ABSTRACT
Fostering inclusive and transformative capstone experiences—where students learn and faculty advance their scholarship—requires understanding the interplay of identities and social positions in the learning context. In higher education, diversity is generally viewed as a characteristic of the student body or a state to be pursued, camouflaging the fact that social identities are a set of power relationships that both structure social interactions—such as capstone experiences—and which are themselves restructured through social interaction. Capstones reproduce students in the image of what—or who—already exists, operating as a dialectic between student and faculty identities. Both student and faculty identities are subsumed by the perpetuation—even through critique—of the idea that today's university students have economic and social privilege similar to that of earlier generations of students. The capstone experience demands reaching beyond disciplinary knowledge to a place of reflexivity about one's relationship to that knowledge and the world; this includes awareness of positionality and identities.
