How We Built a College for Intersectional Inquiry—in a Red State
Kathryn Bond Stockton
True, I work in Utah. And our state motto, I kid you not, is “Life Elevated,” cleverly tucking a spiritual meaning and rock-climbing metaphor into one and the same phrase, for a state, no less, with dense blue skies, bold red rocks, rich Indigeneities, large queer communities, and increasing numbers of Black and brown people. (Also, as you know, many shades of whiteness.)
Here we’ve formed a college unlike any other at our research university. As inaugural dean, in a campy mood, I’m apt to explain: If you take the coolest dance troupe, wed it to a protest, link it to a book club that reads the sharpest books, and make it sing with fiery charm—a charm that breaks barriers, confronts institutions, soothes wounds, cracks jokes, dresses rad, and calls things what they are—you have Transform: The School for Cultural and Social Transformation. The dean specifically curates drink-fests every other week for lubricating thought, suggests playing hooky to snowshoe together (taken up by faculty who come from the Caribbean), and assists the captain of our kickball team. That is to say, we cultivate pleasure so as to practice healing from layered, painful histories and to know each other for linked-arm strength. We dream of creating a livable life.
More straightforwardly, this college brings together our formerly separate Ethnic Studies Program, Gender Studies Program, and Disability Studies Program, soon to be joined by a Center for Pasifika Indigenous Knowledges. Garnering four Mellon grants in just over five years, Transform, as we call ourselves for short, is a gathering force for intersectional thought at the University of Utah. Since our founding in 2016, we have added sixteen scholars, fourteen of whom are young scholars of color, bringing expertise in Pacific Islands studies, American Indian studies, Black queer studies, Black and Asian (Blasian) studies, Iranian and Muslim studies, comparative racial politics (Brazil and the United States), community-engaged research, carceral studies, gender justice, queer disability studies, Latin American studies, and transnational feminisms.
If this story startles you, know that we’re surprised by it still to this day. Luck meets kismet—as you’re going to see—but so does righteous anger meet creative charm, birthing in the process structural change. I’m fond of making a mantra for our students so they’ll know this history (recite it on your pillow every night, I tell them): “From anger to charm to structural change.” Indeed, our students played a founding role. We as a college emerged, as it happens, from an “Open Dialogue on Racial Climate” town hall—and a Hail Mary pass that we launched from student voices.
In Utah, you might ask?
Utah feels unique. But perhaps it uniquely expresses larger trends. Salt Lake City is a segregated city—of typical sort. Wealthier white people live near the foothills, communities of color live on the flats. Religion is a force (to understate the matter). And Utah is home to some of the oldest African American and Asian American communities west of the Mississippi, sits profoundly on Indigenous land, boasts the largest Pacific Islander communities in the continental United States, and is vitally blessed with growing pan-Asian, African immigrant, Latinx, and Chicanx communities. From which we have concluded that the features of this place—historically, geographically, politically, religiously—require new structures for doing intersectional transformative justice, even as the concept lies at a crossroads.
If there’s a lesson in what I have to tell, it is largely this: “Seize the reins, ride the bronco, surf the wave, climb the wall, jump the chasm right in front of you.” We’re quite expert, many of us, in intersectionality as an idea. But what does it mean to do this concept at more structural, institutional levels?1
A Dialogue of All Things
I said that we had luck.
The first weird fortune involved my suddenly, out of nowhere, being asked to serve as the associate vice president for equity and diversity—the university’s chief diversity officer. Any awake, clever theorist would say no. What queer-of-color-critique scholar wants that job, wants to talk “diversity” instead of “antiracism” and “system change”? I surely didn’t.2
But I had long harbored a nagging question. Why, exactly, don’t things happen at predominantly white institutions for people of color? (Queer and trans folks were hardly even mentioned in 2014 in our diversity office.) I was going to be a diversity detective. So, I assented. Something unexpected happened next. I got taken to school by staff. I got immersed in staff magic. What an education I gained as I led thirty or so amazing staff across our student centers and academic programs. Faculty, I learned, are shockingly ignorant of the staff brilliance that runs our universities. Why does this matter if you want to craft a college? You will need staff who know about structures and can help you run them.
And you’ll need a catalyst. We had a dialogue. Which sounds placid. But make no mistake, it was born of anger of the most earned sort. Our creation as a college is rooted in righteous student anger surrounding racial climate.
