propositions, I aim to contribute to both the growing body of literature on Black placemaking as well as the sociological study of higher education. In what follows, I use these propositions to highlight relevant trends and tensions in the study of Black student life at HWIs to show this framework’s usefulness.

Trends in The Study of Black Student Life at HWIs

Racism is a structuring force in society, playing a central role in societal oppression and marginalization (Bell, 1992). The same holds true for college campuses. While no space is immune from racism, Black students’ experiences are especially negative at HWIs. Black students at HWIs, for example, report higher levels of minority-related stress than their counterparts attending Historically Black Colleges and Universities, suggesting a unique, racialized experience for Black students attending HWIs (e.g., Fleming, 1985; Smith et al., 2016). More than any other race, Black students report the highest incidences of feeling discriminated against (Harper & Hurtado, 2007). Black students’ negative perceptions of campus racial climates, or race relations on campuses, is a perennial issue for Black students enrolled in HWIs (Smith et al., 2002; Walsh, 2018).

The need to study how racism influences and shapes Black students’ experiences at HWIs is clear. Black students continue to protest inequitable conditions and experiences on campus (Racial Tension and Protests on Campuses Across the Country, 2015). Black students are racially profiled on their own campuses (Takei, 2018). Black students lag behind most of their non-Black peers in graduation rates (Musu-Gillette et al., 2016). All too often, media outlets report incidents of students and professors using the n-word and engaging in vulgar shows of racism (Bauer-Wolf, 2019). Further, universities continue to grapple with racist histories and legacies of profiting from chattel slavery (Neuman, 2017). Simply put, racism, and anti-black racism in particular, is cemented in the structure of college campuses.

From micro to macroaggressions (e.g., Garcia & Johnston-Guerrero, 2015; Pérez Huber & Solorzano, 2015) and the subsequent fatigue of experiencing a negative campus racial climate (Smith et al., 2016), scholars, with increasing precision, examine the manifestations of racism on campus. Education scholars, for at least two decades, continue to define with greater nuance how Black students experience racism and hostile racist climates (e.g., Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Patton, 2016). Such work is critical to understanding how to better support Black students. Research analyzing and highlighting the violent, expansive force of racism on campus remains important.

While racism is overarching and undoubtedly impactful, are Black students’ campus lives reducible to responses to racism? Black placemaking, I suggest, provides a useful answer. In what follows, I draw from scholarship concerning Black students’ experiences and my own research at an HWI located in an urban intensive context, Southside University². I highlight two questions surrounding tensions present in the research on Black students’ experiences at HWIs and in my research. Black placemaking has the potential to engage these tensions in fruitful, novel ways to more expansively study Black student life.

Are Black Places and Communities Given A Priori Status?

I spoke with a colleague about the potential of the Black placemaking framework in higher education. Based on my cursory explanation, he was unsure of what this lens could add to what research has already conveyed, saying, “But we know where the Black places are on campus, right?” We collectively listed what might be understood as a Black place, including Black affinity residence halls, Black Student Unions, Black Studies departments, Black cultural centers, Black Greek letter organizations and their events, and church services. He was right—research certainly refers to or examines Black places and their benefits for Black students at HWIs (e.g., Guiffrida, 2003; Harper & Quaye, 2007; Patton, 2006). Less work, however, examines how Black places and communities are made, re-made, and maintained.

Scholars implicitly construct the Black community and Black places at HWIs as static objects. Consider two examples from my research on Black engineering students at Southside University (SU). I learned from an administrator that the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) at SU was defunct only 5 years before I began data collection for my ethnography. I learned that a Black undergraduate woman in engineering at SU spearheaded the effort to reinstate NSBE and recruited fellow Black engineers to join the chapter. Through her foundational labor and the cooperation of other Black students, SU’s NSBE chapter was thriving upon the beginning of my study. Black placemaking can be used to usefully analyze the dynamic and shifting nature of Black campus communities.

