Theses and Dissertations from DePaul University

Date of Award

Spring 2026

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Educational Leadership

College

College of Education

First Advisor

Amira Proweller

Abstract

This qualitative phenomenological study examined how entry-level live-in residence directors make meaning of their professional roles while living within institutionally structured environments that merge domestic space with ongoing job responsibility. Although existing scholarship on housing and residence life addresses burnout, boundary management, emotional labor, and attrition, dominant work–life balance frameworks presume that work and home exist as separable domains subject to individual regulation. Such assumptions remain insufficient for professionals whose residences are embedded within the institutional architecture they oversee. Guided by Borderlands Theory (Anzaldúa, 1987), this study reconceptualized the live-in residence director role as a structurally produced borderland in which professional identity, institutional visibility, and personal life remain in sustained overlap.   Using a phenomenological approach, in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with entry-level residence directors with one to three years of experience at colleges and universities in the United States. Data analysis attended closely to the meanings participants assigned to living and working within campus-provided housing and interpreted those meanings through key Borderlands orientations, including nepantla, la facultad, the Coatlicue state, conocimiento, and the Coyolxauhqui process. Findings indicate that participants did not experience boundary permeability as episodic intrusion but as a continuous occupational circumstance. The residence director apartment emerged as a conditional home, simultaneously framed as compensation and experienced as constrained by institutional oversight, spatial visibility, and policy regulation.   This study advances housing and residence life and student affairs scholarship by reframing live-in professional roles as structurally coextensive borderlands rather than as sites of failed boundary management. It challenges individualizing narratives of burnout and situates emotional strain within institutional design, duty systems, and proximity-based labor expectations. By foregrounding how entry-level residence directors interpret and endure sustained in-betweenness, the study contributes a theoretically grounded account of institutional presence as lived experience. Implications include reexamining supervision, on-duty structures, expectations of availability, and organizational responsibility for designing residence life roles that acknowledge the psychological and identity-based consequences of living within the institution one serves.

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