Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 3 - 12

Letter from the Editors
Residential life and housing professionals, along with other
key campus leaders (including faculty like us), must assume
both guardianship and leadership of equity practices precisely
because residential communities are so essential to the work
of community-building on campus.
(Marine & Gilbert, 2021). Practices adopted in the late 20th century-including those
related to room assignments and selection, professional and paraprofessional staff
training, community-building and residential programming, and even newer technologies
like residential curricula-are overdue for examination through critical lenses.
The foundation for this special issue was questioning whether these (and other) practices
work, to what end, and for whom. Alongside calls for increased critical scholarship
from our professional associations (Aho & Quaye, 2018), we argue that it is imperative
to engage in individual and collective dreaming and to re-envision and revisit
practices and policies that, although time worn, fail to engage with praxis or move
towards liberatory possibilities.
For this special issue of The Journal of College and University Student Housing, we
offer a focus on individual and collective dreaming where authors re-imagine and revisit
rote practices and policies that either advance or fail to disrupt an inequitable
status quo. We invited authors to envision our housing programs in an environment
of unfettered freedom and collective well-being, where community members enacted
values of interdependence, self-determination, generativity, and reciprocity. What does
housing work that seeks to center the care and wholeness of staff, residents, and neighbors
look like? What must we discard, and which intentions and heart's desires can we
imagine and bring to fruition?
What we hoped to achieve in this special issue is the kind of thinking that interrupts
static elements of housing and residential life. We encouraged authors to utilize
Love's (2018) components for developing a liberatory consciousness: awareness, analysis,
action, and accountability. These nonlinear components provide a framework to
(re)conceptualize and (re)consider the administrative minutiae that can dominate the
work of housing and residential life professionals. We also encouraged the application
of small changes approaches offered by brown (2017) in Emergent Strategy: Shaping
Change, Changing Worlds.
We constructed an issue that offers insights from those who occupy researcher positionalities
(and thus have experience with systematic analyses and abstraction from
the concrete) and from the lived realities of practitioners (those entrenched in the daily
realities of supervision, leadership, and management of residential staff, spaces, and
policies). We believe that the result of mingling perspectives and voices yields complex
and multidimensional conversations. We also upend our own dichotomy of researcher
and practitioner as a group of individuals who occupied both spaces in our careers.
Volume 50, No. 3 * 2024
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Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 3

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 3