Browsing by Subject "whiteness"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10

Children’s Media Use, Family Psychological Functioning, and Parental Media-Based Racial Socialization during the Dual COVID-19 and Whiteness Pandemics
(2024-07) Eales, Lauren
The dual pandemics of COVID-19 and Whiteness have been jointly affecting numerous families’ lives since 2020 around the world, particularly in the United States. The Whiteness pandemic (Ferguson et al., 2021) has existed long before 2020, but its existence was highlighted in May 2020 following the murder of Mr. George Floyd. This dissertation includes three mixed methods studies that addressed various consequences of these dual pandemics, including child screen media use behaviors, family resilience, and media-based White racial socialization. The data from these studies come from online survey data collected with parents (mostly mothers) living in, primarily, the Twin Cities, MN metro region from 2019 to 2021, and individual interview data collected in 2022. Study 1 assessed screen media (i.e., screen time) and problematic media use (addictive-like screen behaviors) from 2019 to 2021, and found an inverted U-shape for both, peaking in 2020. Some parents reported returning to “normal” in 2021, while others reported continued struggles with media use. Study 2 assessed family functioning and resilience from 2020 to 2021, and found that families, children, and parents were still exhibiting resilience ~15 months post-COVID-19 pandemic onset. Finally, Study 3 assessed how White mothers were using media to talk to their children about race using a mixed methods collective case study. Active race-related media mediation was related to lower ethnic protection. Mothers across multiple White racial identity development groups were not using media to talk to their children about race, often citing their child’s age and emotions as reasons to not engage in that conversation. Findings from these studies can be used by researchers and interventionists to improve child and parent mental health, family resilience, and parental racial socialization during the dual pandemics.
Critical Community Literacy: Looking With Local Resistance
(2018-05) Puett, Sarah
This dissertation considers the relationship between literacy and activism in the public sphere. In the fall of 2016 I participated with a local racial justice organization where I took part in a series of public meetings. Focused on alternative means of public safety, the meetings were planned in response to local state violence—multiple incidents of police shooting and killing Black community members—as well as the broader interlocking systems of oppression which fail to protect people of color. This study exhibits how one decentralized organization helps establish critical literacy in a segregated urban area, better known for its progressive politics than its proclivity for lethal state violence. These meetings warrant a more complex, critical frame than community literacy scholarship currently provides. Drawing on both literacy and rhetorical studies, my analysis reveals the ways in which literacy events represent a type of intervention, and in this case, serve to disrupt mythic timelines. During the events, I contend, local Black organizers occupy and transgress the role of a literacy sponsor by calling on their (kn)own experiences with racial oppression. My analysis nuances the relationship between literacy events and practices, and in turn, I offer a series of dialectics for participant-observation in community literacy studies. I hope to establish precedent for speaking more plainly about racism and whiteness in community literacy scholarship, and to challenge the dominant notion that community literacy projects are categorically just. Looking With Local Resistance signals that if we participate as activists in communities outside the academy, we must do so as reflexively and sustainably as we do critically.
Liberty, Guns, And Pocket Constitutions: Constructing A White Nation Through Legal Discourse In The Pacific Northwest
(2022-04) Wright, Robin
This dissertation investigates the mainstreaming of far-right politics by examining the production of a right-wing discourse focused on the radical defense of the U.S. Constitution in the Pacific Northwest. Despite its progressive image, The Pacific Northwest is a compelling site for analysis, as Euro-American settlers have long sought to render the region as a place reserved for white residents. Through a series of case studies exploring campaigns ranging from gun ownership to First Amendment rights, I argue that activists mobilize a conservative constitutional discourse to re-establish white territorial control at the local and regional level. Examining the circulation of this conservative constitutional discourse, I demonstrate the extent to which activists use constitutionally coded-appeals to position white able-bodied men as the legitimate representatives of “the people.” I show that in doing so, activists engage a constitutional discourse that reproduces the legal, political, and cultural conditions of possibility for white supremacist systems while disavowing an explicit logic of racial superiority. My research demonstrates how right-wing movements use a constitutional discourse to channel regional concerns about changing demographics and shifting representation into white nationalist demands. I thus contend that this constitutional discourse enables a paradoxical turn to extra-legal and sometimes violent actions, as right-wing activists disrupt and delegitimize state action while asserting their own popular authority as the sovereign. My dissertation makes an important contribution to geography, critical race studies, and legal studies by showing how a socio-spatial analysis of law must be mobilized in order to understand the shifting ideologies of race shaping contemporary right-wing movements.
