By D. Chase J. Catalano, Rachel Wagner, and Susan B. Marine
We imagine that when housing and residence life professionals hear the word liberation, many may scoff at it: not because they are anti-liberation, but because they associate liberation with the impractical, the lofty, and the idealist. This does not mean they are opposed to engaging in justice work; the reality is that much of their work focuses on the daily granular actions that keep students and staff safe. To think about the bigger picture and plan for the future – and we suspect that many are happy to be thinking about the future as the next month or semester – is a dreamscape that many do not have the luxury to consider. Still, creating environments where students do more than inhabit a space requires housing professionals to cultivate an expansive vision and associated skills. Staff must employ an intersectional approach to adequately respond to the needs and dynamics of all who live in (and adjacent to) residential communities. A liberatory mindset is key if we hope to realize campus places and spaces that are inviting, equitable, and intentional – environments that support the flourishing of all.
Such was our mindset as we began curating material for our themed issue of The Journal of College and University Student Housing (Vol. 50, No. 3). The authors (both scholar-practitioners and practitioner-scholars) who contributed to this issue all utilized liberation to (re)consider and interrupt staid ways of thinking about, operating, and constructing residential environments, staffing patterns, and programs. They took up the invitation to document liberatory approaches to supervision, restorative justice, and crisis management as they thought about how housing work could, with many small changes, be different. For example, Kelvin Roberts and Susan Marine ask readers to reconsider and revisit the very existence of duty rounds, as current practices may create unintentional harm by instantiating what W.E.B. DuBois referred to as double consciousness: the “sense of always looking at one self through the eyes of others.” Jackson M. Matos invites us to embrace Latinx values that “center family and community . . . as a basis for reconstructing and re-imagining residential spaces as liberatory.”
Gudrun Nyunt, Yuan Zhou, Emily Sandoval, and Christine Bender propose that professional staff can be treated more humanely, paid more equitably, and valued more holistically through the direct action of leadership. Each of these pieces reflects a departure from current practice that, on its face, may seem impractical, yet in terms of a wholly different metric – the calculus of human flourishing – would be highly profitable. These articles constitute a formidable starting place, but they do not map the vast possibility of housing work reconsidered through a liberatory lens.
So what exactly do we mean by a liberatory mindset? Drawn from ideas articulated by critical educators like Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Jamilah Pitts, the liberatory educator is one who sees and nurtures human possibility and well-being as far more primary, valued, and centered than the orderly functioning of institutions. Freedom consists of creating and sustaining the conditions that allow all humans to seek and attain their purposes, both as individuals and as a collective. Liberation lives outside of, and beyond, typical metrics of competition and achievement and actively defies any constructs that insist upon subjugation, particularly of those who are or have been marginalized systemically. As Barbara J. Love recognized, a focus on liberation allows us to persist amidst the realities of oppression without succumbing to its harmful impacts. Liberation eschews the ways it’s always done for the ways it can be done to most fruitfully support human flourishing. By definition, liberation centers thriving and meaning over profit, conformity, and rule-bound notions of alleged rightness.
Campus housing and residence life (and, we would argue, all those in higher education and student affairs) must attend to liberation within both our campus climates and the national and global political climates that influence everyone’s lives. To do so requires us to hold competing truths. For instance, it is true that much of diversity, equity, and inclusion work is in alignment with more politically progressive movements. At the same time, as Dafina-Lazarus Stewart asserted, “Treating students with dignity and respect and educating them to do the same for each other is not about being a liberal. It is about the responsibility of being a human being living in community with other human beings.” Demonstrating a commitment to others’ well-being is a characteristic of healthy, thriving communities.
Further, the scholarship abounds with examples of housing professionals seeking to create inclusive residential communities and to train staff in responding to (and mitigating) manifestations of oppression. Central to staff training is building a community that attempts to create dynamics where oppression is the exception, not the norm. Within their core values and competencies, ACUHO-I and other student affairs associations emphasize social justice and inclusion. Yet responding to oppression is inadequate for eliminating oppression; we also need to imagine and enact a world without oppression.
