Higher education student body diversification as glocal practice

Abstract

Georg Simmel's assertion that strangeness organizes nearness and remoteness helps to understand how the social category of First Generation College Student (FGCS, first in the family to attend college) is used at a public university in the United States southwest. Membership Categorization Analysis (MCA) is applied to ethnographic data. Difference categories and devices morph into those of distance in an interaction where a recruitment convention substitutes for a handshake between a boy and some adults in the hallway of a student center. These changes imbricate with those found in the analysis of a student-persistence sequence of an educational marketing recruitment DVD. As evidence of glocal practice or the global impact of local contact gestures of student body diversification or massification policies directed at FGCSs (and others), they appear to coincide with distribution and recognition social justice projects that are inviting us to reach out across distances, short and long.