Exploring the campus experiences of underrepresented low-income college students through emotion mapping

As university campuses are becoming increasingly diverse, it is imperative to continue to explore the experiences of diverse groups of students. In the study reported here, we employed emotion maps in order to explore 37 Latin@, Native American, and Multiracial low socioeconomic status (SES) students’ visions of campus spaces that cultivate a sense of belonging and inclusion and the ones that marginalize, exclude, and alienate. The two major themes identified in our data analysis were contextual dynamics and affective dimensions. In the contextual dynamics theme, the students focused on the external characteristics of the environment in the various spaces that they identified on campus. In the affective dimensions of campus spaces theme, the students’ descriptions attended specifically to how campus spaces made them feel. The manuscript concludes with implications for practice.