DIVERSITY DISPARITY: AN AUTOETHNOGRAPHY OF EXHAUSTION & RESILIENCE

Carla Guerrón-Montero, Ph.D.It is one thing for a university to claim that it is inclusive and promotes a diverse campus; it is another to experience that so-called diversity on campus. Is there a gap between the contemporary diversity agenda and the way diversity is experienced on campus? In this paper, I use auto-ethnography and ethnographic research conducted with queer and trans students of color at the University of Delaware to reflect on this and other questions about how diversity is experienced in contemporary higher education institutions in the United States. Previous work in this field has provided valuable insight into both the educational outcomes for students and sense of belonging that diverse learning environments create for minoritized students. Yet, often such studies do not address the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexuality. Along with this, majority of these works are written from the perspective of an outsider of student life, rather than a student themselves. Relatedly, barring a few significant studies, much of this research is conducted from disciplines outside of anthropology, which leads to the question of what specific insights might ethnography and other anthropological modes of inquiry give to the experience of student diversity? As I describe in this paper, my auto-ethnographic project, Diversity Disparity, remedies these gaps by analyzing how students with identities that intersect in race, gender, and sexuality perceive diversity in higher education, as told by a minoritized student.Anthropolog