Let me be specific. It was the fall of 2015. Black football players at the University of Missouri had walked off the team due to conditions for African American students there. Yale was blowing up over Halloween costumes. Across the nation, students were demanding racial reckoning from university administrations. And I was having the newly formed Black Advisory Council at my house for a party the night the Missouri players boycotted. We together wondered what our university would do in relation to these national demands. Nothing, we figured. But that night on email a thought was brewing among the vice presidents. Shame on us, the feeling went, if we don’t join this national conversation.
I was shocked. Having been at Utah since 1987 (with no nondiscrimination clause for queer and trans faculty when I began), I had never heard central administration, never mind the president of the university, talk about race. Would he now?
My postdoctoral intern in my office—a scholar of Black educational justice—thought he had to. So, he and I drafted a possible plan for an open dialogue for our whole campus. The president, reached by satellite phone since he was in China on a basketball junket, also agreed(!). But many of my staff (almost all with BIPOC lived experience) were not onboard. If you allow students of color to tell (largely) white people in power that they’re suffering and the university doesn’t act, that would be unconscionable. My answer was facile: If the university does nothing, I will resign. (I could—they couldn’t.) My faculty obliviousness to staff conditions hit me like a thunderclap. I told my companions that if they’d lost faith in me, I would step down. But in their generosity (and angry skepticism?), they struck a stance of wait and see.
Then, the day came. As facilitator I was joined by the African American head of the Women’s Resource Center (a person of incredible vision and trust) and the talented lead of the Office for Inclusive Excellence (a scholar of Pacific Island studies) alongside the founder of the Black Faculty and Staff Association (a nationally renowned scholar of racial battle fatigue). Right before our start, a student from the Inter-Tribal Student Association (ITSA) approached us to say that students from ITSA were going to rush the stage and commence drumming so as to block the dialogue. Together, we instantly decided that we would respect that decision, if drumming commenced.
But that never happened. Four hundred to six hundred people turned out to talk in the Student Union ballroom. And students told it, as you’d hope they would. Anger was the fuel. But what an act of kindness, an act of generosity, for students to come, called as they were, into open dialogue.
And, trust me, there was charm. Two members of the Black Student Union spoke in the most appealing tones about what they thought was needed. I was floored to see both rise with utterly captivating warmth (what? how’s that possible? don’t we need ire?): slightly laughing, slyly smiling, expressing gratitude, and confidently claiming the right to make requests. Leaving the ballroom, the president and provost asked me to draw up a list of actions in response to what we heard. (This list became known as “The Thirteen Immediate Responses to the Open Dialogue on Racial Climate,” which I subsequently spent a semester sharing back with groups that spoke.)3 And since I heard students worried about the defunding of ethnic and gender studies, we threw a desperate pass and suggested that the university create a college for intersectional inquiry.4
The president and provost couldn’t wave a wand and make it happen. We settled in, then, for what we thought would take many years to get passed, since you have to gain approval from six decision-making bodies. Toward the end of the process, it’s the academic senate (lovely but contentious), the board of trustees (rather conservative), and the board of regents (who knew what they would say?). Well, it didn’t take years. Using a kind of anger-fueled charm I noticed in our students—projecting a sense of “I dare you to withstand the beauty of this vision”—we went through the six decision-making bodies in a six-month period without a single negative vote. Literally hundreds of people voted, and not one person voted against us.
My arguments? One, you can send the biggest possible message to our campus about antiracism—not just “diversity”—by creating a college for intersectional inquiry. (I’ve found that creating a vanguard college seems both real and magical to even the most cynical folks.) My second argument centered on newness. Virtually no other school in the country has a freestanding college like the one we’re designing, with faculty spanning the humanities, fine arts, social and behavioral sciences, education, and social work (though New York University’s Department of Social and Cultural Analysis and Arizona State University’s School of Social Transformation did inspire us). Third, I can do it budget-neutral on the front end. (Our Office for Equity and Diversity, with so many cool staff positions—web designer, events manager, communications specialist, budget expert—could sustain a small college and wanted to do so.)
No one demurred. So, Transform was born. Ethnic and gender studies became departments; disability studies was brought inside the school; we’ve achieved these nationally prestigious grants; and we’ve hired sixteen new young faculty.
Anger-spawned kindness—a willingness to dialogue across real difference—made a brand-new structure. Which is not to say it was easy sailing among our own professors. The Ethnic Studies Program wildly supported our bold proposal. Gender Studies was more cautious. It took many hours to get a unanimous vote across our faculties.
