Browsing by Subject "Whiteness"

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Agriculture Without Farmers? Constructions of and Resistances to Whiteness in Two Midwestern Agricultural Education Classrooms
(2024) Barr, Eva
Drawing on two semesters of qualitative observation, interviews, and discourse analysis in the field, I wrestle with the contradictory tension between what is happening and what might be happening in Ag Ed classrooms in the “US” (Gilmore, 2022; Giroux, 1983). Heeding an essential problematic imbalance in white land ownership I explore what is happening in two Midwestern Ag Ed classrooms in the way of the cultural reproduction of and resistance to hegemonic whiteness. I find that Ag Ed classes in the Upper Midwest are preparing students for agricultural careers that are not about growing food. Vocational success leading to earning is prioritized over tangible agricultural experience that results in anything edible. I find contradictions in the term “production Ag” which does not include non-commodified food. I suggest that the removal of food production via the taboo language of “farming” from the Ag Ed classroom is a white technology that functions to legitimize commodity crop agribusiness as “agriculture” while food growing is delegitimized as “alternative” and not profitable. At the same time, I find that Ag Ed classrooms offer unique space for experiential, collaborative, outdoor learning, unlike any other school spaces (Croom, 2008; Hains et al., 2015; Roberts, 2006). Finally, in articulating what could be happening in Ag Ed classrooms, I draw on emancipatory pedagogy (Freire, 1975; Giroux, 1983; Kincheloe, 2008), critical (Indigenous and Black) feminist (Penniman, 2018; Simpson, 2014; Styres, et al, 2013; White, 2018) and agroecological literature (Montenegro de Wit, 2023; Plumwood,2008; Shiva, 1997), to consider how we might do “US” Ag Ed better, to, in Gilmore’s words, produce social justice.
April in Paris, Autumn in New York: Whiteness and the Racial Formation of European Jazz in the US, 1940s–1970s
(2022-04) Vad, Mikkel
This dissertation charts the US reception and dissemination of European jazz and how ideas of European jazz were shaped through racialized narratives in the meeting of African American culture and European whiteness. In a series of roughly chronological of case studies, it traces how Americans wrote and thought about European jazz and explore the lives of Europeans jazz critics and musicians who went to the US.As a historiographical intervention, the dissertation responds to the fact that histories of transnational jazz in large part locate “the transnational” outside the US. The histories told in this dissertation show that the idea of “European jazz” was not only created in Eu-rope, but was also defined by discourses and music created in the US. Mobilizing critical race studies, the dissertation also argues that scholarship on European jazz has avoided the question of its overwhelming whiteness at the expense of colorblind cosmopolitan univer-salism. By focusing on how European jazz fared in the US, this dissertation highlights how the unavoidable fact of jazz’s Blackness came to set the whiteness of European jazz in re-lief. This also shows that the account of whiteness and jazz, even within the US, cannot be bounded by strict national frameworks. Chapter 1 shows how European critics were positioned in the US press as culturally superior to American jazz critics and audiences, through discourses of high-art class hierar-chies and racial whiteness. Chapter 2 explores of the US careers of the European singers Alice Babs and Caterina Valente, whose gendered whiteness was positioned as a form of exoticized Europeanness in the US. Chapter 3 is a portrait of the Austrian pianist and key-board player Joe Zawinul, who used narratives of miscegenation, racial passing, and “soul” in ways that rely on the fundamental instability of racial markers but also on his white privi-lege to tell such stories. Chapter 4 is a case study of the most prominent European jazz rec-ord label, ECM, which built an identity as a European label upon the already established American ideas of European jazz, specifically its high-art status, “serious” approach to mu-sic, “pure” sound production, and whiteness. The research presented herein reveals that Americans used the specter of Europeanness for their own purposes, reshaping American jazz discourse through transatlantic juxtaposi-tions. Most consistently, American critics and musicians saw these fault lines as one marked by class and race, associating European critics with intellectualism and European jazz with the idea of high art (for instance, through the comparison with European classical music). European ethnicities functioned as a white privileged position from which musi-cians could negotiate their identities with African Americans, claiming both solidarity and difference. American notions of an intrinsic white, highbrow European sensibility worked to uplift jazz in the cultural hierarchy.
From white supremacy to solidarity: a pedagogy of anti-capitalist antiracism
(2013-05) Casey, Zachary A.
