Theresa Burruel Stone, PhD., Assistant Professor of English, receives AERA Award for dissertation
Dr. Burruel Stone’s dissertation, Emplacing White Possessive Logics: Socializing Latinx Youth into Relations with Land, Community, and Success, examines how a college preparation program designed to increase the number of Latinx youth attending four-year colleges may have unintentionally perpetuated political and moral stances that increased individual success but maintained the continued need for such programs. She engages Native American and Latinx scholarship in order to place relations with land at the center of her examination of Latinx youths’ college-going pathways and socialization into largely normative conceptions of success. This approach is used to deeply imbricate the places, discourses, relations, practices, and logics surrounding the college preparation program at the center of this dissertation. Featuring data from pláticas and interviews, participant observation, and a multi-sited place project, this ethnographic project builds upon youths’ and educators’ readings and navigations of their social worlds. As a whole, it underscores that college-going pathways and the attainment of higher education are always embedded within the white supremacist, settler colonial nation-state, and cannot be the primary strategy for racialized peoples’ liberation, despite its championing by liberal multicultural approaches to social change. This work suggests that consideration of the ways that educational attainment is positioned within broader goals for liberation must be central to how conventional measures of success are imagined within educational research and practice.