Advancing advocacy communication theory: a theory grounded in undocumented college students’ motivations and strategies for challenging oppression

ABSTRACT

Undocumented college students experience a myriad of stressors (e.g. fear of deportation, limited access to educational resources; Enriquez, Morales Hernandez & Ro. 2018. Deconstructing immigrant illegality: A mixed-methods investigation of stress and health among undocumented college students. Race and Social Problems, 10(3), 193–208. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-018-9242-4) because of systemic oppression, and they often engage in various advocacy efforts to challenge those oppressive systems. Although different persuasion (e.g. Reasoned Action Approach, Anger Activism Model; Fishbein & Ajzen. 2010. Predicting and changing behavior: The reasoned action approach. Psychology Press; Turner. 2007. Using emotion in risk communication: The anger activism model. Public Relations Review, 33(2), 114–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pubrev.2006.11.013) and social movements theories (e.g. Mass Society Theory; Theory of Relative Deprivation; Bernstein & Crosby. 1980. An empirical examination of relative deprivation theory. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 16(5), 442–456. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(80)90050-5) can describe why minoritized group members advocate on behalf of their ingroup, these theories primarily focus on traditional advocacy efforts. rather than representing advocacy as multidimensional. Consequently, this paper introduces Advocacy Communication Theory (ACT), which argues that advocacy communication is a complex and multidimentional process consisting of advocacy strategies at the individual, interpersonal, community, organizational, and policy levels. ACT also identifies predictors of advocacy communication by drawing from communication and psychological factors, and it discusses the potential health implications associated with engaging in advocacy communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Advocacy communication
• oppressive systems
• undocumented college students
• wellbeing
• social movements

Acknowledgement

Dr. Cornejo is supported by the NIH FIRST award number U54CA267738, with funding support from Office of the Director, National Institutes of Health (OD).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Undocumented immigrants are persons, of any age and nationality, who are non-U.S. citizens or non-U.S. permeant residents and who arrive in the United States without legal authorization or who enter the United States with legal authorization but remain in the United States after their authorization expires (Internal Revenue Service, 27 August 2017).

2 According to the Migration Policy Institute, approximately 1.1 million undocumented youth meet the age and education requirements to obtain DACA (Weingarten et al., 2014).

3 According to Case and Hunter (2012), ‘oppression can be defined as systemic and widespread social inequity occurring through the use of power, [and] it involves the existence of a hierarchical social system, which grants one group (e.g., racial, gender, or socioeconomic) greater access to resources (social, economic, political, cultural, and psychological) relative to other groups and creates a marginalized or minority group experience’ (p. 258). Further, oppression does not need to be extreme, violent, or involve the legal system; it can occur in everyday life through interpersonal communication such as microaggressions and discrimination (Deutsch, 2006).

4 Although collective action is vastly used within and outside the social movements’ literature, a specific definition is often excluded. Nonetheless, Oliver (1993) defines collective action as ‘any action that provides a collective good’ (p. 272)