ABSTRACT
Understanding collegiate norms and practices that promote sense of belonging among students who have traditionally been raced, gendered, stigmatized, and excluded as the ‘other’ in predominantly white institutions (PWI) is of paramount importance today as these efforts face increasingly antagonistic legislation, state policies, and governmental executive orders. This study describes specific norms and practices that an organization at one college campus—a performing arts center—took to actively create a sense of belonging for students at the university who identified as members of racially and ethnically minoritized groups. Study findings highlight changes made at the performing arts center that may be adopted by college administrators whether they are responsible for arts or other areas of programming. Recommendations feature the importance of inclusive pedagogy and student engagement.
Summary
College campus arts venues act as important sites to create structural belonging for members of racially minoritized groups when programming engages the geopolitics and the politics of difference with intersectional specificity, offering representations of diversity attentive to the complexities of social identities, especially for individuals with multiple minoritized identities.
Structural belonging is fostered by efforts to expand “ownership” of arts programming beyond season ticket holders and donors to include racially minoritized students, whose voices can be centered as performers, artists, arts producers, and participants in shared governance through steering committees and advisory groups.
The work of “curating” structural belonging includes instruction on how to negotiate interactions with cultural practices different from one’s own and an invitation to do so. Careful attention to difference contributes to the connectedness and social well-being of students.
Art, rhythm, movement, music, voice, film, sculptural forms, and the resonance of time and place are subjects that need not be limited to arts education. Other curricular areas and student affairs programs can incorporate the arts through their teaching of history, place, society, self, physical dynamics, and interpersonal relationships.