Would it work?
Real-World Tests
No one was more surprised than we were to found a school.
Transform was formed through the intersectional commitments of ethnic and gender studies as overlapping entities. This coming-together was rare, even so. Both domains have their own field formations—their own distinct histories—and they have not been known for working hand-in-glove. This is not a mystery. Academic structures do not typically ease the partnerships they applaud. For all the talk about interdisciplinarity, most of it remains low-bar and performative. Hollow lip service. These dilemmas had been prevalent at the University of Utah, positioning the Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies Programs as friendly competitors who didn’t know each other.5
So, when the time came to form a school together, it felt risky. We had no shared curriculum. We had no shared policy. We had not conducted academia together. How to join forces and not in the process lose each discipline’s hard-won thrust?
We began by making hires that expanded our collective reach. These hires—in Pacific Islands studies and disability studies—reflected community needs, which further defined Transform as a school connected to community research and engagement.
The Pacific Islands studies search—jointly chaired by the new Departments of Ethnic and Gender Studies—stands as our most pointed attempt to incorporate community involvement and feedback during a hire. Involvement included our consulting community members over the job description, the shape of search processes, the scheduling of candidate talks at times when community could attend, and the arrangement for candidates to have one meeting and one meal solely with community members in spaces of the community’s choosing. While community members, given university bylaws, could not officially vote, the search committee cochairs sat with community members to receive their input.
At times, as dean, I felt that our ability to be a college was hanging in the balance. Could we work together on the most delicate, contentious front of hiring colleagues? We teetered on the cliff edge working out the process for this first search. But the search committee members worked with exquisite generosity toward each other. It’s as if we nearly came apart at the start, but then, having won the day with that search, fashioned a kind of hiring panache that has not yet subsided—sixteen searches later.
The process for our disability studies search focused more squarely on creating a university community surrounding disability studies issues. Prior to its consolidation in Transform, disability studies existed as a precarious course of study managed by a handful of faculty members across three colleges. Impending retirements and withdrawal of resources meant the university risked losing its engagement with this vital intersectional field. In 2018, Transform provided disability studies an institutional home and hired a second faculty expert in the field, one with essential experience in disability community organizing and community activism. (In fact, she subsequently won the national prize for top emergent junior scholar from the Society for Disability Studies.) Our two Disability Studies Program faculty have now dramatically grown the disability studies minor, which brings students from the Colleges of Health, Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Fine Arts, and Social Work into contact with Transform’s undergraduate curriculum.
These hires affected how we thought as a school.
What resulted were policy and practice changes. For example, our creation of undergraduate interdisciplinary certificates (in Pacific Islands studies; environmental humanities and transformative justice; leadership, equity, and dialogue; and, soon, carceral justice). We are continuing to become intersectional, prompting us to ask: Where, when, and how are we probing this concept as we’re doing it? How are we teaching it? How are we preparing to make change through it, even as we’re querying and challenging it?
We face other challenges. We don’t just research and teach in the ways of an ordinary college. We supply the university with diverse, wise leadership that moves the campus forward. We are also out of space, though we have a beautiful Transform suite in the university’s newest and most central building. More pressingly, we are facing retention cases every year. Our faculty have become so successful in garnering national attention, they now have serious options to move to more prestigious schools with far deeper pockets. The only ray of light: It’s hard to dispute that the Transform job is the better job.
Paradoxical Embrace
You might be wondering how a college such as ours is regarded in the university’s most central spaces.
After all, we unabashedly proclaim that we study and deeply live the interlocking dynamics of shifting sexualities, changing genders, vital immigrations, and emergent struggles against all racist and ableist actions.6 Thus, it may surprise you that we as a college, counterinstitutional though we may be, are fulfilling the university’s new stated goal: “to become a top 10 public university with unsurpassed societal impact.”7
A funny thing has happened on our way to impact. And it has made us golden, at least for the moment, with the university. Not only have we forged something nationally unique—the school itself—but we’ve also landed four Mellon Foundation grants in a five-year period, when the university had never had an academic Mellon grant in its history.8 A stirring award for over half a million dollars has been granted to Transform, making the university one of six universities in the United States to be asked by Mellon to help build a national network for intersectional studies. And we are the only university to receive a million dollars from the Mellon Foundation to build a Center for Pasifika Indigenous Knowledges to act on ways that Pacific Islander forms of knowing cross-connect with Native American tribal wisdoms. Indeed, just two years into Transform, we landed our first Mellon grant of four to establish a program in Pacific Islands studies, which is now among the top programs in the nation. The university is thrilled by all this productivity, prestige, and grant-getting.