This dissertation focuses on a pedagogical analysis of the intersections of white racial identity, nationalism, and neoliberalism as they manifest and impact teachers and teacher education. After first detailing how my own family became white, I discuss my method in this work in two ways: first, as a form of Freirean Critical Study (an elaboration of Freire, 2006); and secondly, through an overview of Marxism, Marx's importance for working against neoliberalism, and the anti-capitalist foundations of the work. Next, I provide a conceptual history of white racial identity in the United States focusing on the ways in which whiteness is invented and imagined out of blackness and how this "inventing" functions to secure the material interests of the (white) owners of the means of production. I work to show how whiteness and white supremacy work to normalize and maintain capitalism through a logic of racial hierarchy and exclusion. Using this historical analysis, I shift to a critique of two of the dominant forms of contemporary whiteness studies: "White Privilege" and "Race Treason." I show the ways in which our present dominant (hegemonic) conception of white antiracist action and pedagogy, white privilege discourse, fails to mobilize white people for material action to work against systemic racism by overemphasizing a critical flaw: white privilege is an effect of systemic oppression, not the cause, and thus a focus solely on privilege without a critical interrogation of oppression functions to maintain the status quo. I extend this analysis into the role of nationalism in white supremacy through examining the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, the formation and activism of the Tea Party, and the writing of Pat Buchanan to show the ways in which whiteness is made further complex, in the context of the United States especially, through its entanglement with nationalism. Finally, I shift to the application of the above theorizations in teaching and teacher education. I demonstrate the ways in which the "professionalization" of teaching and other neoliberal reform efforts undermine critical, culturally relevant, and socially just approaches to pedagogy both in the classroom and at the programmatic level. I then provide the basis for an "anti-capitalist antiracist pedagogy;" first in the classroom, and lastly as a programmatic vision for teacher education. I conclude that such work is necessary, and inherently possible, as we imagine ways to combat the onslaught of white supremacist-nationalist-neoliberal logics that threaten the very existence of teaching for social justice and emancipation in our oppressive social order.
The Melancholy of Schooling: A Critical Ethnographic Study of Race, Trauma, and Learning in a High School English Classroom
(2017-06) Grinage, Justin
This year-long critical ethnographic study discusses the difficulties that arose when a multiracial class of 12th grade high school English students engaged in learning surrounding the reality of racism in the United States amid public displays of police brutality. Most notably, three high-profile cases of racial violence committed against black males, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, took place within five months of each other and coincided with the school year that I conducted my fieldwork for this study. Using the psychoanalytic concept of racial melancholia (Cheng, 2001) as a theoretical framework, I demonstrate how repressed forms of racial trauma and grief are experienced through the process of teaching and learning and how these processes are connected to larger formations of American racialization. My analyses focuses on the psycho-social (Frosh & Baraitser, 2008) construction, production, and transmission of trauma in the context of learning about race in the classroom. I place racial melancholia in conversation with theories of history (Benjamin, 1969), mourning (Freud, 1917), emotion (Ahmed, 2004), haunting (Frosh, 2013), whiteness (Thandeka, 1999) and affect (Massumi, 2015) to document the various ways that both the students and the classroom teacher struggled to learn and teach about racism. I argue that melancholic trauma and racial loss permeates American identities as a result of the nation’s extensive history of denying its racial transgressions. The implications of the study emphasize that we must learn to identify and work through unresolved racial grief if we are to improve our comprehension of race and engender anti-racist agency in the face of persistent systemic and individual acts of racial subjugation. This dissertation makes a distinct contribution to social justice approaches to education by underscoring the generative and productive possibilities for designing curriculum and employing critical pedagogies that center on understanding racial trauma.
