The research and discourse surrounding Black women in college has continued to expand in its scope in recent years. Scholars have written about Black college women in several ways describing the intersections of their multiple identities, racial battle fatigue, and the unique adversities they face (McKinzie & Richards, 2019, Shahid et al,…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to develop an understanding of how the lived experiences of white educators following the murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020 impacted their understanding of racism and how this understanding, if at all, helped them work to disrupt racism in schools. Literature analyzed revealed how white…

This dissertation will explore the following research question: What is the influence of the Reversing the Lens approach (Shamir, 2007) to followership on the career advancement strategies of millennials employed at universities? The research will assess millennials as being born between 1980 and 1995 and currently working at universities in the…

The purpose of this dissertation was to understand the ways forms of literacy and cultural oppression operate in the content of the corpus of 60 books distributed by Dolly Parton's Imagination Library (DPIL) to children who entered kindergarten in the fall of 2022 from their birth to age 5. A growing number of affiliates, including many U.S.…

This autoethnographic dissertation research explores Critical White Studies (CWS) and racial trauma and their impact on Students of Color in a higher education setting. This study aims to challenge the deficit thinking of white educators who perpetuate racism in higher education. The relationship is examined to dismantle the white ideology of…

The purpose of this qualitative narrative phenomenological study was to discover how the structure of power in a school district led Missouri superintendents' leadership styles and feelings of effectiveness in their roles as district leaders. There were four power structures (Dominated, Factional, Sanctioning, Status Congruent) used to categorize…

Little scholarship exists on administrators' perceptions of censorship in specific districts and schools. I studied secondary administrators' perceptions of censorship in one, Midwestern suburban school district and how their perceptions and experiences affect their policy-making practices. Grounded in an anti-censorship stance, I conducted a…

HSIs are largely determined by Latinx enrollment and are not connected to a uniting mission or definition of what it means to serve Latinx students. Consequently, HSIs continue to be saturated with predominantly white faculty who may or may not be interested in eradicating white dominance. Researchers have suggested that white normativity…

Human resource development (HRD) is no longer about simply acquiring the skills needed to perform a task and is now a tool which can shape society and the ways in which we interact with one another. At the forefront of this transition are new ways of imagining HRD, including critical human resource development (CHRD) and critical management…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how the organizational culture on southern predominantly white institutional campuses influences the inclusiveness, belonging, and lived experiences of Black womxn at different levels of the organization hierarchy. The study results showed that experiences surrounding institutional culture,…

Over the past two decades, efforts to amplify student voice have proliferated as a project or process to increase institutional engagement with young people. Institutionally supported student voice is generally distinguished from, yet not independent of, student activism and youth activism. The designs, outcomes, and impacts of student voice…

Through an arts-based autoethnography, I explored the influences and experiences that informed my approach to leading Black youth empowerment programming. Although there is a significant amount of scholarship on Black youth empowerment programming and its importance to Black children, there is limited literature on how one becomes a Black youth…

This qualitative study explored the experiences of vocational rehabilitation counselors (VRC) serving racially diverse clients and how VRCs are trained and educated to work with racially diverse clients. VRCs are typically employed by federally funded state or federal rehabilitation agencies. In their role, they aim to provide individualized tools…

This study invokes the theory of self and identity to investigate how multiply marginalized students, namely Black boys subjected to exclusionary discipline, made sense of exclusionary discipline, as well as the ways in which it impacted their identity fashioning processes. An instrumental case study design was employed to understand the…

Whiteness is for White people. White people own it, benefit from it, and embody it. But whiteness is also for African Americans--to adopt, embody, or internalize the ideologies and ideals of whiteness as a means to reproduce and sustain white hegemony. Uncle Tom, Oreo, Carlton, and Uncle Ruckus are some of the terms African Americans assign and…