Jon Syed Iftikar
Published: 2019
Total Pages: 0
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This dissertation is a conceptual study that engages with several of the dominant theoretical assumptions in the higher education literature on identity and race and introduces a racial subjection approach to theorizing and analyzing racial identity, racial interests, and racial inequities in the context of higher education. In contrast to the major traditional college student racial identity models in the field of higher education that emphasize the developmental aspects of racial identity, through a new racial identity formation model I demonstrate that racial identity is a non-linear, reiterated, and contested process that has important implications for student experiences and outcomes. I thus utilize postmodern approaches to identity that highlight fluidity, anti-essentialism, and performativity, yet I also account for the ways that identity formation is structured and constrained by drawing from cultural studies and critical theory insights on hegemony, ideology, and interpellation. In addition, I engage with critical race work on interest convergence by exploring and interrogating the relationship between racial interests and racial identities, and offer an alternative framework for analyzing the formation of racial interests. In broad strokes, I show how higher education is a site within the larger social formation where racial identities, interests, and inequities are recreated and reproduced, but also revised, reworked, and contested.