Prior research on Black student life has little to say about such examples of the complexities of Black places. While research examines Black student leaders (e.g., Harper & Quaye, 2007), little work squarely focuses on the labor of students in creating and maintaining student organizations and places. Similarly, while the “Black community” is often referred to, rarely is it studied. Research tends to examine how students make use of, benefit from, and understand Black places. Yet, as evidenced, Black organizations such as NSBE, are not a given on college campuses. We know how such organizations shape Black students’ racial identity, leadership development, and how Black students benefit from such places (e.g., Griffin & McIntosh, 2015; Harper & Quaye, 2007; Museus, 2008). Yet, Black organizations and places are constructed as if they act upon students. Without the labor, intentionality, and creativity of specific actors on campus, however, such places do not exist.

Foster (2003) diverges from dominant conceptions of Black student life and culture that construct Black communities “as pre-existent pathological entities” (p. 266). Drawing from his experience studying Black students at an HWI, he argued that competent student life programming, campus policies, and research is hinged upon learning more about the creation and maintenance of Black communities on campuses. In another example, Gilkes Borr (2019) studied Black homophily (finding other Black people) on a predominantly White campus, documenting the intentionality and effort Black students put into forming same-race friendships. Gilkes Borr notes that same-race interactions are rarely studied, perhaps because of an incorrect assumption that same-race interactions are a given and will organically occur without institutional support. She argues, “It is illogical to presume that Black friendships form easily and effortlessly for Black students when Black students are a minority. This assumption obscures the effort that Black students make to find same-race peers” (Gilkes Borr, 2019, p. 324). Black placemaking operates with a similar logic as these authors’ lines of thinking, understanding and engaging with Black places and communities as dynamic entities that require (re)making.

Black placemaking provides the theoretical tools to engage in the dynamic nature of Black campus communities and places. In Hunter et al.’s (2016) work, Black placemaking privileges the urban setting and how Black Chicagoans actively create social worlds “however ephemeral they may be” (p. 32). The same focus on the creation of Black social worlds, however, could fruitfully be applied to higher education research. When Black places are unhinged from the a priori status often ascribed to them in literature, a host of novel lines of inquiry emerge. For example, scholars might examine the labor students and staff exert to maintain Black places, the policies that facilitate or inhibit healthy functioning of Black places, or the inner workings and organizational cultures within Black student organizations.

Are Black Students’ Resistance, Agency, and Humanity One in the Same?

Across the social sciences, scholars wrestle with the linked concepts of agency, resistance, and humanity (e.g., Coffey & Farrugia, 2014; Frank, 2006). Analyzing these concepts in relation to Black life is perhaps even more complex given the legacy of chattel slavery and the structuring force of racism (Johnson, 2003; Young, 1999). The study of Black student life is not exempt from wrestling with agency. Agency, in much of the approaches to studying Black life, is often acknowledged, but rarely is agency studied or theorized beyond resistance. Critical Race Theory (CRT), for example, continues to highlight how racism and white supremacy on campus shapes Black students’ experiences (e.g., Patton, 2016). In an effort to highlight and combat dehumanizing structures and practices of higher education, CRT necessarily centers racism in analyses. Perhaps the most thorough treatment of agency in CRT in education is the transformational resistance framework (Solórzano & Bernal, 2001). Through this framework, agency is understood along a spectrum of resistance.