A Narrative Self-Study: The Intersection of Anti-Racism, Whiteness, and the Institutionalization of Ethnic Studies in K-12 Education
(2022-05) Siebert, Molly
In November 2020, the school board governing Patinmay Public Schools (PPS) passed a policy change requiring ethnic studies coursework to graduate. For several years, numerous people have worked to make ethnic studies a possibility for all students. My story with ethnic studies in PPS, however, began more recently in August 2020. Utilizing methods from narrative inquiry and self-study, I examined opportunities and challenges encountered during the early stages of implementing the new ethnic studies graduation requirement. Desiring to be a co-conspirator (Love, 2019), it was critical for me to reflect on ways in which my identity as a white woman impacted my work implementing ethnic studies as a graduation requirement. By conducting a self-study, I hoped to grow in my own practice, with the ultimate goal of improving ethnic studies programming for students and teachers in Patinmay Public Schools. For this self-study, narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) was utilized to explore, analyze, and make meaning of critical experiences from August 2020 to December 2021. By combining narrative inquiry with methods of self-study along with drawing on theories from Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), I developed a framework to analyze and interpret experiences, interactions, decision-making, and programmatic dilemmas in various social contexts. Further, I aimed to contribute to previous research and literature that examines whiteness , white identity, and race consciousness along with research on ethnic studies in K-12 educational settings.Findings from this narrative self-study add to previous research and literature on ethnic studies, interest convergence, and white emotionality. By passing a policy in which students are required to take ethnic studies to graduate, PPS appeared to be equity and justice-oriented at a time in which the nation was undergoing a racial reckoning. There was public support for the passage of this policy and district leadership was applauded for this monumental change. However, some folx in leadership positions were resistant to disrupt or change existing systems, which supports existing literature on interest convergence (e.g., Bell, 1980; Milner, 2008). Stories related to professional development, determining licensure areas for teaching ethnic studies, infusing ethnic studies versus stand-alone courses, protecting previous informal affinity spaces, and co-creation in our current educational system may be beneficial to both the ethnic studies research community and K-12 school districts across the United States. The narrative accounts exploring experiences of white shame and discomfort adds to existing literature on white emotionality (e.g., Ahmed, 2004; Love, 2019; Matias, 2016; Thandeka, 1999; Zembylas, 2018). Examining white emotions through the lens of anti-racism and belonging supports existing literature that as humans we fear abandonment and have a desire to belong (Lensmire, 2017; Thandeka, 1999). The findings illuminate that consciousness raising around white emotions is not enough. I argue that it is critical for white folx to also examine how emotions are being confronted and addressed—to take into consideration clean pain versus dirty pain (Menakem, 2017). Processing white emotionality through clean pain paves the way for healing. Through actions of transforming the self (brown, 2017), white folx become sites for disrupting whiteness and can better contribute to collective activism.
An Opportunity in Educational Engagement
(2023-12) Block, Sequoia Baobab S. Larson
This capstone focuses on both civic engagement and educational justice and has multiple components. One component includes an analysis of the Read Act legislation designed to guide reading instruction in Minnesota schools, enacted by the Minnesota State Legislature in 2023. I assert the Read Act places too much emphasis on evidence-based research and largely ignores student experience, motivation, and cultural diversity. Another component of the capstone includes me becoming a subject of the research by participating as a volunteer at a local school. In this role, I explore my positionality as a white man as well as the dominant role whiteness plays in educational spaces. I facilitated a cross-age tutoring experience in which students in grades four and five taught reading lessons to students in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten. I explore both academic and civic engagement aspects of these interactions and recognize potential benefits that cross-age tutoring has for both tutors and tutees.
