Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2026

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Program

Psychology

Advisor

Anna Stetsenko

Committee Members

Jeremy Sawyer

Erika Y. Niwa

Lara Beaty

Subject Categories

Developmental Psychology | Higher Education | Social Justice

Keywords

emotions, shame, loneliness, alienation, community colleges, socio-political

Abstract

This dissertation explores how community college students make sense of and navigate their emotions related to learning. Community colleges are two-year public higher education institutions that primarily serve working-class and students of color, enrolling almost half of all current undergraduates in the United States, yet their experiences are rarely addressed by researchers. Drawing on critical theories (e.g., feminist politics of emotions, Black feminist/queer women of color theorizing), emotions in this study are conceptualized as socio-politically situated, shaped by institutions and ideologies distributed through power across intersecting social identities. Although emotion research in higher education has grown substantially in the past two decades, community colleges remain marginal in this literature. This scholarly gap, addressed in this study, is not neutral; if left intact it may reproduce dehumanizing narratives about students from historically marginalized communities. The current study was conducted as a qualitative inquiry (in two phases) employing interviews with community college students about their learning experiences and emotions. The research questions for Phase I focus on how community college students make sense of learning-related emotions—what emotion discourses they use, how institutional contexts shape those feelings, and what supports they draw on when experiencing negative emotions. Phase II research questions examine how students across intersecting identities experience and interpret shame, loneliness, and alienation in learning; how structures of oppression shape these emotions; and how students imagine or create alternatives grounded for resistance and solidarity.

Based in a qualitative thematic analysis, the main finding from Phase I (7 participants) was that students experienced learning-related emotions as shaped by power and institutional context, but often spoke about them in individualist ways that stigmatized sharing, leading most to cope privately except in rare moments of connection, belonging, and critique. Specifically, individualist and isolating spaces of learning in community college seemed to have encouraged students to engage in individualist ways of learning where their feelings of shame were often suppressed and hidden. Phase II (5 participants) extended these findings to include a focus on the dynamics of shame, loneliness, and alienation grounded in social and power-laden contexts of community college. The main finding was that shame, loneliness, and alienation operate in sociopolitical spaces of learning and can enact either oppression or resistance. Specifically, it was revealed how learning was oppressive when shame, loneliness, and alienation served to exclude, marginalize, and isolate students. However, it was also demonstrated how students might draw on these very emotions for resistance against oppressive, dehumanizing conditions for learning. Overall, this study suggests that when shame, loneliness, and alienation are treated as reflections of oppressive educational practices, rather than individual deficits or taboo topics, the stigmatizing, isolating, and overall negative dimensions of these feelings can be negated and subverted by students, thus fostering resistance and solidarity. Thus, shame, loneliness, and alienation contain deep revolutionary potential for educational transformation.

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