Resistance is the dominant framework in understanding Black life (see Quashie, 2012) and is integral to frameworks and concepts used to study Black students’ experiences in higher education. Counterspaces, for example, are “sites where deficit notions of people of color can be challenged and where a positive climate can be established and maintained” (Solórzano et al., 2000, p. 70). Counterspaces are understood as sites of collective resistance and counter to dominant White spaces. Black placemaking, as I describe further in the next section, can be used as a supplement to the concept of counterspaces, equipped with tools to analyze how counterspaces are made and remade by students and other campus stakeholders. Another useful concept is Venzant Chambers and McCready’s (2011) “making space.” Making space, as a concept, is “meant to capture the social, cultural, geographical, and psychological dynamics of a strategy African American students can employ to respond to and/or cope with their marginalization” (Venzant Chambers & McCready, 2011, p. 1356). Drawing from their experiences studying Black high school students in an urban setting who were tracked into a low academic pathway as well as gay and gender nonconforming Black male students, the authors showed how participants responded to their marginalization by making space. Venzant and McCready (2011) highlight how students at one high school in the low-track classes would congregate on a second floor stairwell before class, in between courses, and after school. The notion of making space pushes scholars to engage with Black youth’s agency and resistance in more nuanced ways. While certainly not a weakness, resistance is at the center of both the “making space” and counterspace concepts. Without alternative, supplementary frameworks, “resistance” as Quashie (2012) points out, “becomes the lingua franca of Black culture” (p. 21).

Indeed, challenging racism requires facing racism. The aforementioned concepts—making space and counterspaces—however, have less to say about Black students’ agency or humanity outside of resistance. Much work concerning Black students, necessarily, centers on anti-black racism. Higher education research stands to continue benefitting from CRT and other frameworks analyzing and challenging various manifestations of racism as well as antiblackness. To be clear, antiblackness is not simply racism directed towards Black people. Rather, antiblackness can be understood as the “broader antagonistic relationship between blackness and (the possibility of) humanity” (Dumas & Ross, 2016, p. 429). While the study of antiblackness is interdisciplinary, BlackCrit (Dumas & Ross, 2016) provides among the most incisive theoretical tools to study antiblackness in education. Drawing from CRT and Afropessimism—a theoretical approach for the study of antiblackness, history, and culture (Weddington, 2019)—Dumas and Ross (2016) conceptualized BlackCrit to provide theoretical tools to analyze antiblackness in education and, in part, to offer a “more robust theorizing of exactly what Black students are resisting” (p. 434). I find theories of antiblackness useful in analyzing the devastating structures, histories, and violence engendering Black suffering. Such theoretical approaches, however, are not built to analyze Black students’ agency and social lives.

Theories of antiblackness, for example, are unique from a Black placemaking approach and built with different purposes. Scholars working within Afropessimist traditions, for example, would be suspicious of the potential of Black people to create places on White campuses, flex agency, or engage in a full social life (e.g., Dumas, 2016; Sexton, 2011). Afropessimist work is also preoccupied with questions distinct from a Black placemaking approach. Afropessimism is invested in examining the structural position of Blackness and the violence of antiblackness (e.g., Dumas, 2016; Weddington, 2019). Black placemaking, rather, investigates the interplay between Black agency and otherwise oppressive structures. Further, Black placemaking is preoccupied with exploring manifestations of Black social life, wherever, and in whatever fashion, it may be. Drawing from theories of antiblackness, Dancy et al. (2018) deftly bring to light the institutionalization of Black suffering in higher education. A Black placemaking framework, does not deny structural realities or Black suffering. Rather, a Black placemaking approach has a different goal; to center Black places and Black peoples’ collective agency and lives they create in spite of structurally oppressive conditions.

It is worth noting that a tension exists between frameworks geared toward studying antiblackness and Black placemaking. Theories of antiblackness, such as Afropessimism and BlackCrit, suggest that Black people experience “social death” and are thereby “denied humanity and thus ineligible for full citizenship and regard within the polity” (Dumas, 2016, p. 12). As such, theories of antiblackness hold that Black people are “dispossessed of human agency, desire, and freedom” (Dumas, 2016, p. 13). One might suggest that the primary objects of Black placemaking analyses—Black social lives and collective agency—are rendered an impossibility in theorizing antiblackness. This tension is not new. Sexton (2011), an Afropessimist scholar, for example, explored the related, albeit larger, tension between “Black social life” and “social death.” Sexton (2011) suggested that the two concepts are not in opposition as an either/or. Rather, the concepts might usefully be considered a both/and—as supplements. Exploring such tensions may lead to more robust theoretical advancements in studying Black students’ experiences. While a theoretical discourse between theories centering antiblackness and theories centering Black life and agency (e.g., Black placemaking) is sorely needed in education, that is out of scope of the present paper.

