Part I of the series “Still, We Rise: Translating Research, Practice, and Purpose in Student Affairs
This three-part series centers the lived experiences of Black undergraduate women at historically White institutions (HWIs) and reflects my commitment to ensuring their stories are not only heard but used to inform practice. Grounded in my dissertation research and guided by Black Feminist Thought, the series draws on narrative inquiry to elevate student voice as a critical source of knowledge for equity-minded student affairs work. Part I introduces the study’s methodological framing and key themes that emerged from participants narratives, illuminating how racialized campus climates, belonging, and community shape Black women’s undergraduate experience. Part II details how these insights were translated into practice through the development of Sista Circles, a culturally sustaining initiative designed to affirm Black women’s identities and foster collective care. Part III turns to implication and action, inviting practitioners to reflect on institutional responsibility while offering guiding questions to support assessment, program design, and sustainable support for Black women students. Together, these pieces are intended to move readers from listening to student stories toward intentional, community-centered action.
Historically White Institutions (HWIs) of higher education have proven to be a complex and contradictory space for Black undergraduate women. While these women are frequently celebrated for their resilience and leadership (Haynes, 2019), their lived experiences are shaped by racialized and gendered campus climates not designed with their identities in mind (Corbin et al., 2018; Kelly et al. 2021; Winkle-Wagner, 2015). Navigating these environments, Black women often encounter isolation, invisibility, and heightened expectations to persist without adequate institutional support (Corbin et al., 2018; Kelly et al., 2021; Miller, 2017; Porter & Dean, 2015; Winkle-Wagner, 2015).
Although institutions acknowledge the importance of inclusive practice, many fall short when it comes to engaging students who hold marginalized identities (Rosales & Persons, 2003; Miller, 2017; Winkle-Wagner, 2015). As a consequence, Black women’s experiences are often rendered invisible within dominant narratives of student success, persistence, and engagement (Commodore et al., 2021). Understanding these experiences requires approaches that move beyond the data and center Black women’s voices as critical sources of knowledge.
This article focuses on the narratives of Black undergraduate women whose stories highlight the complexity of identity, belonging, and resilience within institutional contexts. Drawing from my dissertation research, this piece centers their experiences as a vital form of knowledge and positions critical narrative inquiry as an essential tool for equity-minded student affairs practice. Part I establishes the conceptual and methodological foundation for this three-part series, connecting participant insights to the ACPA/NASPA Professional Competency Areas of Assessment, Evaluation, and Research (AER), Social Justice and Inclusion (SJI), and Student Learning and Development (SLD).
Methodological Frame: Qualitative Inquiry with Purpose
My dissertation, Still, I Rise: Using Sista Circles to Explore the Lived Experiences of Black Women Who Attend(ed) Historically White Institutions as Undergraduates, emerged from my desire to better understand how Black women make meaning of their undergraduate experiences within predominantly White spaces. Guided by critical narrative inquiry and informed by Black Feminist Thought, my study prioritized storytelling as a method of knowledge production.
Using Sista Circle methodology, a culturally grounded qualitative approach that centers collective dialogue, storytelling, and relational accountability (Johnson, 2015), participants engaged in facilitated group conversations that revealed both the challenges they encountered and the strategies they used to persist and thrive. Sista Circles position participants not simply as sources of data, but as co-creators of meaning whose lived experiences hold epistemic value. This approach aligns strongly with the AER competency through its emphasis on ethical, participant-centered data collection and interpretation while attending to power, positionality, and context.
It is important to note the method functioned as both inquiry and intervention. Participants frequently described the circles themselves as affirming spaces where they could process experiences rarely acknowledged in institutional settings. In contrast to traditional surveys or quantitative retention metrics, these narratives provided nuanced insight into how institutional climate, identity, and power intersect in students’ daily lives. Critical narrative inquiry thus emerged not as supplemental, but as essential to understanding student experience in its full complexity.
To provide context for the narratives that follow, Table 1 summarizes participant pseudonyms, ages, and institutional affiliations. This overview is offered to situate participants’ stories while honoring the narrative inquiry approach that centers lived experience over categorization.
Table 1. Participant Pseudonyms and Institutional Context
| Pseudonym | Classification | Institution Type | Age |
| Angela | Graduate | Public, Land-Grant Research | 25 |
| Carter | Undergraduate | Public, Land- & Sea-Grant Research | 22 |
| Charlotte | Graduate | Public, Land- & Sea-Grant Research | 23 |
| Delores | Undergraduate | Public, Land- & Sea-Grant Research | 21 |
| Mary | Graduate | Public, Land-, Sea-, and Space-Grant Research | 27 |
| Nancy | Graduate | Large, Public Research | 28 |
| Naomi | Graduate | Very Large, Public, Metropolitan | 22 |
| Sarah | Undergraduate | Public, Land- & Sea-Grant Research | 21 |
With this context in mind, the following section explores the key themes that emerged from participants’ narratives.
