The discourse about activism (and problematic conflations with resistance) typically offer comparisons to the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement, examine first and second wave feminism, and situate apathy and fatigue as opposite from resistance. Using a qualitative research design (Merriam, 2009; 2002), Black feminist thought (Collins, 1990), and endarkened feminist epistemology (Dillard, 2006); this study examined the experience of 6 collegiate Black women and their resistance through engagement of the hashtag, #BlackGirlMagic. Specifically, the inquiry explored how and why participants used the hashtag and investigated connections that give nuance to activism and resistance through community building, digital counterspace creation, and connections to higher education broadly. Findings include how participants conceptualize and define resistanceand how #BlackGirlMagic serves as one way they can and do engage in resistance; and the author explores relevant implications for colleges and universities.
An overarching component of PAR is that there should be participant engagement between researchers and other participants as members of a/the community under inquiry. This expectation while powerful, can also prove to be prohibitive for studies seeking to engage communities with stigmatized and/or criminalized identities, which was the case as I sought to engage a PAR methodology with college student sex workers. As such, along with study collaborators, we imagine and develop a power-conscious collaborative process that is useful for researchers wishing to embrace a collaborative ethic, when the community component of PAR might be unsuitable or unattainable. Specifically, this process creates conditions whereby the researcher can be cognizant of power relations and disrupt the prevalent researcher/researched dichotomy and more deeply invite subjects of research to become collaborators and share power within the inquiry.
This chapter explores the concept of bridge leadership within the context of student activism and student activist leadership on college campuses. This work seeks to uncover certain types of leadership that can often be rendered invisible in social movement spaces.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.