The study of Black life requires different theories with different goals. As mentioned, undertaking a Black placemaking approach is possible because of the tireless effort of scholars identifying and decrying racism and antiblackness in education. Black placemaking in higher education, however, provides a theoretical toolkit attuned to Black collegians’ agency and humanity. The roots of Black placemaking, originally created by urban sociologists, undergird how Black placemaking is attuned to Black life. Hunter et al. (2016), note that “. . .social science scholarship on Black urban communities. . .so rarely captures the life that happens within them, and thus the matter of Black people’s humanity” (p.32). Research centered on antiblackness in urban contexts, for example, may focus on the “gentrification of historic Black urban homeplaces” and resultant Black suffering (Dumas, 2016, p. 15). While many Black urban residents indeed live in racist, oppressive environments, their lives are not wholly responses to oppression or gentrification. A Black placemaking framework analyzes how Black people in urban contexts shape otherwise oppressive urban geographies into sites of pleasure, celebration, politics, play, and life (Hunter et al., 2016). The same approach can be used to study Black students attending HWIs.

Black students are more than the manner in which they cope with a hostile racial climate. Mustaffa (2017), in his articulation of the history of anti-black violence and higher education, for example, reminds scholars, that “those committed to freedom for Black people must know that no site of oppression completely silences Black life” (p. 725). His point is salient in a scanning of the research of Black students attending HWIs. Black life on campus, after all, is more than resistance to racism, more than protests, more than coping with tokenism, and more than the structural position of Blackness. Despite the permanence of racism (Bell, 1992), Black life is also house parties, grabbing lunch with friends, and studying all-night during finals. By only focusing on the negative, racialized experiences of Black students, we inadvertently make students one-dimensional. To better understand the totality of Black student life, from the protests to the step-shows, from the the microaggressions to the Black parties, and from the fantastic to the mundane, scholars must make use of a variety of frameworks. Black placemaking, I suggest, is a useful addition to the expanding list of frameworks scholars might use to examine the dynamic nature of Black life.

Applying Black Placemaking to Higher Education: Vignettes From Southside University

I have described the five propositions of Black placemaking and described trends in the study of Black life at HWIs, touching on where this framework might add to and complicate existing work. To further explicate the potential of a Black placemaking approach in higher education, I provide three short vignettes based on fieldwork I conducted at Southside University (SU). Derived from a larger study, I include these vignettes, solely to begin to concretize a Black placemaking approach in an HWI setting. In order to contextualize the data I draw from, however, I first provide a short description of my larger project at SU. In what follows, after each vignette, I show how a conventional analysis might make sense of the data point. Then, I demonstrate how a Black placemaking analysis offers different, nuanced insights of the same example.

An Ethnography at Southside University: In Brief

I conducted a year-long ethnography about campus life for Black engineering majors at SU, a selective HWI in an urban intensive context. At the time of the study, Black engineers comprised 3% of the school of engineering and 6% of the SU undergraduate population. Two questions guided my research at SU. (1) How do Black engineering students at SU experience the campus racial climate? (2) How, and by what mechanisms, do Black engineering students foster a sense of engagement at SU? My goal in the larger project was to examine Black engineering students’ lives to learn about Black student engagement and life at an HWI.

SU’s National Society for Black Engineers (NSBE) chapter served as an entry point for recruitment and building rapport. With NSBE student leaders’ permission, I became an unofficial member. I attended NSBE meetings, shadowed students, studied with them, and helped out with NSBE events. Through NSBE, I interviewed over 40 SU Black engineering undergraduates and conducted over 150 hr of participant observation. While Critical Race Theory (CRT) propelled my larger project at SU, I noticed theoretical tensions both in my research and in literature about Black students’ agency and community-building, which led to my interest in Black placemaking.

