Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 3 - 49

Re-imagining Live-In Staff Experiences
Practitioners in residence life are well situated to change workplace
culture, especially if they are able to increase their organizational
capacity for reflection and build a collective liberatory consciousness.
METHODS
We utilized qualitative inquiry as a way to honor the complex and varied experiences
of live-in staff (Merriam, 2009). Semi-structured interviews allowed participants to
express these experience in a detailed and illustrative manner (Schuh et al., 2016).
Participants
To better understand how live-in staff would re-imagine their roles, we conducted
60-minute interviews with seven participants, many of whom had experience in multiple
live-in roles in different residence life departments that included on-call responsibilities.
Applying a convenience sampling approach, we reviewed the websites of higher
education institutions within four states in the Midwest and identified residence
life professionals using information available on campus websites. Participants were
eligible if they had been in a live-in position for at least one year. More than 25 individuals
expressed interest, but many did not reply to requests for an interview. Ultimately,
we interviewed seven staff at five different institutions:
* Alex (they/them) works at a private religiously affiliated institution in a
metropolitan area and disclosed that they identify outside of the gender binary.
* Lake (she/her) works at a large public suburban institution and describes
herself as a queer cisgender White woman who identifies as being on the
" ace " (asexual-aromantic) spectrum. Lake also shared that she has obsessive
compulsive disorder and that many of her obsessions or compulsions revolve
around sleep, which greatly affects her work in residence life to the point that
being woken up in the middle of the night was impacting her mental health.
* Harley (she/they) works at a private university in a metropolitan area and
considers her salient identities as being a queer Jewish White woman. At work,
she utilizes her queer and Jewish identities to create more representation in the
workplace.
* Spencer (she/her) works at a large public suburban institution and describes
her salient identities as being genderqueer, White, non-religious, disabled, and
lower middle class. During her interview and in follow-up communication,
Spencer also noted the relevance of identifying as American, biromantic, and
asexual.
* Stella Luna (she/her) also works at a large public research university in a
suburban area. The most salient identities that impact her work are being a
queer Jewish cisgender White woman. She also notes the saliency of age, given
that she is 24 years old, the youngest professional in her department.
46 The Journal of College and University Student Housing
Journal of College & University Student Housing Volume 50, No. 3

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