Toward Thick Responsiveness: Engaging Identity-Based Student Protest Movements

ABSTRACT

This article utilizes ethnographic and philosophical methods to consider the ethical dimensions of responding to student activists protesting racial and other forms of social inequality. I consider the case of State University, a public institution that experienced a conflict during the 2015–2016 school year provoked by national conversations about racism as well as in response to local acts of bigotry. I use this case to critique and extend the work of philosophers Bentley and Owen (2007), who argue the civic virtues of responsiveness and endurance should guide deliberations between minoritized communities and those in power. I amend their framework by demonstrating that responsiveness can be either thin or thick. When thin responsiveness occurs, dialogue is prioritized over action and student endurance often turns into exhaustion. Thick responsiveness, in contrast, is characterized by both the validation of student's experiences and reasoning and shifts in institutional power and resources. Thick responsiveness, I argue, allows institutions to address the unequal social relations that drive student protests and foster student belonging and development as democratic citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Student protest
• student activism
• diversity
• Higher Education Administration
• ethics
• ethnography

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I use minoritized rather than minority or underrepresented because this term reframes minority status as the product of social relations and processes rather than numerical differences (Harper, 2012).

2. As a critique of late liberal governmentality, Povinelli’s (2011) work distinguished between modes of power that operate by “making die” and “letting die.” To distinguish between suppression and thin responsiveness, we might define the former as “making die” and the other as “letting die.” These distinctions are worthy of further theorization but are beyond the scope of this study, which sought to explicate the boundaries between thin and thick responsiveness.