To create the kind of living and learning environments necessary to produce the futures we hope to inhabit requires imagination. We must be willing to dream together of places and spaces and dynamics and structures that offer us possibilities. We recognize that it takes tremendous effort to simultaneously respond to manifestations of oppression and generate ideas of an attainable future. The workdays are full, the emails are non-stop, and the constant barrage of big and small crises is tremendous. However, liberation is not another task to add to a long to-do list, and liberation is not a flight of fancy by those who fail to recognize the busy schedules of campus housing professionals. Centering liberatory thinking in our work begins with the premise that as housing professionals we seek to create a world where everyone flourishes, everyone’s interests are served, and everyone is invited to participate.
Liberation is also about living as whole, integrated, and honorable humans within systems of oppression while seeking to dismantle that oppression. We offer liberatory consciousness to orient our thinking, not to demand responses to everything all at once. A liberatory consciousness provides practitioners with the components necessary to be what Love calls a liberation worker: “one who is committed to changing systems and institutions characterized by oppression to create greater equity and social justice.” The four components of a liberatory consciousness – awareness, analysis, action, and accountability – function to provide clear, accessible opportunities to recognize, consider, resist, and reflect on how to respond to oppression. As Love noted, awareness, analysis, action, and accountability are helpful to realize how “every human can acquire the skill to become a liberation worker.” That is, we each have the agency to create more freedom for ourselves and our communities.
Centering liberatory thinking in our work begins with the premise that, as housing professionals, we seek to create a world where everyone flourishes, everyone’s interests are served, and everyone is invited to participate.
It may be helpful to unpack the agency and possibilities that a liberatory consciousness framework affords by situating it within concrete practices familiar to housing practitioners. For those of us who are well acquainted with stage models of student development, the non-linearity of liberatory consciousness may be unfamiliar. Therefore, we offer explanations and examples of liberatory consciousness within housing work to stimulate expansive thinking with this framework. Accountability is an apt component to begin with, in the context of housing, as it encapsulates ideas of connection and collaboration. Housing and residence life work requires working across and within groups in order to share perspectives and cultivate allies. In short, accountability is in alignment with how many professionals talk about community development in residential life settings. Accountability reminds us that liberation is the work of everyone, not just those who experience oppression, and we must work in concert with others to interrupt dominant norms that allow oppression to persist.
Awareness requires that professionals cultivate the ability to notice patterns of inequity and exclusion that operate on interpersonal, institutional, and ideological levels. Relevant to housing work, awareness prompts us to be alert to how we inadvertently maintain asymmetrical systems of power that perpetuate an inequitable status quo. Awareness compels us to notice those who experience harm and those who are overlooked. It encourages us to listen and bear witness to others’ experiences with oppression and privilege. How we act in response to what we witness or what others share with us requires us to analyze and make meaning of that information, evaluate the available resources, and reflect on the culture of our department and campus that provides the context for those experiences. Our analysis might inspire us to take action, to seek out more information (awareness), to question norms that previously made the oppression invisible, to acknowledge the harm and any role we played in it (accountability), and to explore possibilities for change to ensure that this situation does not happen again (awareness, analysis, and action).
If housing professionals make time to integrate these components into their daily practice, then departments would begin with liberation instead of hoping they have time during the breaks or summer to dream together. To begin with, liberation also means that professionals would question how to imagine approaches that center self-determination (for students and all staff), agency, and collective well-being. What might it look like to interrupt hierarchy and invite ideas from those at all levels of the department? What might we create if we organize our work around creating reciprocity between all members of our communities? How might we allow residential spaces and departments to function as rehearsal spaces for experiencing and building the skills and dispositions to manifest liberatory futures for us all?
As authors, we recognize that our ability to chart pathways to realize the potentials offered in the questions presented here is limited by our position in the academy as faculty. But we have been privileged to be part of several projects that have begun to chronicle possibilities that emanate from a liberatory stance. ACUHO-I’s Future of the Profession project enumerates eight topic areas, including the value of creating inclusive communities. Phase two ushered in a conceptual model that can bridge liberatory thinking and the skills, processes, and structures that constitute and enable housing work. Consider this your invitation to contribute to the narrative building – and thus the world-making – of liberatory residential communities.
D. Chase J. Catalano, is an assistant professor at the Virginia Tech School of Education. Rachel Wagner is an associate professor at the Clemson University School of Education. Susan B. Marine is a professor and vice provost of graduate and continuing education at Merrimack College.