Multicultural Community Building in an Urban Neighborhood
(2015-06) Champe, John
This is an anthropological ethnography of multicultural community-building among the almost all-white activists in Minneapolis' largest neighborhood, Whittier. It shows the effects that the discourses, theories, and activities of these neighborhood activists have on the social structures that reproduce class, racial, and ethnic inequality. The first chapter analyzes the acrimonious battle over the opening of an apartment building for homeless. It shows the construction of the symbols at play, including Stability, Burden, Stakeholders, Gentrification, and Over-concentration of the poor. Chapter two explains how politics in Whittier became so polarized between competing factions of white, liberal, middle-class homeowners, who all share a love of their neighborhood's diversity. The study also illuminates how the faction representing "homeowner interests"� achieved dominance. Chapter three shows that while many paint Whittier as very dangerous, statistically it is not. The chapter explains the role that fear, exaggerated talk of crime, citizen crime patrols, media sensationalism, personal identity, and class conflict play in the creation of place and racial segregation. Chapter four explains how ethnic identities and class hierarchies are socially constructed through neighborhood campaigns, and also how the meaning of "diversity"� itself gets produced. The chapter details how white and Somali ethnicities are manufactured by struggles over a Somali mall and the parking around it. Chapter five reveals the failures of democracy in Whittier politics, and argues that not only has elected, democratic governance failed, but that attempting it on the neighborhood scale is probably futile and destructive. Chapter six discovers that while the academic literature argues that Americans are largely ignorant of social structures that reproduce inequality, white Whittier activists of many viewpoints are actually cognizant of them, and of their own privilege. This study finds that the key to understanding the multiplicity of thought and policy on poverty and multiculturalism, is by investigating Whittier activists' theories on neighborhood development. For example, activists opposing more subsidized housing in Whittier espouse that Whittier's health requires more homeowners, fewer renters, and fewer residents needing housing subsidies. This activism modified class hierarchy, by re-imagining it along the lines of the housing one inhabits.
Orientalist knowledges at the European periphery: Norwegian racial projects, 1970-2005.
(2010-05) Myrdahl, Eileen Muller
In this dissertation I examine recent Norwegian racial formations. I argue that whiteness has become an increasingly central aspect of productions of Norwegian national identity. Furthermore, I show that the racializing processes first established in the early 1970s continue to be reproduced and shape Norwegian society today. The dissertation focuses on three disparate but interlinked sites. First, I discuss the experiences of postwar Southern and Eastern European migrants in Norway, based on interviews with 12 migrants. I argue that these migrants are produced as white in a qualitatively different way from non-migrant Norwegians who are seen as white. Furthermore, I suggest that the apparent production of the migrants' children as white and Norwegian shows that Norwegian forms of whiteness are less dependent on tracing descent to Norwegian territory than has previously been suggested. Secondly, I trace the changing discourses of race and migration that culminated in the 1975 "immigration stop" legislation. I argue that at the beginning of the decade Norwegian understandings of immigration were not heavily dependent on constructions of race, but that they became so within a few years. Using close readings of policy documents, the Parliamentary debate on the "immigration stop" and newspaper coverage from the entire period, I show that the development and passing of the legislation was dependent on, and in turn codified, racial constructs that saw some migrants as always already excessively different. Lastly, I argue that imperatives to love-and romance-based marriage that is evident in Norwegian family reunification law constitutes a racial project - one that can be seen as an extension of the processes of racialization that were established in the 1970s. I also suggest that arranged marriages queer in relation to Norwegian heteronormativities. In the conclusion I point both to the continued reiteration of race in Norway, and to forms of opposition to the racial productions that I have discussed. I argue that international perspectives on racial formation provide analytic dexterity that is necessary if Norwegian racializing processes are to be interrupted.
The place of race in cultural nursing education: the experience of white BSN nursing faculty
(2011-01) Holland, Ann Elizabeth
The growing cultural diversity in the United States confronts human service professions such as nursing with challenges to fundamental values of social justice and caring. Non-White individuals have experienced long-documented and persistent disparities in health outcomes and receipt of health care services when compared to whites. Medical evidence suggests that health care disparities experienced by non-Whites in the U.S. are perpetuated, in part, by bias, discrimination, and stereotyping by health care providers. National experts recommend cultural competence education to fix this problem. The cultural competence focus in nursing education programs has been criticized by some nursing scholars for essentializing culture and failing to examine the dynamics of race and racism in U.S. society. Yet, the call for an explicit focus on race and racism raises the question, "Are nursing faculty, of whom 93% are White, prepared to teach students about race and racism?" This study investigated what White nursing faculty members who teach cultural nursing education think, believe, and teach about race, racism, and anti-racism. The study resulted in four conclusions that are of interest not only to nursing faculty who teach cultural topics, but to any nursing faculty who wish to prepare students to work for justice in a culturally and racially diverse society. First, the findings suggest that the Whiteness of the participants' personal and professional experiences and contexts obscured their understanding and teaching of race, racism, and anti-racism. Second, learning about race, racism, and anti-racism was best understood as a lifelong developmental process and warrants developmental learning goals. Third, teaching about race, racism, and anti-racism was most effective when grounded in relational, holistic pedagogies. Finally, the findings of the study suggest that the White faculty participants were not well prepared to teach about race, racism, and anti-racism, in most cases lacking the intention and academic knowledge to incorporate these topics into their culture courses. This study has implications for White nursing educators and administrators and offers recommendations to assist them in taking individual and systemic actions that may facilitate teaching and learning about race, racism, and anti-racism.
