The Unequal Terms of Support: Race, Class, and Opportunity in College with Sherelle Ferguson

Colleges routinely encourage students to build relationships with faculty and advisors, treating these connections as pathways to mentorship, academic support, and opportunity. But what are colleges asking of students when access to valuable forms of support depends on relationships they must initiate and cultivate with people who hold authority over them? Drawing on interviews with undergraduates and ethnographic observations at a private university, this talk examines how race and social class shape students’ understandings of institutional authority, their strategies for cultivating relationships, how those relationships develop, and what they yield. While some students approach these relationships with a sense of familiarity and possibility, others carefully manage their self-presentation, maintain boundaries, or seek to minimize the risks of engagement. Together, the findings challenge conventional approaches to student support that emphasize individual initiative while overlooking the unequal relational work involved in turning institutional resources into meaningful educational opportunities.

More about Sherelle:

Sherelle Ferguson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Her research explores how schools and universities shape what students are able to do and become, examining the organizational practices and social relationships through which educational opportunities are created, constrained, and unequally realized. Spanning secondary and higher education, her work investigates how schools cultivate students’ capacity for agency, how educators’ judgments and decisions shape educational trajectories, and how race and social class influence students’ navigation of institutional rules and authority. Her emerging research also examines how colleges create or constrain opportunities for recovery after academic setbacks.

Her research has appeared in Sociology of Education, Sociological Forum, and Socius. She is coauthoring an NSF-supported book with Maia Cucchiara examining how progressive urban public high schools cultivate student agency. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania.