A Feminist-Informed Autoethnographic Study Troubling My Motivations for Peer Leadership in Higher Education

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to trouble my own motivations for serving as a peer leader while in college. As a unit director for a student support office at a large, land-grant institution of higher education, I have worked over 15 years in the field of higher education alongside peer leaders as a graduate assistant, a program coordinator, and unit director. More so, I served as a first-year seminar peer leader and resident mentor (routinely called resident assistant) while an undergraduate student in college. I engaged in an autoethnographic study and applied emotional recall, journaling, timelining and kinship mapping to meet the needs of the study. As a critically-informed study, I applied feminism as an epistemological stance and incorporated Crenshaw’s (1988) concept of perspectivelessness to serve as a conceptual lens. Through a series of vignettes and found poetry, findings problematize the role of trauma, my socialization from childhood and into college, and my motivations for peer leadership as a vehicle for safety and as a way to feel valuable while in college. Implications of this study include 1) helping practitioners trouble the varying motivations for students serving as peer leaders, 2) building nuanced and power-informed understandings of the systems and structures that inform peer leaders’ experiences while in college, and 3) challenging practitioners’ own assumptions and beliefs associated with peer peers and peer leadership programs.