Discussions of U.S. affirmative action policy assume that considering race in undergraduate admissions increases Black and Latinx student enrollments. We show that this assumption that affirmative action is linked to Black and Latinx student enrollments holds true for higher-status colleges and universities, but not institutions across the field of higher education. We use fixed effects modeling to analyze the association between a stated affirmative action admissions policy and enrollment trends for first-year students of different racialized backgrounds between 1990 and 2016 at 1,127 selective institutions. We find that, at the most selective institutions, stated policy usage was associated with increased Black student enrollments. However, at less selective institutions, policy usage was associated with decreased Black student enrollments and increased Non-U.S. resident enrollments. We also identify close-to-zero estimates of this relationship for enrollment trends of additional demographic backgrounds. We use these findings to elaborate the role of field-level status dynamics in racialized organizations theory. Paradoxically, U.S. American higher education’s contemporary racialized status order roughly consists of higher-status institutions that consider race in admissions but do not enroll racially heterogeneous cohorts, middle-status institutions that do not consider race but enroll racially heterogeneous cohorts, and lower-status non-selective institutions that enroll disproportionately high numbers of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students.
This bibliography curates scholarship around understandings people identify as knowledges—their production and legitimating institutions and their experiences and embodiments, with an emphasis on those excluded from the canonizations of knowledge. This “knowledge cultural sociology” (KCS) recognizes the importance of the Mannheimian tradition, and its extensions, that explains how social relations and positions shape the articulations and validations of knowledge. However, KCS also situates knowledge within systems beyond those who produce and consume it. KCS views knowledge as itself necessarily contested, as struggles over its qualities reflect social locations and articulate social practices. KCS works to understand how knowledges’ symbols, schemas, institutions, and networks shape the terms of social reproduction and transformations; as such, it demands consideration of different kinds of knowledge cultural products and modes of communication. KCS is thus necessarily grounded in the question of what constitutes knowledge, and for whom and with what interests and expectations. This KCS intervention focuses on 21st-century work. This decision aims to engage scholarship that extends and challenges a 20th-century canon, including works from the 20th century signals scholarship yearning for expansion. The bibliography is not comprehensive, though it marks how knowledge is valued and ignored. To focus on this century and move beyond sociology allows engagement with ways of knowing and being that sociology has historically minoritized, moving consideration to structures and processes validating some kinds of knowledge over others. KCS is not canonization, but works toward liberation, toward a knowledge activism mobilizing knowledge in consequential public ways alongside more familiar scholarly ambitions. KCS seeks to move scholarship beyond familiar networks and self-reproducing knowledge hierarchies grounded in race, gender, sexuality, religion, and world region. It seeks to move dialogue beyond familiar self-referential walls and identify new and ignored ideas, meanings, references, and authorities for constituting knowledges of consequence, reframing contests along the way. For example, instead of asking how excellence and diversity can be combined in knowledge production, KCS asks instead what anti-racist knowledge excellence looks like. Given the politics of epistemology, accounts of epistemology ought to foreground the contexts and power relations in which those sensibilities are formed and communicated; thus, the references below move generally from concept to context. Likewise, sections moving toward global, postsocialist, and postcolonial discussions inform ontologies and epistemologies organizing scholarly work and public consequence. But this begins with what might be identified, in this entry at least, as the greatest hits of KCS.
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