Racial discourse in predominantly white classrooms: a phenomenological study of teachers' lived experiences discussing race
(2012-09) Lee-Nichols, Mary Elizabeth
This dissertation examines the lived experiences of white middle school teachers in predominantly white rural communities as they discuss race and race issues with students. Using methods of descriptive phenomenology, interviews were conducted with teachers to explore what it was like for them to talk about race in classrooms comprised of only white students, and when classes included one or two students of color. The essence of the experience was determined through phenomenological analysis, making meaning of how teachers’ experienced dialogue focused on race. Findings reveal six themes illuminating how teachers’ experienced talking about race and issues of race with students, whether the discussions were intentional or unplanned. Their experiences were characterized by fear and discomfort, uncertainty, anger, frustration, experience, and paralysis. Teachers experienced fear and discomfort as race became central to the discussion, especially concerned about how racial discourse would negatively impact the one or two students of color in the classroom. Uncertainty surfaced as teachers struggled with issues of colorblindness, “politically correct” language, and the possibility of reinforcing white supremacy. Anger and frustration emerged as teachers found they were unprepared and lacking experience in facilitating lessons and discussions surrounding race. However, experience acquired through exposure to aspects diversity in college, or years of integrating social justice issues into lessons, made teachers more likely to have discussions of race with students. Finally, as a result of the negative feelings they associated with discussions of race, some teachers experienced a sense of paralysis as they considered eliminating lessons in which issues of race might surface. This study contributes to an understanding of the experiences of white teachers as participants’ in a racial society within a predominantly white rural setting. Implications of the study suggest a need for teacher preparation programs to address race and racism more directly through curriculum and practice. This will significantly impact how white students and students of color make meaning of race in predominantly white communities.
Student response to critical literacy within the dominant discourse.
(2009-07) Knutson, Margaret MacCarthy
Critical literacy is one application of critical pedagogy that focuses on the cultural and ideological assumptions that underwrite texts and discourses. While there is no simple, unified definition of critical literacy, instruction that aligns with this framework involves investigating the politics of representation and interrogating the inequitable, cultural positioning of speakers and readers within discourses. Critical pedagogy and critical literacy are often framed pedagogies of the oppressed with little attention to their relevance within the dominant Discourse. However, many theorists believe that such teaching within predominantly white and affluent populations is not only relevant, but necessary (Howard, 2003; Thandeka, 2002). Drawing on teacher-as-researcher design, this study examines how the students in her all white class within an affluent suburb made sense the ideas of power and privilege and how they responded to critical literacy pedagogy. This action research utilizes grounded theory and critical discourse analysis to illuminate the complex and nuanced responses of students. Data includes video recorded class discussions, student work samples, fieldwork observation notes, interviews and surveys. Findings from this study reveal the complex and sometimes thorny ways that critical literacy manifested itself in the classroom and in students' lived lives. The implications for teaching are presented in two themes 1) The need for teachers to build trust with communities outside of the classroom, namely, parents and administrators through strong communication, academic rigor, understanding, and 2) The need for teachers to increase awareness of the potential negative effects of critical literacy on students and minimize them. The intent of this study is to address the need for greater understanding of how students engage in critical literacy to better support teachers, students and to strengthen it as a pedagogy.
