Collectivity and agency for hope to progress anti-racist change in the academy

Despair is global antiblackness manifesting itself in our universities. This paper pivots from this despair, without discounting it, to foreground hope for anti-racist change. Drawing on data from 30 semi-structured interviews with anti-racist university leaders, the paper makes three original contributions to knowledge in the study of race equity within higher education studies. First, it foregrounds a non-structural sociological theoretical framework to account for hope for anti-racist change. Second, related to the previous point, I offer empirical evidence that hope for race equity in higher education is ‘something-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts’ that ties individuals as a collectivity. Finally, this paper foregrounds individual agency against the processes of white supremacy and antiblackness in the academy. This paper concludes that the elusiveness of hope may be due to the dominance of structural explanations in discourses of persisting race inequities within higher education studies.