Mixed Meaning Making: A Third Wave Investigation of Multiracial Student Development

This paper traces the trajectories of multiracial college student development theories through the three waves conceptualized by Jones and Stewart (2016) to inform future directions in critical mixed race scholarship and praxis. Within each wave, the author examines the utility and limitations of each paradigmatic perspective to construct their argument. The author focuses on Critical Multiracial Theory or MultiCrit (Harris, 2016) and utilizes it as a frame in their analysis. This literature review demonstrates that theories of multiracial identity development are uniquely positioned to inform college student development theory; but while multiracial identity development theory is currently situated in the third wave from critical perspectives, more research is needed to capture multiracial students' lived experiences from a poststructural worldview to inform liberatory praxis.