Transformational Festivals and the Enchantment Economy: Performance and Race in Neoliberal Times
(2019-06) Schmidt, Bryan
This dissertation examines the phenomenal global growth of music festival culture over the last two decades, with particular emphasis on “Transformational Festivals,” a genre of participatory, for-profit event influenced by New Age ideology and aesthetics. I use ethnographic examination of these festivals in the United States and Costa Rica as a basis for understanding the role that participatory culture and event economies play in territorialization and racialization. I historicize this analysis as a component of liberal and neoliberal culture by examining the lineage of repertoires and event structures in US temporary outdoor communities, which utilized the natural landscape as a basis for creating a White-dominated participatory culture. These communities were crucial to furthering a settler colonial project by creating deeply affective forms of social connectivity among White liberals, while also iteratively and imaginatively overwriting the landscape’s history of conquest so as to render native claims to colonized land pliable and, ultimately, dismissible. Turning to the aesthetics of contemporary festival culture, I trouble the scholarly tendency to examine the festival event as a social interstice that exists “outside” of quotidian time and space. I build a concept of “enchanting performance” that allows the production of event space, and the performance of idiosyncratic festival repertoires to appear as activities self-consciously connected to political and social commitments. This offers an alternative to structural interpretations of festivals as “counter-spaces,” allowing us to consider the complicated role such events play in ongoing movements for social change—especially those that pertain to race. I then outline how festival aesthetics tie in to a wider “enchantment economy” that operates at local and transnational levels. With an examination of the Harmony Park Music Garden in Minnesota, I articulate how struggles over symbolic and material control of the festival space create a fraught politics of Whiteness that manifest through claims of autochtony vis-à-vis the festival grounds. I then examine Envision Festival in Costa Rica to discuss the phenomenon of “Destination Festivals,” with attentiveness to transnational symbolic and material exchange. I outline how Envision utilizes an erotics of the Other to capitalize on the libidinal economy that attends festivalgoing in order to generate identity capital for White tourists. I also discuss the economic and social consequences of this culture mining, which offer up heritage as an object of mass consumption in the service of White identity formation.
Whiteness and Raciolinguistic Ideologies in the Preparation of Content Teachers for Working with Language-Minoritized Youth
(2019-05) Schornack, Miranda
We must attend to raciolinguistic ideologies (Flores & Rosa, 2015) in the preparation of new teachers to work with language-minoritized students. Racism and linguicism are manifestations of Whiteness (Frankenberg, 1993) and White Cultural Hegemony and, left insufficiently examined or non-confronted, they will continue to be the building blocks on which new teachers enter the profession. In this study, I used interpretive case methodology (Merriam, 1998) to examine three critical incidents (Flanagan, 1954) of White, English-speaking, content teacher candidates learning to teach language-minoritized youth. My findings call for preservice teacher development to include languaging and infrastructuring strategies (Cushing-Leubner, Kim, Sato, Schornack, Tobin, 2017) to hold complicated conversations (Mason, 2016b) about race and language. I offer a metaphor for Whiteness as an addiction and look to principles based in spirituality that could provide a pathway to recovery.
Wrestling with Whiteness: Complexities and Contexts of White Educator Identities
(2022-05) Deutschman , Megan
This study utilizes life history methodology to understand how White teachers develop racial awareness, and in turn, how this contributes to the makings of a White identity. Critical Whiteness Studies frames this work, and demands a nuanced, contextual, and intersectional understanding of how Whiteness functions both individually and systemically. This research advances scholarly understandings of enactments of Whiteness in a critical empirical way that deeply considers the complexities and tensions that White educators feel as they attempt to understand their role in a society that is marked by racism and structural oppression. This study begins by exploring the moments in childhood that delineated racial boundaries for the participants, and I offer insights into how White children begin to conceptualize race. As adults, the participants in this study chose the profession of education, thus exposing themselves to races, languages, cultures, and religions that were different from those in the insulated White world in which they grew up and built a life. For many of these educators, teaching was the first time they had been “exposed to difference.” This exposure complicated their prior notions of race, leading to conflicting and ambivalent feelings as they began to examine their own ideological considerations. After grounding this study in the development of White racial awareness, I illuminate how situated and selective this awareness is. The educators in this study often made attempts to enact their racial awareness at school, but upon leaving school they either could not or would not enact that same awareness in their everyday lives. Here is where this study becomes especially critical to the field of Comparative and International Development Education (CIDE), as the themes of transracial adoption, sex tourism, immigration, and international volunteer-tourism surface as educators share stories pertaining to their understandings of race, racism, and Whiteness. These narratives demonstrate how local issues have a global resonance, and furthers recent arguments that an examination of Whiteness and its historical legacies of power, colonization, and domination are critical for the field of CIDE. Finally, the teacher participants in this study share stories of the real and/or perceived social and emotional costs for their understandings of racism and their attempted solidarity with people of Color. As such, this dissertation advances current debates on the cost of racialized awareness to White people. This is an under-researched topic in Critical Whiteness Studies, but it is vitally important as it speaks to the reasons why White people are thwarted in their anti-racist attempts. This also speaks to the costs that are expounded on White people, both by individuals and society at large.

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