A Case Study of Leadership at a Women’s College: Teamwork, Diversity, and Confidence Building

ABSTRACT This study reports on women college students’ leadership, teamwork, diversity, and communication skills while planning and executing a leadership event in Japan over a period of seven months. Data were gathered from 11 students who completed two online questionnaires: Questionnaire A was administered while planning the event and Questionnaire B was administered after they executed the event. The questionnaires asked about the difficulties/joys of teamwork as both a leader and a follower as well as the lessons they learned through the process. An analysis of the questionnaire results indicated drastic changes in participants’ views of leadership, teamwork, diversity, and communication skills. Students’ learnings mostly occurred during teamwork planning efforts, but after the execution, the learnings become established as a sense of appreciation and self-confidence, thereby enhancing their potential as a leader and a follower. KEYWORDS: Leadership Education, College Student, Teamwork, Diversity, Confidence Building

Negotiations of Women’s Black and Activist Identity Through Dress on the College Campus, 2013–2019

Black people, especially Black women, have used dress to reject racism and discrimination and as a means for negotiating their Black and activist identities. Building on past work, we examine how Black women use dress as an embodied practice to negotiate both their Black and activist identities. We focus on a particular space and time: campus life at predominantly White institutions during the Black Lives Matter movement era from 2013 to 2019.To achieve this purpose, we conducted 15 in-depth, semistructured wardrobe interviews with current Black women college students. Overall, we identified three themes relating to Black women college students: experiences on predominantly White campuses, negotiating Black identity through dress, and negotiating activist identity through dress. Examining how Black women negotiate identity through dress recognizes their stories as important through counter-storytelling, allowing Black women to write their own history in their own voices.

“My Hijab Is Like My Skin Color”: Muslim Women Students, Racialization, and Intersectionality

During the past several years a growing body of literature has encouraged sociologists to examine the intersection of race and Islam as a distinct form of racialization. What is further needed is an understanding of the experiences of racialization of Muslims through the prism of intersectionality. Applying and expanding Selod’s (2018a, 2018b) conceptualization of “gendered racialization” we argue American and international Muslim college women in the United States experience racialization at the intersection of nationality-culture; how their corporeal bodies are gendered and racially signified; religious-political expression; and legal-political policies and practices. Using data from 34 Muslim women college students we argue, first, that they are being racialized in similar practices and feel un-American and that they do not belong but how they mitigate racialization differs based on their intersecting identities. Specifically, the intersecting forces of nationality, gender and racial body signification, and religious-political expression are pertinent. Second, Muslim women college students negotiate their racialization with different coping strategies informed by their intersecting identities, notably their nationality and how they are bodily signified. These findings expose how whiteness is a malleable process for Muslim college women and choosing how to navigate racialization is determined by competing identities.