CRT arose in response to legal scholarship’s failure to engage with the central role of racism in structural oppression and inequality (Crenshaw et al., 1995). CRT has since made waves in education broadly (Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995) and continues to shape the study of race/racism in higher education (e.g., Patton, 2016). CRT scholars in education often employ five tenets: (1) centering racism and its intersection with other forms of oppression (e.g., sexism), (2) challenging dominant ideology, (3) fighting for social justice, (4) valuing the experiential knowledge from People of Color, and (5) adopting an interdisciplinary approach (Solórzano, 1997). Increasing research employs CRT in higher education to center the voices of Black students at HWIs, especially in learning how racism shapes their campus experiences (e.g., Patton, 2016). Given my interest in the campus racial climate at SU, I found CRT a logical framework to explore the racialized realities of Black students at HWIs. Yet, in order to learn more about students’ lives, inclusive of but also beyond their experiences with racism, I found Black placemaking a useful supplement. In what follows, I introduce the first vignette based on fieldnotes from my SU study followed by a description of how CRT and other conventional analyses of race in higher education might make sense of similar data.

Black Parties On/Off Campus

During data collection, I noted advertisements for Black parties held by the Habesha student organization, the Pan African Student Association, and other Black affinity groups. Students posted flyers for parties in the Black SU GroupMe mobile messaging app, on Twitter, and on Instagram pages. I attended two parties held by SU Black engineers held during data collection. Their annual party was called Brown Sugar—an allusion to the classic film and the overly sweet drink they concocted for guests. While I did not ask, one might also assume that the name had something to do with the race of the party throwers. The party was a month in the making. Black engineering majors worked on securing a venue, creating flyer designs that the Black engineers approved of, advertising, deciding how much the entrance fee would be, and managing responsibilities and tasks for the party. They decided on a fellow NSBE member’s house, located in the vicinity of SU, to hold the party. The DJ at Brown Sugar, a Black SU engineering major himself, played predominantly hip hop music. The party was understood by participants as a “Black party.” In addition to fundraising for NSBE activities, Brown Sugar was, for some of the Black engineers, the only party they attended during the academic year.

Conventional analysis

What does a Black party on a historically White campus mean to the education scholar? Is the party worthy of study and how might we understand Black parties? Scholars have used CRT to usefully study racially-themed campus parties held by non-Black students, highlighting how such parties are both implicitly and explicitly racist (Garcia et al., 2011). Black parties are also referred to tangentially in some higher education research (e.g., Solórzano et al., 2000). Guiffrida (2003) usefully identified how Black students distinguished a Black party from a White party on campus, explaining, “Dancing to ‘good’ music, meaning hip-hop, rhythm and blues, and reggae, was described as the emphasis at a typical Black party” (p. 312). Beyond such examples, however, Black parties or sites of Black joy and merriment at HWIs are largely unobserved by the education scholar’s eye.

Black placemaking analysis

Black placemaking averts our analytic gaze to the often racially homogenous, Black parties. This is not a simple suggestion to study parties with Black partygoers. Rather, my point here is that certain aspects of Black student life might be overlooked or understudied with prevailing frameworks centering on resistance. Recall the propositions I offered of Black placemaking in higher education. First, Black placemaking finds in Black parties rich sites of study to potentially learn more about student engagement, sense of belonging, and campus racial climates. Second, Black placemaking identifies students’ labor, creativity, and thereby agency, in making this party happen. For example, scholars might examine how students use social media to advertise and which Black students learn about such activities. Scholars continue to highlight the heterogeneity within Blackness, especially Black students’ different ethnic identities (Mwangi & Fries–Britt, 2015). This analysis engages with the diversity of Blackness, perhaps even challenging the broad identification of “Black party,” pointing to the Black parties affiliated with various ethnicities. A Black placemaking scholar might examine how Black students’ ethnic identities shape how they have fun on campus.

