“Making Space” for Ourselves: African American Student Responses to Their Marginalization

Drawing from two separate case studies, one on lower track African American students and another on gay and gender nonconforming African American male students, this article explores how students with multiple stigmatized identities make sense of and respond to their marginalization, a process we term making space. In particular, we consider how making space can support students’ psychosocial needs and at the same time work against school engagement and academic striving. We describe types of “making space” strategies: sociospatial, performative, and political/institutional, and use these categories to describe the ways students in our projects responded to their perceived marginalization. Institutional processes that make these responses necessary are addressed as well as how schools can either mediate or intensify students’ feelings of marginalization and therefore their perceived need to “make space.”