The author draws on the oral histories of 44 LGBTQ Princeton alumni who graduated from 1960 to 2011 to examine student strategies for negotiating marginal identities when integrating into an elite university. Even with greater LGBTQ visibility and resources at the institutional level, LGBTQ students’ experiences and strategies suggest that we question the larger social narrative of linear progress. Across time, students navigate space by highlighting difference to belong as queer students in explicitly LGBTQ circles or muting difference to belong as token queer students in heteronormative circles. Integration of an LGBTQ person does not necessarily mean incorporation of an LGBTQ identity and vice versa. These strategies are largely contingent upon students’ social positions: intersectional identities, structural location, and available models. Student strategies are structurally tempered by queer integrative marginalization: the process of select predominantly elite LGBTQ people’s achieving special status among the heteronormative mainstream.
I call for a globally informed sociology of comparative placemaking that integrates historical and contemporary processes and includes the ephemeral, institutional, and personal. By placemaking, I am referring to the explicit or tacit cooperation among people to create, maintain, and give meaning to places in space through bodily occupation given differential resources and constraints. I review select place, space, and community‐based literature about urban, Black, migrant, LGBTQ, and international populations to think about how we can build upon and integrate multiple theoretical, methodological, and epistemological insights to form an explicit placemaking research agenda. A US focus on neighborhoods contrasts with a comparative examination of global urban networks, social polarization, and transformation of the built environment in the interdisciplinary field of global urban studies (Ren, 2018). I argue for a placemaking research agenda that bridges insight from US Urban Sociology with Global Urban Studies to consider how various structures and actors constrain and facilitate place projects. With a globally reaching and comparatively informed sociology of placemaking, we can illuminate our multi‐structured story of place and agency in context. We can answer questions about how and why we co‐create and are simultaneously disciplined by the process of creation.
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