Chapter 11: Navigating Through Student Affairs as a Cultural Organizer

I write this chapter not from a place of certainty with definitive tools for survival, but from a place of having wrestled with and continuing to make meaning of my diverse experiences in higher education. The purpose of my story is to outline tools and strategies I learned along the way that kept me grounded and give me inspiration to continue. More specifically, I will share how I integrated practices of cultural organizing to maximize my experiences in student affairs, and sometimes, even thrive in the most challenging of times and places.

Cultural organizing as a framework helped me navigate the terrain of higher education. Kuttner (2015) defines cultural organizing as “exist[ing] at the intersection of art and activism. It is a fluid and dynamic practice reflecting the unique cultural, artistic, organizational and community context of its practitioners” (Kuttner, 2015, para. 2). In this chapter, I share interventions that incorporate arts-based pedagogies, story-telling, and the facilitation of a multiracial network as strategies for navigating the field of student affairs. These examples reveal my philosophy as a practitioner in progress-purpose driven, emotion-centered, and committed to solving problems in new ways.