A Phenomenological Exploration of the Hegemonic Insider-Outsider in Teacher Education
(2021-06) Hong, Younkyung
Social justice-oriented teacher education is a way for prospective teachers to learn and practice taking critical perspectives and use reflection for their future teaching practice (McDonald & Zeichner, 2009). Despite preservice teachers’ interest and effort in engaging with racially and culturally just educational work, their approaches often result in (re)producing the marginalization of people of color and/or people from non-dominant backgrounds (Leonardo, 2013). Meanwhile, studies have addressed how preservice teachers feel when they are forced to engage in anti-racist work when they have little space to reconcile the dilemmas they may experience during their journeys to becoming critical educators (Mason, 2016; Philip & Zavala, 2016). In this dissertation research, I seek ways to support preservice teachers’ engagement with the topics and practices related to race, racism, and cultural diversity. This work is grounded in the understanding that various axes and dimensions of power relations deeply inform teacher practice (Asher, 2007) and assumes that future teachers must learn how to navigate various forms of domination and exclusion in society. The four main areas of scholarship are in the foreground of this study: (Critical) Whiteness Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Feminist Theory, and Intersectionality Theory. In terms of research methodology, based on Vagle’s (2018) post-intentional phenomenology, I suggest intercultural post-intentional phenomenology by claiming the necessity of intercultural inquiry because Western/Eurocentric approaches tend to prevent researchers from more fully understanding different cultural aspects involved in educational phenomena (Hong, 2019). This methodological development builds on Lau’s (2016) intercultural phenomenological understanding, which challenges the Eurocentric tradition and tendency of phenomenology and promotes an intercultural and/or decolonizing phenomenological approach. This dissertation captures some of the tentative productions and manifestations of the phenomenon of the hegemonic insider-outsider in a teacher education course. My analysis shows how the hegemonic insider-outsider is produced as individual preservice teachers navigate various forms and levels of relationships, dominant discourses, oppressions, and marginalization. This study finds that the phenomenon of the hegemonic insider-outsider is constructed in multiple ways and levels as it is produced at the intersections of individual students’ positionalities, social systems, and structures.
Race Critical Action Research: 8th Grade Global Studies Teachers Move Beyond the Status Quo to Address Issues of Race and Racism in Our Classrooms
(2018-05) Andrews van Horne, Kate
Research has shown that despite a recent emphasis on issues of race and racism in US society, White teachers struggle to construct adequate learning environments for their students of Color (Epstein, 2009; Martell, 2013; Sleeter, 2017). Further, Milner (2006) posits that when White teachers lose themselves in the “having of good intentions,” their failure to act enshrines the status quo in classrooms. Using race-critical action research, the author presents the work of a group of White female teacher partners (n=6) who collaborated over two years to critically examine the role of race and racism in their teaching practice. Data included transcripts of group meetings, reflective journals and interviews. Building on a framework of sociocultural and race-critical theories, the author explores the role that resistance and appropriation played as the teacher partners worked to improve their anti-racist teaching practice. Specifically, the teacher partners sought to defy deficit-thinking paradigms, redefine power in the classroom, and create a caring classroom climate. Through sociocultural and race-critical analyses, the author finds evidence of what Lensmire (2010) terms an “ambivalent” White racial identity; one that reveals itself to be both race-evasive and race-visible (Jupp and Lensmire, 2016) when enacting anti-racist teacher practice. The author concludes that collaboration and critical reflection are essential conditions for surfacing these paradoxes and deepening anti-racist teacher practice.