Key Themes from Participants Narratives
Participants’ stories revealed three interrelated themes that shaped their daily campus lives: navigating racialized climates and microaggressions, negotiating belonging and authenticity, and relying on community as critical support. Together, these themes offer critical insights for student affairs professionals committed to fostering equity, inclusion, and student belonging. Taken together, these themes trace a progression from the racialized conditions participants navigated, to the ways those conditions shaped belonging and authenticity, and ultimately to the role of community in sustaining Black women within environments not designed with them in mind.
Navigating Microaggressions and Racial Climate
Participants’ experiences were shaped by a racial climate in which microaggressions were not isolated incidents, but routine features of daily life that influenced how Black women navigated classrooms, campus spaces, and institutional interactions.
Participants recounted many encounters with racial microaggressions and implicit bias that shaped their academic confidence, peer relationships, and sense of self. When Angela sought academic support as an undergraduate, she recalled being told by the faculty member she “should think about community college.” This interaction called into question her academic legitimacy, highlighting how routine advising moments can erode students’ confidence.
Experiences like these contributed to what many described as racial battle fatigue (Corbin et al., 2018; Smith, 2015), with cumulative effects on well-being, engagement, and perceptions of safety and belonging (Donovan & Guillory, 2017; Profit et al., 2000; Winkle-Wagner, 2015; Zamani, 2003). Although often minimized or unacknowledged at the institutional level, participants described these interactions as deeply consequential to their campus experiences.
Despite these challenges, students demonstrated agency by drawing on internal resilience, faith, family support, and peer relationships, often in the absence of adequate institutional support, to navigate institutional barriers. Participants were clear, however, that these strategies emerged out of necessity rather than choice. As Mary shared, “We just can’t be defeated or let that get to us…”. Charlotte reflected that her faith helped her, “… definitely being strong in my faith helped me get through a lot of like, just tough times in college”. Delores described relying on peers, explaining that “a source of support has come from my friends and like, that friend group is a support group that I built”.
While these forms of support sustained students, they also highlight how responsibility for survival was frequently shifted onto individuals rather than addressed at the institutional level. These narratives underscore the need for student affairs professionals to strengthen their capacity to assess racial climate beyond isolated incidents or aggregate indicators. SJI and AER competencies require practitioners to interrogate how everyday interactions, advising conversations, classroom exchanges, and institutional responses to bias, collectively shape students’ sense of safety and legitimacy. Participants’ stories remind us that climate is experienced relationally and cumulatively, and that equity-minded assessment must center student voice, attend to power and positionality, and recognize narrative as a credible form of institutional data.
Over time, these repeated encounters did more than create moments of discomfort; they shaped how participants understood their place within the institution and whether they could show up authentically, laying the foundation for deeper questions of belonging.
Belonging and Authenticity
Within their racialized campus climates, participants described belonging as conditional and authenticity as constrained, often requiring them to carefully manage, when, where, and how they were visible (Apugo, 2019; Stewart, 2017). Participants’ reflections on belonging extended beyond involvement or participation to include authenticity and psychological safety. Belonging was described as the ability to show up fully without suppressing cultural expression or engaging in constant code-switching to be perceived as competent or acceptable (Apugo, 2019; Strayhorn, 2012).
Charlotte shared advise her dad gave her, “You have to work twice as hard to be half as good,” reflecting the belief that, as Black undergraduate women at historically White institutions, they must expend greater effort for distinguished recognition. Naomi, a 22-year-old from Gulf University, captured this tension when she stated, “White people wake up worthy, Black people have to work for worth.” Her words stress the ongoing labor required to validate their presence on HWI campuses.
Their narratives challenged deficit-oriented models of student success that place responsibility within individuals rather than institutional structures. From a Student Learning and Development lens, belonging emerges as an institutional outcome shaped by relational, curricular, and co-curricular environments, not a trait students must earn, perform, or sustain alone. Participants’ insights invite practitioners to reframe success through an asset-based, identity-affirming lens.
Hypervisibility and Invisibility
An important subtheme that emerged within participants’ discussions of belonging was the simultaneous experience of hypervisibility and invisibility. Hypervisibility refers to the heightened attention Black women students often receive due to their intersecting racial and gender identities. Participants described being closely watched, scrutinized, and stereotyped in classrooms, meetings, and campus spaces. Carter, a 22-year-old from State University summarized this experience when she described “that feeling of having to be on top of your game all the time”. While this visibility sometimes resulted in opportunities for leadership or representation, it more often produced microaggressions, tokenization, and the expectation to speak on behalf of an entire race or gender.
Participants also described profound experiences of invisibility within historically White institutional environments. Mary, a 23-year-ol student reflected on being the only Black student in her Spanish class and noted that it is “really important, especially for White professors, to know how to provide support to students…because it is not a one-size-fits-all approach.” Across narratives, participants noted limited representation in curricula, faculty, leadership roles, and campus initiatives, as well as exclusion from decision-making spaces that shaped their academic and co-curricular experiences. Sarah articulated the exhaustion of rarely encountering Black women in the classroom, while Angela described the significance of finally seeing a Black woman faculty member whose scholarship centered critical race theory. Delores extended this invisibility to leadership, noting that access to highly visible roles often required Black women to exceed already elevated expectations. Collectively, these experiences reveal that invisibility was not merely symbolic, it carried tangible consequences for participants’ sense of belonging, agency, and institutional trust.
