Reconceptualizing College Impact Studies Through a Fractal Assemblage Theory

College impact studies have formed the common sense of understanding institutional relationships to student growth and change for decades. In this time, they have become entangled with the production of the neoliberal university. This paper1 presents an alternative theorization of student change on campus, a fractal assemblage theory. Assemblage theory is discussed through a single common language of major assemblage theory concepts across four authors. After exploring these concepts in depth, this paper returns to the stakes of assemblage theory: higher education research not to channel student to predetermined outcomes, but to create student futures in excess of our imaginations

Nomadic Subjectivity: Movement in Contemporary Student Development Theory

This essay opens space for movement in higher education~student affairs by using poststructural philosophy as a counterweight to balance the corpus of student development theories that create and inscribe in/dividualized subjectivity onto students. Taking up Jones and Stewart’s (2016) structuring of waves in student development theorizing, we unpack régimes of truth that undergird the profession of college student educators: discipline/control (a doubled biopower that centers the whole student), and dividuation (a fracturing of the whole student into component parts). We extend dividuation to include an adherence to representationalism through method in perpetuating and inscribing the student as in/dividual (neoliberal subjectivity). We take up Rosi Braidotti’s concept of nomadic subjectivity—a relational subjectivity—as a counterbalance to the in/dividualizing subjectivities of current student development theorizing. In doing so, we advance queered third wave theorizing, provoking movement and necessary ethical questions for college student educators: what does it mean to give up commonplace notions such as student, development, identity, and method? What possibilities for practice(s) and futurities in higher education~student affairs open by embracing movement

The Value of the Useless: Erin Manning, Impact, Higher Education Research, Progress

This article brings the work of Erin Manning to bear on common sense practices and conversations of the value of a college education. Manning’s work provides a productive alternative to the neoliberal discourse of college impact that has dominated higher education research for the past half century. Neoliberalism produces the common sense of the value of education as privatized, datafied (or dividuated), and measurable outcomes. This common sense reduces American higher education to the sum of its parts. To produce worlds to which campus marketing departments on occasion gesture, worlds where college produces spaces of community transformation, we must come to re/value progress in excess of measurable outcomes. In a rotating series of revaluations, this paper puts Manning’s concepts to work in both substance and form in four refrains: redefining value in higher education, revaluing the infrathin and the imperceptible, reconceptualizing liberal education, and valuing the useless