Award Date

5-15-2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Sociology

First Committee Member

Robert Futrell

Second Committee Member

Cassaundra Rodriguez

Third Committee Member

Courtney Carter

Fourth Committee Member

Iesha Jackson

Number of Pages

168

Abstract

My dissertation examines the roles that faculty and staff play in (re)shaping institutional policies and procedures to support undocumented students. While access to higher education has been examined through various lenses, we know very little about the “institutional activists” who advocate for undocumented student support in a bounded system like a college campus. The extant literature on faculty support of undocumented students focuses on the ways they create a sense of belonging and validation through mentorship and encouragement (Pérez-Huber, 2010; Gámez, Lopez, and Overton, 2017). My research suggests that while undocu student activists are the driving force behind change at DRU, faculty, staff, and other allies play crucial roles as institutional actors pushing for campus policies and procedures to support undocumented students on a larger scale. In this dissertation, I center DRU faculty and staff as institutional activists and the main analytic category, and I analyze undocumented student activists as agenda setters whose mobilization creates the openings that insiders translate. The concept of institutional activists allows me to highlight the role that DRU’s institutional activists play in attempts to expand access to higher education for undocumented students. Understanding this phenomenon offers additional insight into how institutional policies and practices change, how insiders and outsiders to an institution collaborate to make change, and the obstacles and openings for institutional change that undocumented students and their allies face. My findings contribute to a broader understanding of the undocumented student movement in southern Nevada and examines who else serves as an agent of change work beyond the undocumented students. In each chapter, I use different sensitizing concepts/theoretical frameworks to enhance my analysis of three components that help explain institutional activists’ translation work at Desert Rose University: 1) their motivations for becoming institutional activists, 2) what they conceptualize as change work, and 3) the counterspaces they build and sustain within the institution.

Keywords

Counterspaces; Faculty Activism; Higher Education; Institutional Activism; Undocumented Student Movement; Undocumented Students

Disciplines

Education | Social and Behavioral Sciences | Sociology

File Format

PDF

File Size

1052 KB

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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