Importantly, participants did not experience hypervisibility and invisibility as opposing forces, but as coexisting realities. They were often called upon when institutions needed diversity labor, serving on committees, responding to campus climate issues, or representing “the Black student perspective”, while simultaneously being excluded from spaces where power, influence, and long-term decisions resided. This selective visibility demanded emotional labor while offering little agency or power (Porter & Byrd, 2021; Zamani, 2003). Recognition without power did not foster belonging; instead, it reinforced marginalization.
Participants’ reflections challenge practitioners to reconsider how belonging and development are understood and operationalized within predominantly White institutional contexts. From a SLD perspective, these narratives reveal how identity, power, and environment shape students’ ability to show up authentically and engage fully in their learning. Social Justice and Inclusion competencies call practitioners to recognize the emotional labor produced by hypervisibility without agency and invisibility with affirmation, and to question institutional norms that requires Black women to perform belonging rather than experience it as an assure condition of their campus lives.
As institutional spaces frequently failed to offer affirmation or agency, participants increasingly sought connection elsewhere, turning toward community as a vital source of validation, resilience, and support.
Community as Critical Support
In the absence of consistent institutional care, participants identified community as essential to their persistence, well-being, and sense of self on campus. Prior scholarship affirms this reality, emphasizing that success for Black undergraduate women is not achieved in isolation but sustained through access to supportive, affirming community (Everett & Croom, 2017; Porter, 2017).
Across the narratives, participants described community, particularly spaces grounded in shared identity and cultural understanding, as foundational to their success. Delores, a 21-year-old student at State University spoke about how her CA and RA helped ground her and provide community. For her, “It was helpful to have somebody that was there for me specifically to help me grow”, she explained. Participants consistently emphasized the importance of environments where they could speak candidly without needing to explain or justify their experiences.
While institutions often offer generalized support services, few spaces explicitly affirmed the intersection of race and gender in ways that resonated with the participants’ lived realities. As Charlotte, 23-year-old from State University shared, “It is either one or the other, but never both.”
Participants’ reliance on community highlights the developmental and sustaining role of identity-affirming spaces in environments where institutional care is inconsistent. SLD and SJI competencies ask practitioners to move beyond viewing community as supplemental and instead recognize it as foundational to persistence, well-being, and meaning-making for Black women students. These narratives illuminate the limits of self-constructed support networks and underscore the responsibility of institutions to intentionally create, resource, and legitimize spaces that honor the intersection of race and gender rather than leaving students to navigate these needs alone.
In response, students often created informal networks to meet these needs. Participants emphasized that community was not ancillary to success but foundational. At the same time, their experiences revealed the limits of relying solely on self-constructed support, underscoring the need for intentional, institutionally supported spaces that center Black women’s voices, healing, and belonging.
Implications for Practice
For student affairs practitioners, these findings underscore the need to rethink how support structures are designed, assessed, and sustained. Black women’s experiences at HWIs cannot be fully understood through traditional engagement metrics or satisfaction surveys alone (Patton & Croom, 2017; Porter & Byrd, 2021). Research that centers narrative, voice, and lived experience offers a more intricate understanding of what students need to feel supported, affirmed, and empowered.
Integrating qualitative and narrative approaches into assessment strategies, such as focus groups, reflective dialogue, and story-based evaluation, can deepen institutional understanding and support more responsive practice. This approach aligns with the AER and SJI competencies by elevating voice, honoring lived experience, and using data to advance equity rather than merely document disparities. When narrative insights are intentionally connected to program design and strategic planning, practitioners can move beyond awareness toward action.
In this study, participants’ stories directly informed the development of an initiative designed to address the needs they articulated. These insights formed the foundation for the practice explored in Part II of this series.
Summary
Together, these narratives offer more than insight; they present a call to action rooted in student voice and lived experience. When students tell us who they are and what they need, the work before us is not whether to listen, but how to respond with intention, care, and purpose. If we accept these findings as credible and consequential, the question becomes not what Black women need, but what this knowledge requires of us in practice.
The next article in this series examines how these research insights were translated into intentional action through the creation of Sista Circles, an initiative designed to create conditions where Black women students are seen, heard, and supported on their own terms.
Reflection Questions
- How might your campus assessment practices incorporate narrative and qualitative approaches to better capture the lived experiences of students with intersecting identities?
- In what ways do institutional structures contribute to the experiences of visibility without agency?
- How can student affairs professionals leverage stories of belonging and resilience to inform program design and institutional strategy?
Author Biography
Wanda Johnson (She/Her) is an award-winning scholar-practitioner whose research centers the lived experiences of Black women at historically White institutions. Drawing on critical narrative inquiry and Black feminist thought, her scholarship bridges research and practice to create institutional conditions where Black women are seen, supported, and able to thrive.
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