A Hole in the Soul of Austin: Black Faculty Community Engagement Experiences in a Creative Class City

This article examines how tenure and tenure-track Black faculty at a predominantly White institution (UT-Austin) make meaning of their community engagement living and working in the city of Austin, a bellwether creative class city given its demographics and history. Findings indicate that faculty experiences living in other locales greatly affected their Austin experience, and that faculty navigates a Du Boisian double-consciousness interfacing with the community as citizen-scholars. Faculty discussed the notion of welcoming and exclusionary spaces and how parental status greatly affected how they felt welcomed or excluded from opportunities to engage with the community. Participants indicated advantages of living in Austin, but also discussed dissatisfaction with a dearth of Black-centered activities.