Paul W Eaton

Highlighting my own daily social media practices as an example, I will unpack the various tensions and possibilities associated with being a scholar and social media activist as everyday practice. In what I refer to as multiplicitous~ becoming~activist, I harness ideas from Luis Urrieta, Jr. to challenge notions of social justice and activism identities as static, but rather as active processes that can and should be enacted within distributed social media spaces.

This article utilizes postqualitative inquiry, providing two critical readings – one from a critical-cultural poststructural perspective (rooted in intersectionality theory) and one from a critical posthumanist perspective – of one student’s relationship to race, class, and ethnicity across distributed social media spaces.  The act of tagging-untagging as described by Miranda is central to unpacking the two critical readings offered in this article.  How students understand, articulate, and potentially unpack race, ethnicity, and class in the digital age requires college student educators to move beyond traditional developmental theories, exploring and engaging the ambiguity of these socially constructed concepts in a technologically mediated world.  This article advocates that discussions of race, ethnicity, and class in the 21st century must account for digital social media spaces as well as new forms of inquiry - reading and plugging data into multiple theoretical perspectives.

This article examines the limitations and possibilities of the emerging competency-based movement in student affairs. Using complexity theory and postmodern educational theory as guiding frameworks, examination of the competency-based movement will raise questions about overappli- cation of competencies in graduate preparation programs and continuing professional development, particularly in relation to complexity reduction. Following this discussion, possibilities of using the student affairs competencies to increase complexity and create postmodern curricula will be examined.

This dissertation explores the possibilities and limitations of conducting research on college student identity in the digital age.  Utilizing philosophical theories from complexity theory, post-qualitative research, and new materialisms, I interrogate, question, disrupt, and challenge current theories and models of college student identity, largely developed from a positivist, modernist, empiricist perspective. 

Conducting research on college student identity in the twenty-first century may benefit from discarding the old ‘developmental’ language of the twentieth century, replacing this discourse and understanding with a language drawn from complexity theory.  In this regard, I believe educators, researchers, and practitioners should begin talking about identity emergence and becoming. 

I explore how to embrace more complexivist epistemologies, moving educators, practitioners, and researchers away from traditional research methodologies.  Drawing on emerging theoretical work of post-qualitative researchers, particularly Karen Barad (2008a), Alecia Youngblood Jackson and Lisa Mazzei (2012), my post-qualitative research agenda explored in this study used processes of digital immersion, interviewing, theoretical reading, and online blogging tools to create a research process viewed as a living system, exploring college student identities in the digital age as an emergent phenomena. 

This research highlights seven college students actively engaged in multiple distributed social media spaces.  I refer to these seven college students as human becomings.  In addition to following and intra-acting with these students in distributed social media spaces, I also conducted two interviews: issues of identity, digital practice(s), digital presentation(s), meaning-making, digital materiality, agency, and discourse were discussed.  I conducted a process of dat(a)nalysis, highlighting dialogue, conversation, and observations on each human becoming.  Further, I begin a process of entangling with theoretical, philosophical, and discursive research, creating the complexivist epistemologies so critical to understanding research on identity in the digital age. 

I end this dissertation discussing cyber-currere: viewing digital social media spaces as educational spaces where the processes of human becoming and subjectification occur as emergent phenomena: nonlinearly, non-hierarchically, and synchronously.  In my closing remarks, I articulate how educators, particularly college student educators and curriculum theorists, might view digital spaces as always authentic, partial, and ontological – and what such an approach means for practice and future research.

This essay opens space for movement in higher education~student affairs by using post-structural philosophy as a counterweight to balance the corpus of student development theories that create and inscribe in/dividualized subjectivity onto students. Taking up Jones and Stewart's (2016) structuring of waves in student development theorizing, we unpack régimes of truth that undergird the profession of college student educators: discipline/con-trol (a doubled biopower that centers the whole student), and dividuation (a fracturing of the whole student into component parts). We extend dividuation to include an adherence to representationalism through method in perpetuating and inscribing the student as in/dividual (neoliberal subjectivity). We take up Rosi Braidotti's concept of nomadic sub-jectivity—a relational subjectivity—as a counterbalance to the in/dividualizing subjectivi-ties of current student development theorizing. In doing so, we advance queered third wave theorizing, provoking movement and necessary ethical questions for college student educators: what does it mean to give up commonplace notions such as student, development, identity, and method? What possibilities for practice(s) and futurities in higher educa-tion~student affairs open by embracing movement?