Black placemaking engages with place, structures, and oppressive conditions. One might wonder, for example, why the students held the party at a house as opposed to a venue on campus. The relationship between Black collegians and how they use off-campus sites in an urban context to meet their social needs also comes to fore in a Black placemaking analysis. One might also wonder if SU makes it more difficult for Black students to hold parties. By engaging with such a question, the scholar learns how campus structures shape Black students’ experiences and sites of joy. Black parties or other Black places are not somehow exempt from racism. Black placemaking allows one to take account of the joy inside the party but also racist institutional policing and surveillance that often plagues and confines Black events. Despite the force of anti-black racism, Black placemaking averts the scholars’ gaze to Black places, even parties, as potentially critical to the sense of belonging, attachment, and at base, joy, of Black students.

Black Student Union and National Society of Black Engineers Elections

I observed election procedures for the executive boards of two Black student organizations at SU—the Black Student Union (BSU) and the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) chapter. The BSU election occurred 1 week prior to the NSBE election. Before introducing the candidates, the outgoing BSU president, reminded the candidates to say their gender pronouns before making their speech. Students did not mention their pronouns at the NSBE election. Black women were the outgoing presidents of both organizations. Similarly, only Black women were running for the incoming president positions for both organizations. Less than a fourth of the 28 students at the BSU election were men. I recalled as I listened to the speeches that a member of NSBE suggested that BSU was more of a “women’s group.” One of the few men present at the BSU election, a member of the African Student Organization at SU, posed a question to the candidates saying, “There’s a sizable portion of students that don’t feel like BSU represents them. What do you all think about that?”

One Black engineer, confided in me that the NSBE election felt like more of a popularity contest and that the president is tapped as a first year. The NSBE election—including the candidates’ speeches and voting—lasted over 2 hr. From surprise candidates, vote re-counts, moving speeches, and nervous looks shared between the outgoing executive board caused by unexpected victories, the night was rife with drama, life, and a passion for serving SU’s NSBE chapter. One student, who unsuccessfully ran for two different positions before finally winning the vote for a third position, was on the verge of tears at the end of the meeting. “So how are you feeling, Tyler?” another member asked her. “I’m just happy I got something, man,” she replied. “No,” the other member said while putting his hand on her arm, “but how are you?” They walked out of the room where the elections were held.

Conventional analysis

Conventional scholarly perspectives make mention of both organizations. Scholars, for example, often refer to the value of NSBE as a vehicle for engagement and belonging on campus (Frierson & Tate, 2011; Harper, 2010) and use NSBE as a site of recruitment for studies on Black engineering majors’ experiences at HWIs (e.g., Lane, 2016; McGee & Martin, 2011). Less often, however, do scholars place their focus squarely on NSBE chapters. Researchers address BSUs in a similar manner. BSUs function on HWIs nationwide and are among the oldest Black student organizations (Kinchen, 2014). Despite their prominence on campuses, education literature has little to say of their role on campus and in Black students’ lives. Scholars examine how students benefit from or use BSUs and ethnic student organizations (e.g., Guiffrida, 2003; Harper & Quaye, 2007; Kelly et al., 2019) rather than examining them as dynamic places co-created by students. Conventional approaches to analyzing student organizations such as BSU and NSBE, I suggest, are just scratching the surface of these Black places.

Black placemaking analysis

Appreciating and investigating the diversity within Black groups, Black placemaking asserts that NSBE and BSU—Black places on campus—are not a given and are not all the same. As Reyes (2018) showed in her study of Latinx organizations on campus, student groups have unique cultures shaped by institutional structures and the demographics and backgrounds of members. As such, a placemaking analysis attempts to make sense of how the unique engineering school structures shape the culture of NSBE.

One might analyze the speeches of students running for positions in BSU alone, and learn about the socialization of Black students’ politics, sense of engagement, campus climate, and BSU’s organizational culture. A Black placemaking analysis might also engage with the leadership and labor of Black women in leadership positions or dive into the groups’ cultures that led only one organization to include gender pronouns when introducing themselves. Building upon scholarship examining Black students’ multiple identities (Stewart, 2008), a scholar might also explore why some Black students do not feel like BSU represents them.

