Journal of College Student Development

The beauty of Campus Counterspaces is the clear construction of the both-and. In this book, Micere Keels holds the tension of how campus counterspaces are critically necessary within higher education while also recognizing their limitations. That is, these spaces are not the “panacea for increasing Black and Latinx students’ college persistence” (p. 164). With topics including the financial stressors college students experience (Chapter 3), the critical importance of advising (Chapter 10), and the need to move beyond representational diversity (Chapter 6), Campus Counterspaces provides a sharp analysis at the intersections of race, gender, class, and placemaking to differentiate the ways students experience going to school versus being a student. Keels defines campus counterspaces as “pockets of resistance” designed intentionally for individuals from marginalized groups (p. 18). The book’s thesis centers campus counter-spaces as part of and a response to the racialization within higher education. As such, the introduction is aptly titled, “It doesn’t have to be race-ethnicity to be about race-ethnicity” (p. 1). Keels and her co-authors nuance this argument throughout the book, exploring the tensions historically marginalized students experience (chapter 2), finding community (chapter 7), and engaging in the campus as scholar-activists (chapter 5).

Guided by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s influence regarding the dangers of the single narrative, the book reflects a rich portrait of student experiences, with data collected from 533 participants across five universities via seven waves of survey deployment and four waves of interviews. The analysis includes the intentional integration of co-authorship among Keels’ team. Outlined in the appendix (a must-read), Keels highlights the generative process behind the research design and within it, illuminating what Patel (2016) would describe as answerability for more justice-oriented scholarship. Student participants explained how they appreciated being able to talk both about their experiences and how they felt about them (see p. 171). The research used to construct Campus Counterspaces serves as a counterspace itself, pushing back against the extractive practices within higher education and student affairs scholarship. As such, the diversity of narratives and nuances clearly illuminated how these findings are not singular incidents but are instead woven into the fabric of the campus culture and climate.

The shift toward institutional support versus student readiness best describes my (Cho’s) point of entry with this review. As a former student activist and student affairs professional, my academic and professional trajectory has been rooted in the organizational potential toward transforming higher education and the organization’s reality of reinforcing harm. Now, as a Korean-American woman of color faculty member at a predominantly white institution, my scholarship and praxis continue to challenge how academic spaces—literal and figurative— shut out racially marginalized students. For me, the critique between what students expect versus what the institution provides (especially [End Page 382] seen in Chapters 5 and 7) is one of the text’s most poignant takeaways and contributions. Keels’s scholarship extends existing research on institutional accountability, particularly regarding the phenomenon of empty promises and disillusionment. Ahmed (2012) and Squire et al. (2019) have concretized similar phenomena through the language of nonperformativity, noting that institutions claim they are making progress via proclamations rather than through any tangible action—hence, the “non” in non-performance. Institutional efforts toward diversity and inclusion can easily turn into forms of “checkbox diversity” initiatives (Ahmed, 2012) or surface-level appeasement without clear transformation (Cho, 2018; Patton et al., 2019; Ray, 2019). Thus, even university efforts to invest in counterspaces as possible recommendations or even as interventions may be inadequate. Keels argues these types of diversity policies “revolve around tolerance—the acceptance of an allowable amount of variation—and aim to help historically marginalized students adjust in ways that leave the institution’s culture largely unchallenged and unchanged” (p. 5).

The ways that Black and Latinx students form and navigate relationships with each other align closely with...