Race Talk In The Classroom: Whiteness, Emotionality, And Antiracism
(2020-05) Lally, Kevin
Like many classroom teachers, I long understood antiracist pedagogy as white privilege pedagogy (McIntosh, 1988), where students must confess to their privilege to embrace antiracism. By leaving young white people with untenable models of understanding themselves as raced beings, this work has, to put it generously, come up short. Using critical ethnographic methods, I seek to make better sense of these sincere shortcomings by locating them in historical (Allen, 2012; Roediger, 1991) and emotional (Boler, 1999; Trainor, 2008; Zembylas, 2006) contexts. I worked with ten white high school students over the final five months of their senior year. We attempted to work through the constrained and paradoxical ways they understood race and race talk. We worked through their struggles with the languages and patterns of race talk, their inadequate schooling on race, and their inability to manifest their antiracist values. I find that the discourses available to them, in particular white privilege pedagogy, limit their capacity to both imagine themselves as antiracist actors and take up antiracist actions. I suggest that by examining and unpacking the discursive binds attendant to their race talk (Pollock, 2004), and by making visible the historical and emotional contexts of their understandings of themselves as raced beings, educators can more effectively guide young white people toward antiracism.
Spiritual Matter: Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism, Whiteness, and Material Performance
(2022-05) Rickard, Hazel
This dissertation analyzes the “physical manifestations” of nineteenth-century Spiritualism including animated objects, tipping tables, spiritual machines, spirit materializations, ectoplasm, as well as cases of animating human remains. I discuss the American spirit mediums Jonathan Koons, John Murray Spear, J.H. Conant, Elizabeth Denton, Anne Denton Cridge, Mary Schindler, G.A. Redman, Mary Comstock, Paschal Beverly Randolph, Kate and Maggie Fox, Margery Crandon, the English mediums Florence Cook and Elizabeth d’Esperance, and the French medium Eva Carrière. While my analysis is rooted in the American context, I follow where these repertoires traveled, which allows us to see this form of mediumship as a transatlantic phenomenon.I argue that these spirit mediums turned racial Whiteness (particularly feminine Whiteness) into a practical spiritual technology through literalization. Literalization, as a logic of performance that collapses the gap between matter and meaning, uniquely exposed the implicit racial and sexual meanings behind Spiritualist activities. Ultimately, I contend that Spiritualist material performance comprised a set of experimental practices employed to test the power of White identity to transcend matter by absorbing material powers associated with racially othered spirits. The first two chapters look at White mediums channeling Indian and Black spirits, the third looks at how male mediums employed female bodies as spiritual resources, and the fourth looks at how female mediums racialized and sexualized Whiteness through materialization.
“When There’s Good, There’s Good. When There’s Harm, There’s Harm”: Diverse Voices on Community Engagement
(2021-05) Perrotti, Carmine
Service learning and community engagement, pedagogical strategies combining work in the community with academic learning, have become near ubiquitous across U.S. higher education. While scholarship has demonstrated positive student learning outcomes of community engaged pedagogies and practices, there has been unequal consideration towards understanding the experiences of communities involved. Calls for elevating community voices and perspectives in service learning and community engagement are not new but have all too often demonstrated lofty rhetoric without subsequent practical application. What is even more concerning is that critical scholars have argued that service learning has been shaped by white supremacy and neoliberalism. Yet, these racial and economic realities have rarely been discussed in detail and scholars also have neglected to consider these issues from the perspectives of communities. Because community perspectives have been largely missing from the community engagement scholarship, this qualitative inquiry, drawing on a case study research approach, as well as the analytic lenses of Critical Whiteness Studies and neoliberalism, aimed to engage a multivocal account of how one community described and understood their experiences with community engagement by one college. Specifically, this inquiry took me back to the college that I graduated from, Providence College (a regionally selective, predominantly White, Catholic, liberal arts college in Providence, Rhode Island that had an academically situated undergraduate community engagement program) and the Smith Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island (a predominantly lower-income, multiracial community that abutted the southeast corner of the campus) where I was first introduced to and participated in service learning and community engagement as a college student. Findings from this study revealed how a range of community members experienced Providence College’s community engagement work within Smith Hill as well as how community members described a perceptual harm imposed on the community by the college’s community engagement work. By listening to community voices and perspectives, this inquiry offers a key implication for practice and future research that more fully considers community members in the context of service learning and community engagement in higher education.

University Digital Conservancy

Browse by Subject

Browsing by Subject "whiteness"