Tyler’s decision to run for three different positions is also worth noting. At the risk of embarrassment and discomfort, she continued to run for positions until she was elected. Beyond passion to help lead and serve NSBE, her experience highlights her agency. Her interaction with a fellow NSBE member demonstrates the care between members and, perhaps more simply, also serves as a reminder of Black students’ humanity. The NSBE and BSU elections provide insight to just how integral Black places are for many Black students’ experiences at HWIs.

The NSBE Spring Retreat

I joined NSBE for their spring retreat. The NSBE executive-board intentionally held the retreat on a Saturday. Their agenda was too extensive to occur on a weekday—between class and other engagements, the weekend was the only possible time to hold the event. The outgoing and incoming executive-board members were present. Using institutional funding and a reserved conference room in the engineering school, outgoing leadership shared the chapter’s organizational knowledge and expectations for the following year. Their agenda was wide ranging, discussing everything from securing funding from the school of engineering, fundraising, the rocky relationship between NSBE and the Black Student Union, and brainstorming how to ensure high participation in NSBE the following year. After the 3-hr retreat, we carpooled to play laser tag both as a team-building activity and just for good fun.

Conventional analysis

NSBE can be understood as a counterspace. In response to the challenges that Black students enrolled in HWIs face, Black students, faculty, and administrators create and use counterspaces as pathways to fostering a greater sense of student engagement and belonging (e.g., Patton, 2006; Solórzano et al., 2000; Strayhorn, 2012). Groups such as NSBE and the spaces they create are resistant in the anti-black, oppressive context typical of HWIs, but they are not resistant, or counter, “in essence” (Quashie, 2012, p. 24). In using a resistance-centered framework, scholars might miss the collective agency, political socialization, leadership, joy, and mechanisms of belonging that make counterspaces valuable.

Counterspaces are co-created by various people (Solórzano et al., 2000). While important exceptions exist (e.g., Harris & Patton, 2017; Patton, 2006), research rarely examines this process of co-creating and maintaining counterspaces. Black placemaking can be used to unhinge counterspaces from the a priori status often ascribed to them in research. In this manner, Black placemaking, serves as a complement, providing tools to analyze dynamic processes of sustaining counterespaces.

Black placemaking analysis

The NSBE executive board’s labor and creative agency to plan and direct a meaningful retreat comes to fore in a Black placemaking analysis. The transfer of institutional knowledge from the outgoing to the incoming NSBE leaders is an example of students’ active and intentional efforts to maintain Black places. The retreat also demonstrates the interplay between structure and agency. Partly because of the vast underrepresentation of Black engineering majors at SU, organizations like NSBE and events such as the retreat play an important role in Black engineering majors’ engagement and belonging. Despite marginal numbers—a structural problem—Black students made use of institutional structures, such as funding and spaces, on campus to meet their needs.

Research suggests that Black places such as NSBE and Black cultural centers are important because they are places for Black students to feel at home (e.g., Guiffrida, 2003; Patton, 2006). Such organizations, however, are not welcoming or nurturing by default—students intentionally make and remake groups to feel like home. A Black placemaking analysis highlights the specific processes students engage in to make NSBE critical for Black students. The student organization of NSBE is only made important by the students and their actions, practices, and labor. NSBE executive board members intentionally created an agenda and place to discuss expectations and transfer knowledge. In a like manner, they decided to partake in a leisure activity—laser tag—to bond, have fun, and get to know each other on a more personal level.

Of note, is the fact that they held the retreat on a Saturday. The collective agency of NSBE members and the tenuous status of Black places at HWIs is not missed upon a Black placemaking analysis. In order to sustain NSBE and ensure its longevity as the outgoing executive board took lesser roles or graduated, members opted to give up their time on a weekend. A placemaking analysis might further explore how students’ labor and energy directed to maintaining Black places such as NSBE shapes their campus experiences and multiple identities.

