Ishara Casellas Connors
PUBLICATIONS
This qualitative research engages the theoretical framing of community cultural wealth (CCW) to consider the lived experiences of racially minoritized students within the geosciences. Through semi-structured interviews with 13 students at a research university, this research captures the diverse forms of capital students enacted to successfully navigate academic careers in the geosciences. The findings identify how a web of CCW is engaged as students work to access and succeed in the geosciences. The themes highlight the importance of rich familial and aspirational capital in accessing the geosciences and students' retention once enrolled. Further, how aspirational capital is coupled with an interest in the social justice potential of the geosciences.
This research engages 10 Equity Reports at public two-year and four-year HSIs in Florida. Through the lens of critical race theory and LatCrit, the analysis foregrounds patterns regarding institutional discourse, in response to state policy mandates, considering the intersection of HSI designation and institutional type. The findings illustrate how the Equity Reports decenter racial equity, reflect a sparse substantive mention of Latinx students, and only superficially engages with the HSIs designation. The findings expand the analysis of HSIs to a new sociopolitical context, providing a broader view of HSIs, and provide policymakers and implementers with tools to consider racial equity through DEI policy.
In the contemporary U.S. higher education marketplace, college and university mission statements are profiled on almost every institutional website. The extent to which higher education institution (HEI) mission statements reflect isomorphism, attempts at defining market position and similarly, whether they are primarily aspirational, platforms for strategic implementation and institutional meaning-making, or relevant to the experiences of minoritized students are areas of debate in the international literature. This paper applies quantitative textual analysis to the diversity statements of a subset of American HEIs: those employing a Chief Diversity Officer. We interrogate how concepts such as “race” and “racism” were named and framed by those same statements.
This research engages 10 Equity Reports at public two-year and four-year HSIs in Florida. Through the lens of critical race theory and LatCrit, the analysis foregrounds patterns regarding institutional discourse, in response to state policy mandates, considering the intersection of HSI designation and institutional type. The findings illustrate how the Equity Reports decenter racial equity, reflect a sparse substantive mention of Latinx students, and only superficially engages with the HSIs designation. The findings expand the analysis of HSIs to a new sociopolitical context, providing a broader view of HSIs, and provide policymakers and implementers with tools to consider racial equity through DEI policy.
STATE-BASED POLICY SUPPORTS FOR REFUGEE, ASYLEE, AND TPS-BACKGROUND STUDENTS IN US HIGHER EDUCATION.
Higher education for displaced students is rarely the focus of academic literature in the context of the United States, despite 79.5 million people displaced worldwide as of December 2019 and 3 million refugees resettled in the United States since the 1970s (UNHCR, 2020). An estimated 95,000 Afghans will be resettled in the US by September 2022, and the executive branch has requested $6.4 billion in funds from Congress to support this resettlement process (Young, 2021). This represents the most concentrated resettlement in the US since the end of the Vietnam War. It is therefore clear that policy supports for displaced students represent a pressing educational equity issue. This paper applies critical policy analysis to state-level policies supporting displaced students and argues that both data gaps and policy silence characterize the current state of play.
As racialized institutions, Hispanic-serving institutions educate large portions of racially minoritized students within organizational and policy structures that advance Whiteness. This research considers how the institution-level diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) plans, produced in response to state-level DEI policies in Florida, California, and New York, construct narratives of intersectional diversity and a racialized Latinx identity at Hispanic-serving community colleges (HSCCs). Engaging critical discourse analysis, drawing together critical race theory and LatCrit, the analysis expands the consideration of DEI policy implementation at HSCCs. The findings illustrate the interconnectedness of state-level policy, policy implementation guidance, and institution-level discourse related to defining intersectional diversity and demographic data. Furthermore, it captures a lack of attention to racial composition among Latinx students and the limited characterization of HSI status. This study highlights how the implementation of state-level DEI policies can advance or erase the considerations of intersectionality among Latinx students.
Seventy-four students from underrepresented groups portrayed their first-semester college experience through privately-shared, captioned Instagram photos elicited by text message prompts. Longitudinal study analysis investigates the feasibility of this innovative visual data collection method, characterises the content of photos, and compares visual evidence to audio-diary data from the same students. The method succeeded in revealing detailed longitudinal accounts of students’ transition into college. Descriptive captions allowed participants to interpret their own images without the need for interviews, centring power with the student rather than the researcher. As compared with photo elicitation, collecting captioned images offers a more manageable, cost-effective way of collecting longitudinal data from relatively large, geographically dispersed samples. High response rates suggest that a familiar social media format like Instagram is a good fit for young adults and a promising approach for recruiting and retaining low-income, first-generation, and racially underrepresented minority students in research studies.