This essay reflects on the campus sanctuary movement that accelerated in the immediate aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, focusing on the promises and pitfalls for activists who pushed to have their campuses declared sanctuaries for undocumented students, staff, and faculty. It offers a personal case study that relates to the nationwide push for campus sanctuary.

Scholarship regarding those who are categorized as undocumented can put sanctuary principles into practice in research settings. To do so, scholars can conduct research in collaboration with immigrant communities, reject essentializing terminology, develop modes of sociality that challenge exclusion, and document the unofficial forms of sanctuary devised by members of immigrant communities. This research model is grounded in principles of accompaniment that were followed by 1980s activists who offered sanctuary to those fleeing wars in Central America. Examples of research initiatives and educational programs that follow such principles are presented.

This essay builds on Cheryl I. Harris's conception of racialized property and bell hooks's notion of aesthetic inheritance to analyze the “double down” and “call-out culture” as performances at play in the aftermath of Martin J. Medhurst's 2019 editorial about the National Communication Association Executive Committee's decision regarding the selection of new Distinguished Scholars. The essay offers a descriptive analysis that places merit and inheritance in conversation and argues for five specific strategies for countering white supremacy in the academy.

Representations of undocumented people on television shows such as The Fosters can impact how audiences understand contemporary issues concerning sanctuary and migrants. In this Critical Intervention forum essay, we examine the intricate representation of Ximena, a Latinx woman, and her struggle as an undocumented person who takes up sanctuary in a church to avoid being arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This televisual representation of Ximena highlights the need to incorporate the complexity of undocumented people's experiences into mainstream narratives. As activist scholars, in this brief essay we support, critique, and contextualize representations of undocumented people and sanctuary as part of the work that needs to be done to help challenge dehumanizing representations, laws and policies, and actions.

Sanctuary is a play based on real events and real people. In this opening scene, we meet Carol and Mica as they set out to investigate what they believe to be a refugee crisis in 1981. They have uncovered harsh truths about Central Americans, mostly Salvadorans, fleeing war. They are being detained by border patrol under the US Immigration and Naturalization Service's orders and are being coerced against political asylum applications. Mica and Carol set out to help refugees apply for political asylum, but first they must convince the detainees one by one that they can be trusted.

This essay examines how, in the academy, the language of merit is used to discipline and conform bodies to the standards set up to uphold conditions that benefiting whiteness. Therefore, the violence of merit is one of the ways whiteness reasserts itself.

In this essay, I autoethnographically map my experience of pursuing and then denouncing the “religion” of merit into which I was indoctrinated in my white, second-generation immigrant household. I argue that my disabled body is marked as visible through medical discourse that originated within, and is in turn perpetuated by, white patriarchal discourse. This visibility interrupts the power of white invisibility, allowing a means of understanding how white normalness perpetuates a system of merit that rejects all visible, abnormal bodies while offering an unsuccessful pursuit of meritorious invisibility. The normal and invisible system of merit, when exposed, visible, and rejected, can be dismantled.

This essay is a personal reflection about an email I received from a Professor Emeritus at my university after my research received nationwide news media coverage. During my doctoral research, I located racist public statements made by William Ferguson Massey (1856–1925), former prime minister of New Zealand, whom my university (Massey University) is named after. The white Professor Emeritus, who I have never met, took it upon himself to email me, a Māori [Indigenous] junior faculty member, and chastise me for presenting my archival research to other faculty members. The Professor Emeritus's email epitomizes white power and white fragility in the academy that work to silence “Other” voices.

In this essay, prompted by the disciplinary debate over #CommunicationSoWhite in summer 2019, I reflect on my past publications in Rhetoric & Public Affairs to identify how structures of whiteness influenced the shape and acceptance of my publications. Drawing upon my self-critique, the essay provides advice for white scholars who aim to responsibly address questions of race and racism as both authors and reviewers.

Scholars of color in white majority universities inhabit a zone of alterity, which forces them to make strategic choices about how they perform. Tactical essentialism is an alternative to the dichotomous ideologies of static and fluid ontologies. Rather than allowing oneself to be caught in the double bind between performing whiteness and resisting white supremacy, a tactical form of essentialism recognizes that identity is fluid, yet simultaneously linked materially to lived-empirical experience. By recognizing that the dichotomy can be complementary, the tactical subject intentionally engages in performances of identity that can be leveraged to decolonize merit in the ivory tower.

Inspired by Dwight Conquergood, who calls on scholars to engage in intimate conversations, I offer an autoethnographic approach to explore the interconnectivity between place attachment, shame culture, and what I refer to as identity suicide through my journey to finding an attachment to place, to having interaction. Through these findings, I discovered the self-acceptance that had always been a struggle to reach due to the choices I was making within the shame culture in which I was living. This work is a reflective processing of my choices along this journey—choices that are denied to so many other queer individuals.

Although the field of critical qualitative inquiry is saturated with literature on methodologies and theoretical orientations, there is less scholarship that explores the dynamics that prevail when women of color conduct critical qualitative inquiry with participants who share their identities. Using scholarly personal narrative (SNP), our project examines the intricacies of kinship found between women of color researchers and their research participants. More specifically, this article presents narratives of an African American scholar, a British Pakistani immigrant scholar, and two Latina (Mexican) immigrant scholars who explore dilemmas and rewards that surfaced in our research within our individual communities.

This essay introduces the issues and stakes of sanctuary movements and provides an introduction to the Critical Intervention forum.

This essay examines the campus sanctuary movement that launched in response to the 2016 US presidential election. It focuses on the case of my employer to illuminate the broader context of the campus sanctuary movement's nationwide emergence, including the neoliberal evisceration of higher education and right-wing attacks on intellectual freedom and demands for social justice. Recognizing that the institution will not save us, sanctuary organizers not only demand that institutions use their resources for the public good, but they also work beyond the confines of institutions to build the resources that we need through community-based organizations.

In the spirit of Gilles Deleuze, who sought to interrogate the presuppositions of the ideas and concepts we assume as a function of our education and social existence, this essay uses poetic prose to reflect upon nine quotations from Difference and Repetition as they are relevant to questions of merit and distinction. Like Deleuze, the author assumes that allusive and even metaphysical prose employing neologisms and creative (re)interpretation of language can be especially helpful when critiquing and seeking to understand repetition, tradition, and hierarchies that have been locked in place by disciplined styles of expression.