Student Vulnerabilities
Decolonizing “Cheap Labour and Good Business”: An Analysis of the Experiences of Racialized International Students and Settler Colonial Violence View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hijin Park
This paper draws on interviews with 45 racialized international students and 10 university employees who provide services to international students at a comprehensive university in Ontario, Canada, and examines the student’s experiences with discrimination and violence. While international students are often stereotyped as inordinately wealthy members of the global elite, many racialized international students in Canada are precarious and exploited students and workers. A growing body of scholarship on international student victimization reveals that racialized international students in the West are disproportionately vulnerable to discrimination and violence on and off university and college campuses, and in public and private spaces. This harm may be committed by landlords, employers, strangers, fellow international students, non-international student classmates, professors, and administrators and by members of their ethnic communities. Factors for this include visa and immigration requirements, unregulated homestay programs, unregulated tuition fees, and the intersections of racism, sexism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. Our research documents some of these harms and argues that this discrimination and violence is connected to the violence of settler colonialism. Drawing on critical race and decolonial perspectives on internationalization we focus on how coloniality produces the patterned migration of disenfranchised people from the Global South who are pushed to migrate to settler colonial countries that historically and in the contemporary context require a large pool of exploitable labour. We highlight how the settler colonial state -- through the governing of higher education -- advances and normalizes discrimination and the impact of these systems on racialized international students.
Exploring Retention Initiatives for Sustained Student Support for First-generation, Online BIPOC Students Beyond the First Semester: Amplifying the Positive Influence View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Angela Brown, Jennifer Butcher, Sandra Cleveland, Tana Palafox, La Keeta Prunty Keeta
This study explores and describes how institutional and community members can aid in the retention of minoritized undergraduate students at an online liberal arts private university through positively identified initiatives. The objectives of this study include investigating the unique cultural background of a specific group of minoritized students and how it influences their academic retention, what institutional, faculty, and family supports best support the retention of these minoritized students, and if the timing of such support plays a role. According to Rovai’s retention model, student characteristics, external factors such as finances and family responsibilities, and the institution's internal social and academic support significantly influence student retention. This study contributes to the literature surrounding the role of administration, institutional, and community members in combating minoritized online student attrition in higher education. A mixed methods approach is utilized with quantitative correlational analysis of surveys completed by the subject population and qualitative analysis of in-depth student interviews to identify themes of effective institutional and community support for student retention. Potential research limitations include a small sample size from one institution, time constraints for the research and/ or interview process, and investigator confirmation bias. Practice implications may include the importance of initiating retention practices with BIPOC online, first-generation students during the application process, and continuing throughout enrollment by faculty and other institutional support staff. In addition, recognizing potential cultural familial influences on retention may advocate for institutional flexibility with this minoritized population.
Facing the Reflections in the Mirror: A BIPOC Graduate Faculty Postcolonial and Indigenous Deconstruction of Graduate Mental Health Care and Teacher Education
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Micki Abercrombie Donahue
This postcolonial tribal critical race theory ethnography analyzes the implementation of an Indigenous faculty and BIPOC graduate student advisory group that co-led Indigenization and decolonization efforts in a university graduate school. The study documents the integration of Indigenous epistemology to disrupt the legacies of colonization, structural racism, and systemic inequality in three graduate mental health and teacher education programs. Tummala-Narra (2020) documented the racial trauma that results from colonized forms of education. BIPOC faculty and graduate students are frequently trained in programs steeped in systemic structural racism and colonial beliefs. Tummala-Narra (2020) suggests, “The pervasiveness of racism interacts with the normalization of racism, such that traumatic stress remains invisible to the perpetrator and sometimes to the victim/survivor” (Davids, 2009; Fanon, 1952; Hammer, 2019, p. 734). This study explores BIPOC faculty and graduate student resistance to these oppressive structures and systemic racial inequality (Fanon, 1952; Tummala-Narra, 2020). This concurrent mixed-methods ethnographic study provides a rich, detailed, and textured description of the research results (Creswell, 2015). Ocampo & Blackdeer (2022) state, “BIPOC students often do the invisible labor of mentoring and holding space for fellow BIPOC students, educating students, faculty and administration on diversity, equity, and inclusion issues, contending with faculty expectations, and participating in unpaid diversity, equity and inclusion service work” (p. 705). This study documented resistance to, “micro- and macroaggressions from their institutions and peers, lack of administrative and institutional support, and the trauma of observing anti-racism quickly go in vogue and then fall out of favor” (p. 705).