What these grants gain us is the chance to do our concepts. For example, our intersectional studies Mellon grant has allowed us to fund fourteen Intersectional Pedagogy Fellows, across four institutions, who bonded for a year over five teaching workshops and a national webinar. In our second year, we funded ten Intersectional Research Fellows, as we also granted moneys and forged new ties through seven Intersectional Signature Initiatives: the Black Ballet Collective, the Utah Prison Education Project, the Gender-Based Violence Consortium, the Indigenous Women’s Collective, the Critical Disability/Critical Race Initiative, and the Intersectional Transcontinental Train Project. We never thought we’d have such chances for enriching our work so early on—or that we’d experience such a buy-in to our plans from the central administration.
We have been embraced by the structure we would change.
I end with an intimate paradoxical embrace. My heart’s belief that anger-fed generosity is key to future impact. As we push policies, we will need charm. We will need campy confidence, where we collectively say to others, “I dare you to withstand our gorgeousness—we’re not going back in the boxes that contained us.”
Now, you might be thinking: Is this dean naive? Does she know history? Does she think that generosity and charm can address brutal anti-Blackness, hate directed at Asian Americans, violent transphobia, ugly anti-immigrant policies aimed at Latinx communities and Muslims, never mind the stealing of tribal lands? No, I do not think charm cures that. And I am not saying, “Can’t we all just get along?”
Anger is our engine, and we cannot lose it. But creative charm is one surprise we carry. I have seen it be disarming. I have seen it make connection and open a space to receive a different thought and produce a different outcome (as in our open dialogue). Could it be rehearsal for structural change? Almost advertisement for structural change? It’s as if we’re saying through the kindness of our charm: “I’m showing I’m seriously down for change by doing the difficult thing now, connecting through difference . . .” “I’m rehearsing the world I want to inhabit . . .” “In new structures, we will need generosity . . .” Besides, creative charm that exudes generosity is pleasurable to practice—and doesn’t lack edge.
Campiness was always this genius for generosity. Billy Porter, Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion, Margaret Cho, even Oscar Wilde: Campiness practiced by queer communities and communities of color was meant to be wonderfully, wildly unrealistic (beyond our realities). A fabulousness that reaches out and says: “Make way, we’re coming through!” “We’re talking to you.” “And we’re not afraid to listen, take your questions, and hear your beliefs we’d like to speak to.”9
Why be up for this? Because we’re not alone, even when we’re by ourselves. Should you enter a room, I tell our students, as the only Latina, the only seemingly genderqueer person, the only Black student, remember you’re part of a campy collective that is always with you. We are with you and always by your side.10 You are safe enough for kindness born of earned anger. Safe enough for dialogue. With each act of generous engagement, feel yourself saying: “I am fighting for systems that ensure affirming care—affordable care—pure water, clean air, strong shelter, and living wages for all.” “That is what is curled inside my charm.”
This campy confidence undergirds Transform.
Addendum: What Has Since Transpired
What has been our fate since I wrote this essay? In 2024, Utah House Bill 261 killed our university’s diversity offices, which also led to the shuttering of our historic student centers: the Women’s Resource Center (fifty-three years old), the Center for Ethnic Student Affairs (fifty-one years old), the LGBT Resource Center (twenty-two years old), and the Black Cultural Center (just five years old). That bill targeted DEI entities but left the academic and curricular missions of the U untouched. (For now, that is.) We were even able to launch the Center for Pasifika Indigenous Knowledges in fall 2024, with all attendant joy—though we have lost key Pacific Islands Studies faculty just as we’ve added some splendid junior scholars. In June 2025, the School for Cultural and Social Transformation, after standing as a college for almost nine years, was made into a single department—the Department of Ethnic, Gender & Disability Studies—and placed inside the College of Humanities. This move has been dispiriting, to put it mildly. Still, we cling to hope, ready for a fight, with our charm (fed by anger) always to the fore.
Kathryn Bond Stockton is distinguished professor of English, former associate vice president for equity and diversity, and former inaugural dean of Transform: The School for Cultural and Social Transformation at the University of Utah. Two of her books—Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” and The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century—were finalists for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies and her recent book Making Out was a 2020 finalist for the Next Generation Indie Book Award for memoir. Her newest book is Gender(s), and she has also authored God Between Their Lips: Desire Between Women in Irigaray, Brontë, and Eliot.
