Empowerment Agents
Sumun L. Pendakur · 2023
This chapter discusses empowerment agents as models of thought and practice who call into question the race-blind, gender-blind standards of a meritocracy by naming and challenging the extant stratification in US higher education. Picture a newly minted graduate of a higher education or student affairs master’s program. Maybe this graduate (or new professional) is you. You have lived a set of experiences and studied a curriculum that included an analysis of structural and systemic difference, power, and privilege as well as the stories of different communities in higher education. Stanton-Salazar explains that mobilizing social capital networks (social connections) for purposeful action occurs within the context of structural inequity in which the imbalance of power is normalized and within an economy in which valuable resources are distributed in an inequitable fashion.