Those who compete in the Gaokao, China's College Entrance Exam, are often referred to as Gaokao zhanshi, or warriors. Based on long-term ethnographic research, this article examines how Gaokao warriors combine two types of agency that are conventionally considered contradictory: the docile cultivation of virtue and the struggle against social…

This qualitative study examines the experiences of Latinx youth and mainly white staff of the Academic Scholars Program, a college access program that operated in an affluent suburban high school. Guided by Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies, the findings highlight the constraints Latinx youth and staff faced and how they resisted…

We explore how Black and Latino/a students from economically marginalized communities drew upon dominant capitals accrued by virtue of attendance at elite secondary schools in conjunction with non-dominant family and community capitals to chart their postsecondary lives through college and beyond. In so doing, we point to affordances offered by…

The United States is experiencing state disinvestment from higher education and significant wealth inequality. This article documents how low-income college students both experience and attempt to manage these contexts in their daily lives at a public flagship university in the American Midwest. We theorize these experiences as forms of precarity…

This paper documents play in the context of technoscience education in India. Drawing on data from an ethnography of a pharma college, it describes youthful, pedagogic, and professional play. Youthful "masti" subverted rigor. At the college, it was amplified into a festival and monetized by social networking sites. Pedagogic and…

This article seeks to extend our understanding of how American Indian college students' success is crafted from their lived experiences and ancestral understanding to create community on a college campus. Using a methodology of portraiture, the Cherokee concept of gadugi is explored as a formidable concept to indigenize spaces on a primarily white…

Declining support for US higher education and the corporatization of this institution shape students' experiences. This ethnography describes a campus culture stratified by an ideology called "majorism." Majorism, a term particular to this study's site, is the preferential treatment of science and technology over the Liberal Arts. By…

I investigated how two U.S.-born Salvadoran eleventh grade boys formulated college-going mindsets at the nexus of family-based cultural influences, adolescent development, masculinity, and academic self-appraisals. With asset-based theories, findings show how immigrant families encouraged college going by shielding their sons from noneducational…

This article presents a case study that examines how undocumented students created a safe space for themselves on their college campus and how that space was ultimately institutionalized by the university. It also considers the politically vulnerable position of undocumented youth in such endeavors. Drawing from Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems…

This article explores the ways in which social scaffolding and cultural brokering processes within educational spaces engender ideological tensions among predominantly Latinx youth participants and educators within a college and career readiness organization. Based upon data from an 18-month ethnography, they engaged in forms of resistance through…

This paper asks, what significance do diversity committee meetings have for how diversity workers experience, make sense of, and navigate the challenges of diversity work at a large, public research university? Drawing on a sixteen-month ethnography of diversity policy and practice, I analyze the practice of "preaching to the choir"…

This paper analyzes how knowledge is reproduced as "universal" in contemporary higher education and how this production of universality influences the application of knowledge. Using a case study of clinical psychology, it describes the results of over two years of ethnographic fieldwork in a university and professional settings in…

This article highlights how video-cued ethnography (VCE) helped facilitate conversations about race between parents of color and preservice teachers. Utilizing VCE, we conducted exchanges between both groups to determine what would occur if they engaged in asynchronous discussions about the impact of race in schools. Two notable shifts emerged:…

Educational research widely neglects the effectiveness of multicultural education courses among teacher candidates of color (TCCs). In this article, the experiences of six Black preservice teachers enrolled in a diversity course are explicated to unearth nuanced pedagogical missteps that hinder their development as students of asset pedagogies.…

Through an ethnographic case study of campus politics at a Parisian university, this paper shows that neoliberal university reforms in France failed to create neoliberal subjectivities. Instead, the reforms provoked conflicts between direct and representative democracy, traditions which had organized post-1960s French university culture. These…