The Way Forward

Black places are not a given at HWIs. Black placemaking provides tools to identify the creative, collective, and agentic ways Black collegians engage in higher education and make places for themselves. Further, a Black placemaking analysis shows the critical role of Black places in Black collegians’ experiences. In what follows, I provide three questions that might shape future research informed by a Black placemaking approach in higher education.

(1) Where are the Black places of belonging, mattering, joy, and community?

Stakeholders might examine taken-for-granted and transient Black places on and off campuses, such as on-campus church services predominantly attended by Black students (e.g., McGuire, 2018). It is important for administrators and scholars to take Black places seriously, both as complex objects of analysis and as critical sites of engagement. Black Student Unions (BSUs) also serve as an example of an understudied object of analysis that is likely taken-for-granted in research and by higher education leaders. While BSUs are among the oldest functioning ethnic student organizations on HWIs, their role on campus is surprisingly under-investigated. Black placemaking can provide a useful lens to identify, appreciate, study, and support such Black social worlds on campus.

(2) Who labors to support/sustain Black places?

Through a Black placemaking analysis, one might examine the work necessary to upkeep Black places and who is participating in such labor. In addition to the labor of Black faculty and staff (e.g., Anthym & Tuitt, 2019), one might examine how students, themselves, organize to sustain Black places. Relatedly, scholars might examine how university policies and leadership shape the characteristics of Black places on campus. With Black placemaking in mind, scholars and university leaders might focus on what Black communities on campuses are doing in anticipation of, in conjunction with, or in response to institutional policies to shape their own university experiences. By examining the interplay between structure and Black collective agency, stakeholders might identify the extent to which university structures facilitate or inhibit a positive campus experience for Black collegians.

(3) How does Black placemaking look in different contexts by different stakeholders?

Black placemaking can be used to study different groups in different higher education contexts. In other words, Black undergraduates attending HWIs are not the only people who create Black places. One might employ this approach to examine how Black faculty, graduate students, and student affairs professionals create places for themselves and in conjunction with each other. Black placemaking is also sensitive to heterogeneity within the Black community. For example, a Black placemaking analysis could extend the important work about the experiences of Black queer students at HBCUs (e.g., Mobley & Johnson, 2019) by examining places Black queer students creatively sustain in nearly homogenously Black universities.

Black student life is complex and expansive, requiring frameworks across disciplines with different goals attuned to the dynamic nature of campus life. A Black placemaking framework, I suggest, will serve as an addition to the toolkit of theories higher education stakeholders might employ to understand and better support Black students. In this paper, I have made a case for how Black placemaking can offer a useful framework to study Black students’ experiences. I have also offered propositions for a Black placemaking approach specific to higher education that might guide scholars in future work. With a Black placemaking approach, scholars might find generative lines of research that are both novel and pragmatically useful in supporting Black students in higher education.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Antar A. Tichavakunda

Notes

Author Biography

Antar A. Tichavakunda is an assistant professor of Education at the University of Cincinnati. His research centers on equity. Tichavakunda uses qualitative inquiry to study the sociology of higher education and Black students’ experiences at historically white institutions.

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Studying Black Student Life on Campus: Toward a Theory of Black Placemaking in Higher Education

Abstract

Keywords

Outlining the Significance of the Essay

Introducing Black Placemaking

What Is a Place?

Black Placemaking at Work

Understanding agency

Using Black placemaking to study urban residents

Black Placemaking’s Potential for Higher Education Research

Trends in The Study of Black Student Life at HWIs

Are Black Places and Communities Given A Priori Status?

Are Black Students’ Resistance, Agency, and Humanity One in the Same?

Applying Black Placemaking to Higher Education: Vignettes From Southside University

An Ethnography at Southside University: In Brief

Black Parties On/Off Campus

Conventional analysis

Black placemaking analysis

Black Student Union and National Society of Black Engineers Elections

Conventional analysis

Black placemaking analysis

The NSBE Spring Retreat

Conventional analysis

Black placemaking analysis

The Way Forward

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author Biography

References