This dissertation qualitatively examined former (18) and current (2) college players’ experiences within their athletic department ecology—experiences with teammates, coaches and administrators, team doctors and health professionals, and experiences with various mechanisms of discipline, punishment, and surveillance. Using antiblackness and carcerality as an analytic, this study demonstrated how higher education’s administering of college athletics mirrors other antiblack state projects and structural conditions of antiblackness more broadly. Across Division I FBS, FCS, and Division I (no football) institutions and participants who competed in track and field, cross country, men’s and women’s basketball, men’s soccer, football, softball, and/or volleyball, every participant was subjected to carceral conditions and lived in relation to athletic department and coach despotism. However, antiblackness is constitutive of carcerality and as such the concentration and magnitude of harm was oriented around an antiblack logic that mediated participant experiences—with the most harm being concentrated on Black women. Nonblack, and especially white, participants were afforded more leeway to self-police or maintain the illusion thereof, whereas Black participants experienced heightened, more severe, and/or unique forms of containment, surveillance, and bodily and psychological harm. Findings from this study demonstrate how college sport is used to complement other state projects of enclosure. Sport, when operationalized this way, takes on the state’s carceral logic, necessarily making the organization of these leagues follow an antiblack algorithm of containment, control, surveillance, bodily harm, and punishment. Thus, higher education institutions can be understood as engaging in a carceral partnership with the state in their creation and normalization of the nonprofit “collegiate model of athletics.”

This case study centers the voices of cultural center professionals and uses historical and present day collective counterstories to unveil visible and invisible forms of resistance, tools and strategies for change, and the ways in which they foster interest convergence within their multiple spheres of influence to advocate for students of color and minoritized communities. Inspired by Critical Race Praxis for Educational Research this study also reveals institutional domains of dominance that perpetuate systemic racism, status-quo norms, status-quo stories, and race-neutral policies in higher education. The perpetual delegitimization of cultural centers, institutional disinvestment in professional development, systemic erasure of community histories of struggle and resistance, and institutional co-optation of diversity and equity labor, institutionally marginalizes the expertise and racial literacies of cultural center professionals in higher education, and pushes cultural centers to operate in silos. Despite these challenges, cultural center professionals often leverage relationships with student activists, staff, faculty, alumni, and community members to foster transformative changes in higher education.

When discussing students’ educational experience on campus, including race and racism, previous studies usually discuss domestic and international students separately and use different theoretical frameworks. Previous literature examining international students focused on the individual characteristics of students and how those associated with their personal adjustment to their campus environment (e.g., Andrade, 2006; Khawaja & Stallman, 2011; Ward & Masgoret, 2009). Little attention has been given to critical frameworks that address the international student population, considering not only on students’ race and ethnicity as major factors, but also engages international students’ direct racial experiences within specific institutional types. This study explores Asian international graduate students’ experiences of campus racial climate and resistance strategies in a Minority-serving Institution (MSI) in the U.S. This study uncovers how racialization experiences are shaped by students' own ethnic backgrounds, the history of the U.S.’s racial stratification system, and national and global contexts. My research also raises timely concerns of anti-Asian racism in the U.S. due to America’s shifting political climate and the serious consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education. Despite facing microaggressions and other forms of oppressions on and off-campus, Asian international graduate students engage in resistance strategies to adjust to and combat microaggressions, institutional invisibility, and academic injustices. This research is guided by a qualitative research methodology utilizing a single case study to focus on an individual’s lived experiences. The aim of this research also includes ameliorating oppressive attitudes to Asian international students.

The marginalization of “dis/abled” Black and students of Color is well-documented in the K-12 contexts (Annamma et al., 2013; Artiles, 2013; Artiles et al., 2002; Artiles, & Trent, 1994; Blanchett, 2006). Studies have found that not only do Black and students of Color experience overrepresentation in Special Education but that Special Education placement increases the likelihood of these students being removed from schools and placed into carceral facilities (Annamma, 2015; Annamma, 2017; Artiles, 2013; Artiles et al., 2002; Artiles et al., 2010; Sullivan & Artiles, 2011). While these studies allow us to understand barriers impacting dis/abled Black and students of Color in the K-12 system, far less is known about this student population upon entering higher education. Extending Dis/ability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit), my study examines the racialized experiences of dis/abled Black and students of color attending four-year colleges and universities in California. I build on existing literature in K-12 and higher education contexts to examine the ways in which race and dis/ability intersect and perpetuate inequity for students in the study. I found that many existing policies and practices were not objective or race-neutral and privileged constructions of dis/ability rooted in hegemonic whiteness which invisibilized the experiences of Black and students of Color with dis/abilities. Building on Pérez Huber et al.’s framework (2010) of racist nativism, CRT, and DisCrit, I propose “racist ableism” as a conceptual framework to theorize these intersections of race and ability. I use racist ableism to describe how particular forms of ableism, informed by racist beliefs and institutions, oppress and dehumanize Black, Indigenous and people of Color based on actual or perceived (or, inversely, lack of perceived) dis/ability, thereby reinforcing the relationship between whiteness and ability. Last, I found that institutions of higher education police, surveil, and criminalize dis/ability. I identify particular practices, such as requiring students to register for services or using campus police in crisis response, as embodying carceral logics and carceral control. Overall, these findings highlight the need for colleges and universities to reexamine existing policies and practices with regard to dis/ability. Intersectional framing is of paramount importance if colleges and universities are going to meet the needs of increasingly diverse student bodies.