Notes
I consider the following people coauthors of this college, alongside every faculty, staff, and student member. Together, we have authored a school for transformation. About four paragraphs here, moreover, were first drafted by us as a group (to be used for grant purposes), which I rewrote for those proposals and this essay. I couldn’t be prouder to acknowledge these collaborators who have served in leadership: Edmund Fong, Wanda Pillow, Angela Smith, Maile Arvin, Matt Basso, Hoku Aikau, Claudia Geist, Estela Hernandez, Elizabeth Archuleta, Kim Hackford-Peer, Jen Wozab, Maria Morales, Pat Ross, and Daniel Hadley. I also acknowledge, in the strongest terms, the inaugural chairs who helped found our college: Ed Muñoz and Susie Porter. Finally, I thank our then-provost Ruth Watkins and president at the time, David Pershing, for their bravery and support.
1. The lineage of the concept (coined as a term by Kimberlé Crenshaw) has been moving back in time, through the Combahee River Collective (in the 1970s) to thinkers such as Anna Julia Cooper (born in 1858). See Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139–68; Keeanga-Yamattha Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Haymarket Books, 2017); Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (Aldine Printing House, 1892). For a compendium drawing together a wide spread of writers, activists, and theorists, see Patrick R. Grzanka, ed., Intersectionality: Foundations and Frontiers, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2019).
2. I write on queer issues and racialized gender, inside queer-of-color critique. My book publications include Gender(s) (MIT Press, 2021); Making Out (New York University Press, 2019); The Queer Child (Duke University Press, 2009); Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (Duke University Press, 2006); God Between Their Lips (Stanford University Press, 1994).
3. See Janelle Hanson, “Racial Climate Initiatives,” University of Utah, April 19, 2016, https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/racial-climate-initiatives/.
4. It may help to know that the University of Utah has a college system: There are separate colleges of Humanities, Science, Social and Behavioral Science, Education, Fine Arts, and several more. A “school,” by the university’s definition, is a “small college.”
5. I was there for that history, having directed the Gender Studies Program (which we transformed from Women’s Studies) from 2000 to 2011. Along the way, I and then-director of Ethnic Studies Ed Buendia tried to bring the programs into conversation by getting to know each other’s curricula and dreaming up ways we could think together. Still, these efforts remained quite nascent until Transform was built.
6. Our mission statement reads in full: “‘To act, we must think.’ That’s Transform in a phrase. And relevance is the coin of our realm. Everything on fire in our world we study. Everything everyone is currently debating—shifting sexualities, changing genders, dynamic immigrations, and emergent struggles against all racist and ableist actions—we discuss with passion and cool examination. We are student-centered truly to our core. We believe we are the product of the students who find us. We receive their wisdom, fan their inspiration, and help them build their questioning. At heart, we are forging real-world thinking for hopeful change in a roiling world.” Cited in our proposal to the Mellon Foundation, “Intersectional Studies Collective: Ecologies of Place and Transformative Justice,” September 2021.
7. See “Six Commitments,” President Taylor R. Randall, University of Utah, June 16, 2022, https://president.utah.edu/six-commitments/.
8. Here are the press releases for those grants: Neelam Chand and Brooke Adams, “Building an Educational Bridge,” At the U, October 19, 2018, https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/building-an-educational-bridge/; Morgan Aguilar, “U Awarded Prestigious Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant,” At the U, January 19, 2022, https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/u-awarded-prestigious-andrew-w-mellon-foundation-grant/; Morgan Aguilar, “U to Expand Pacific Islands Studies with Momentous $1M Mellon Grant,” At the U, March 29, 2022, https://attheu.utah.edu/facultystaff/u-to-expand-pacific-islands-studies-with-1m-mellon-grant/.
9. I have always begun my queer theory classes of whatever sort with a focus on camp, for all these reasons. Indeed, the culminating chapter of my 2006 book Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” is entitled “Dark Camp.” I also take cheer from Jules Gill-Peterson’s recent assessment of camp in her piece “Camp and the Millionth Age of Gay Panic,” Sad Brown Girl, July 9, 2022, https://sadbrowngirl.substack.com/p/camp-and-the-millionth-age-of-gay.
10. I give this point a theoretical spin in the concept I’ve devised, “the horizontal hold,” in my book Making Out, 138–43.