No abstract

No abstract

At a time of transition in higher education, college students across the U.S. are decorating their graduation caps with a variety of artistic, personal, amusing, and political designs. A seemingly popular fad among millennials, the phenomenon has become a viral sensation. Informed by a critical interpretative framework, the article takes a closer look specifically at students of color and their mortarboards designs. Analysis of student-submitted images and reflections reveal their intentional approach to their designs, the elaboration of a communal definition of social mobility, and the framing of student life as political. As an example of what Willis (2000) would characterize as a "grounded aesthetic," the decorated caps provide a window into an emerging student visual culture that is changing norms and traditions in higher education as campuses become more racially and ethnically diverse. Implications for what the caps mean in the context of student resilience and racial justice on campus are also discussed.

School facilities are increasingly seen as essential to achieving educational equity. By foregrounding often taken-for-granted school spaces, this conceptual article seeks to situate school design within broader antiracist efforts in education. To that end, I make a few critical contributions: (a) I shift attention to the social construction and contestation of school spaces; and (b) I develop a framework for dealing with racialized imaginaries of school spaces that goes beyond conventional equity applications. Applying this framework to school design literature and planning documents, I derive a blueprint to examine minoritized school spaces that encompasses aspects of culture, wellbeing, and power.

The article provides a critical reflexive account of a community-based research project from the perspective of four undergraduate students and their professor. The project came out of a partnership with a local nonprofit organization that has long offered social justice-focused camps to high school-aged youth. Student-researchers conducted interviews and focus groups with former participants to better understand the camp's potential longer-term impacts on their social justice knowledge and actions. Findings underscored the sometimes unsettling nature of social justice education as evidenced in how campers grappled with critical understandings of race, class, and gender. The paper presents student-researchers' reflections on their own struggles in the development of critical consciousness as sociology majors. Utilizing complementary frameworks that encompass how student-researchers engage "difficult knowledge" (Britzman 1998) in the classroom and "uncomfortable reflexivity" (Pillow 2003) in their research, our account captures the sometimes messy, unfulfilled, and alternative possibilities of social justice education and community-based research.