are under pressure to represent the ethno-racial diversity of their student bodies in the most favorable light via their websites. We analyzed the race/ethnicity tables and figures featured prominently on the websites of 158 colleges and universities. We found 3 practices that institutions undertake to enhance the appearance of diversity on campus: omission, aggregation, and addition of ethno-racial categories. Universities with the lowest levels of student diversity were the most likely to engage in these practices. We understand these practices to be organizational-level racial projects (Omi & Winant, 2015). That is, universities are actively transforming "the content and importance of racial categories" (p. 61).
The ever-developing arena of social media blurs lines separating public and private spheres. Voluntary usage of social media platforms transforms users’ personal and sometimes private imaginings into publicly accessible artifacts. The entanglement of these two domains demands society’s consideration as policy makers, employers, and qualitative inquirers contend with making meaning of messages initiated within the social media sphere in a world extending beyond it. In this article, I reflect on interplay with a subset of data from my dissertation featuring transcripts pulled from YouTube videos posted by self-identified biracial individuals. As I attempted to instill dialogic properties into what could have been unidirectional interactions, I confronted several challenges. I managed pressures of simultaneous allegiances to my research goals and to the integrities of my informants who were not aware that they were informing me. This article provides insight into navigating these tensions, which are necessary and, to date, too scarcely available.
It is well-documented that multiracial college students experience microaggressions in their everyday schooling experiences. However, little research has gone on to place these individual experiences in the overall organizational structure of educational settings. Using a racial formation theoretical frame, we explore how institutions make use of various racial projects when representing multiracial students. By applying a critical discourse analysis approach to the examination of 271 university website representations of student body diversity, we found that university websites erase and selectively reclassify multiracial students in representing their student bodies. These practices mirror multiracial microaggressions that occur routinely at the individual level, but are situated at the institutional level and perpetuate monoracial normativity, the assumption and centrality of monoracial identities.
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