World Journal of Social Science Research ISSN 2375-9747 (Print) ISSN 2332-5534 (Online) Vol. 1, No. 2, 2014 www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/wjssr 151 Fostering Student Activism: Barriers, Sharing, and Dialectics M. Candace Christensen 1* & Alexis V. Arczynski 2 1 University of Texas San Antonio, San Antonio, TX, USA 2 University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA * M. Candace Christensen, E-mail: candace.christensen@utsa.edu Abstract The present study was an exploratory investigation of interviews with six college students who participated in the development and implementation of a theatre-based sexual assault prevention intervention. We investigated how these students experienced their involvement in activism within the context of developing and presenting a sexual assault prevention program. The research revealed common themes: each student experienced fears about participating in activism or identifying as an activist, had strong desires to share knowledge about sexual assault prevention with their community, and viewed their individual activist identities within a complex understanding of what it meant to be activists. These themes helped us to develop implications for future research and educational practices to support activist identity development. Keywords activism, feminist research, grounded theory, college students, barriers, motivation, activist identity development 1. Introduction Encouraging students to value activism and engage in activist behaviors is in alignment with feminist praxis (Brown, 1994; Hooks, 1994; Tong, 2007). As feminist educators and scholars, we urge ourselves to not only counsel and educate, but to inspire our clients and students to develop a critical consciousness about how cultural norms, social systems, and interpersonal interactions support hegemonic practices that stratify us based upon our social locations (Friere, 1970; Hooks, 1994; Lorde, 1984; Tong, 2007). Beyond this critical consciousness, feminists urge individuals to use their awareness to change oppressive norms, systems, and interactions. As scholars, one of the communities with which we work is the college student population. As feminist scholars, we are committed to teaching our students how to analyze their individual, lived experiences from a lens that identifies power; intersections between race, class, and gender; and the value of equity. If we want our students to become change agents, we need to understand how they perceive the process of activism. We begin with an overview of related scholarship. Then, we describe the sexual assault program from which participants were recruited, the participant recruitment procedures, the interview process, and the data analysis procedures. The heart of the article consists of the results of a qualitative investigation of