This tool is designed to assist higher-education student services in understanding the forces that act on multiply marginalized students — and whether their own practice feeds dominant deficit narratives or reinforces the counter-narratives that empower students’ agency and welcome their whole selves. To use: drag each arena’s pulls, reinforcers, and pushes sliders and watch positionality and salience respond; type real examples in each societal arena’s boxes.
Higher education is built upon and reinforces white supremacy, whiteness, ableism, and racism, yielding dominant deficit narratives — the result: “Ability as property.” An individual’s positionality — their intersecting social positions within context, place, and time — is ELASTIC. Societal arenas (organizational, representational, intersubjective, experiential) are the contexts an individual’s positionality engages. Within each arena, dynamic positionality forces engage with the individual and shape their identification, expectations, and sense of belonging within their social positions. Pulls stretch positionality toward those dominant deficit narratives, reinforcers build resilience and counter-narratives, and, thus empowered, the individual pushes back on the oppressive systems to create change. The dynamic salience spectrum shows how social positions cohere — fractured, stressed, strategic, or synergistic — as intersectional stress rises or falls under the influence of the dynamic positionality forces across the different societal arenas.