Scholarly Work: Edited Book Volume

Making Servingness a Reality: Confronting Past Harms and Dreaming New Futures.

For those conducting research in educational equity and servingness in higher education, we invite you to consider submitting a chapter to our new edited volume, 

Making Servingness a Reality: Confronting Past Harms and Dreaming New Futures.

Co-editors: Assata Zerai, Brandi Wells-Stone, Mariann Skahan, and Teresa Y. Neely

This edited volume advances interdisciplinary scholarship by operationalizing servingness across higher education and the arts. Building on Wells‑Stone, et al. (2026), it expands servingness as a framework for understanding equity and student success, examining how minority‑serving institutions enact equity through policy, practice, resource allocation, and cultural labor.

The volume explores three questions: how overlooked histories reshape equity; how structural and epistemic violence shape access and belonging; and how marginalized communities mobilize intellectual, cultural, and political resources to challenge exclusion and transform institutional priorities. 

Contributors draw on critical, decolonial feminist, queer, disability justice and other organizational approaches and diverse methods, from case studies and community‑based research to ethnography and creative forms, to consider how institutions shaped by settler colonialism can move toward equitable, community‑centered, liberatory futures. 

Organized around these questions, the volume concludes by outlining pathways for institutional transformation and advancing servingness as both analytic framework and transformative project.

For more information, please, email Assata Zerai, Ph.D. (zerai@unm.edu) and/or complete this short survey and we will be in touch. Link: https://unm.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8tSQaVzg7ZIKms6