Problematising the role of the white researcher in social justice research (original) (raw)

Sleepwalking into the ‘Post-Racial’: Social Policy and Research-Led Teaching

Social Policy and Society, 2021

Research-led teaching is the sine qua non of the 21st century university. To understand its possibilities for teaching and learning about race in Social Policy requires, as a first step, interrogating the epistemological and theoretical core of the discipline, as well as its organisational dynamics. Using parts of Emirbayer and Desmond’s (2012) framework of disciplinary reflexivity, this article traces the discipline’s habits of thought but also its lacunae in the production of racial knowledge. This entails focusing on its different forms of institutionalised and epistemological whiteness, and what has shaped the omission or marginalisation of a full understanding of the racialisation of welfare subjects and regimes in the discipline. Throughout, the article offers alternative analyses and thinking that fully embrace the historical and contemporary role of race, racism, and nation in lived realities, institutional processes, and global racial orders. It concludes with pointers towa...

What ’s Race Got to Do With It? Critical Race Theory’s Conflicts With and Connections to Qualitative Research Methodology and Epistemology

Qualitative Inquiry, 2002

This article will provide the theoretical and conceptual grounding for forthcoming discussions regarding how critical race theory (CRT), as a discourse of liberation, can be used as a methodological and epistemological tool to expose the ways race and racism affect the education and lives of racial minorities in the United States. To that extent, the goal is threefold. First, the authors seek to adequately define CRT by situating it within a specific socio-historical context. Second, they seek to present an argument for why there is a need for CRT in educational and qualitative research. In doing so, they discuss the ways concerns regarding race and racism have or have not been addressed previously in educational research. Finally, they speculate about what lies ahead. In doing so, they fully assess the possible points of agreement and conflicts between CRT and qualitative research in education.

Rethinking White Supremacy

Ethnicities, 2006

The article addresses the nature of power relations that sustain and disguise white racial hegemony in contemporary ‘western’ society. Following the insights offered by critical race theory (CRT), white supremacy is conceived as a comprehensive condition whereby the interests and perceptions of white subjects are continually placed centre stage and assumed as ‘normal’. These processes are analysed through two very different episodes. The first example relates to a period of public crisis, a moment where ‘what really matters’ is thrown into relief by a set of exceptional circumstances, in this case, the London bombings of July 2005. The second example relates to the routine and unexceptional workings of national assessment mechanisms in the education system and raises the question whether assessments merely record educational inequity or actually produce it. These apparently divergent cases are linked by the centrality of white interests and the mobilization of structural and cultura...

Decolonial methodology and reflexive wrestles of whiteness

Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology

This article explores some of the challenges encountered when being a white researcher engaged in research that aims at contributing to social justice for marginalized, indigenous and racialized people and perspectives. Drawing upon a combination of theoretical investigations and practical experiences made during the process of a PhD study, the author offers reflections on what implications taking on a decolonial perspective might have for how a white researcher can possibly approach questions of social and cognitive justice without reinscribing privilege or resorting to self-righteousness. Inspired by Pillow (2015), the author argues that in order to do this, reflexivity need not only be interpretive, but also genealogical, and allow for a “reflexivity of reflexivity”. Furthermore, it is argued that the decolonial stance brings self-reflexivity and ethics together through centring relations as key in accounting for positionality.

The promise of political blackness? Contesting blackness, challenging whiteness and the silencing of racism: A review article

Ethnicities, 2019

This article reviews three books that examine black discourses and perspectives on whiteness and delineate the negative impacts of structural, institutional and interpersonal racism on the life chances and inclusion of people of colour within the national imaginary through both epistemic and material violences. The books explore practices of silencing which surround racism, facilitated by post-racial and colour blind frames which deny people of colour’s lived experiences of racism: Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race; Hirsch’s Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging and Andrews’ Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century. The review focuses on the British context. It explores the politics of place and the journeys undertaken by those marked as racially Other to belong and the recuperative potential of a form of intersectional politics as a means of understanding and navigating how we might overcome divisions between differentially...

Locating the “white” in critical whiteness studies: considerations for white scholars seeking to dismantle whiteness within educational research

International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2022

In this essay, I reflect on and detail some of my experiences navigating the question of what it means for white scholars and white researchers to critically engage their own whiteness within the context of educational research. Considering my current academic role as a faculty member who works primarily with graduate students in educational leadership, students who include white people who are seeking to better understand racism and white supremacy, this reflective essay details my thoughts regarding white people who wish to use educational research to uncover, expose, and disrupt whiteness and white supremacy within schools and contexts that are school adjacent, such as education organizations and education non-profits. I walk the reader through various aspects of my own journey understanding my racialized self, how racism and white supremacy connect to Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS) as a field of inquiry, and ending with my considerations for white scholars.

Experiencing ‘white fragility’: Cultivating discomfort and the politics of representation in feminist research practices

Feministische Geo-RundMail , 2020

Feminist and postcolonial anthropology have long stressed the need to perceive the researcher as a positioned and biased subject (Collins 1991, Rosaldo 1989, Weston 1997) and it is, therefore, important to reflect on one’s position in the field as well as the writing practice. Today it has become standard practice to have at least one student assignment on ‘positionality’ in anthropology or human geography classes. However, in my PhD research, the need to reflect upon my social and cultural position was not only prescribed by social and cultural anthropological practice but also demanded from the interlocutors themselves—because I am a white German woman researching Afrodescendent and Black26 identities. Also, I work with Black feminist activists, who form part of a political community in which questions of representation are a core theme. In this essay I reflect on fieldwork experiences I made at conferences and with research interlocutors and explain how I deal with my own positionality as a white female researcher.