Publications
Special Issues
‘Reproducing and Resisting Whiteness in Organizations, Policies, and Places’, Shona Hunter, Elaine Swan, Diane Grimes (eds) Social Politics, Vol. 17 Iss. 4, Winter 2010.
Abstract
This special issue provides a unique opportunity to draw on and extend insights from the international and interdisciplinary field of ‘white studies’ (Bonnett, 1996b; Bonnett, 2008) or ‘critical whiteness studies’ (Nayak, 2007) for feminist social politics.
Debates in the journal Social Politics have already been important to analysing the ways in which states create and maintain the ‘racialized gender order’ (Boris, 1995; Boris, 2005). Recent critique focuses on the reproduction of white privilege through welfare and public policy paternalisms (Williams, 1989; Williams, 1995) and maternalisms (Brush, 2001; Crenshaw, 1989; Lambert and Bullock, 2005). Thus, there is a growing examination of the material effects of whiteness as an oppressive social relation enacted through state welfare. Nevertheless, within this literature there remains relatively little, if any explicit interrogation, as to the ‘nature’ of whiteness. There is a tendency for popular concepts such as ‘white backlash’ (Neubeck and Cazenave, 2001; Hewitt, 2005) to reduce whiteness to ‘anti-blackness’. Yet, there is a wealth of interesting issues to explore around the multiple and varied everyday experiences of whiteness; of the ways in which whiteness infuses state making, policies, organisational practices and broader governmental belongings which Ghassan Hage describes as ‘the feeling that one is legitimately entitled in the course of everyday life to make a governmental/managerial statement about the nation’, and/or ‘to have a governmental or managerial attitude towards others especially those who are perceived to be lesser national or non-nationals’ (Hage, 1998 p.46; Elder et al., 2002).
It is from within these contemporary social, political and institutional contexts that we position this special issue, arguing for new ways of understanding the subtleties and nuance of racialised governmentalities and how they operate. We suggest that critical whiteness studies provides one important avenue for such an analysis in that it provides a means with which critical scholarship can continue to explicitly name racialised power, institutionally enacted through the complex combination of the signs, subjects, strategies and sanctions of welfare (Adams and Padamsee, 2001).
‘Critical Whiteness Studies Methodologies’, Linda Lund Pedersen and Barbara Samaluk (eds) Graduate Journal of Social Sciences, Vol. 9 Iss. 1, March 2012.
Abstract
The collection of articles presented in this special issue seek to develop critical methodologies for studying whiteness as a social, cultural, political and material phenomenon. It is rooted in ideas of postcoloniality, transnationality and intersectionality. In line with Lopez we argue for postcolonial and transnational approaches to whiteness ‘across a range of geographic and cultural incarnations, where the concept of whiteness as a form of hegemony historically linked to colonialism clashes in the new postcolonial moment with new, competing narratives of national histories’ (A. Lopez, Postcolonial Whiteness, 2005:19). The articles presented in this special issue address the methodological challenges in critical whiteness research by looking at not often explored geographies, locations and translations of CWS.
‘New Territories in Critical Whiteness Studies’, Maddy Abbas, Say Burgin, Julio Decker, and Shona Hunter (eds), Vol. 9 No. 1, January 2013.
Abstract
The impetus for this special issue can be traced back several years, when members of this issue’s editorial team—Madeline-Sophie Abbas, Say Burgin and Julio Decker, then MA and PhD students—organised the ‘New Territories in Critical Whiteness Studies’ postgraduate conference at our home university, the University of Leeds, in August of 2010. The conference launched the postgraduate/early career researcher arm of the international, interdisciplinary White Spaces Research Network, established in 2009 by Dr Shona Hunter (also University of Leeds). This special issue represents one of the many collaborative projects sustained through the postgraduate network (see also Pedersen and Samaluk, 2012). The special issue’s title relates to our sense that the next generation of critical whiteness scholars is self-consciously stretching the boundaries of the field—geographically, empirically, theoretically and methodologically. ‘New Territories’ provides an opportunity to showcase the dialogues and debates that have emerged from our inaugural conference. It draws together significant lines of inquiry emerging within the field and advances the inventive thinking and methodological approaches of a new generation of critical whiteness scholars. The articles here span both new disciplines, such as music, as well as more traditional subject areas, such as history and sociology. Taken together, they reveal significant intersections and points of (dis)continuity among these fields in ways that broaden perspectives within critical whiteness studies and stimulate methodological innovation.
Academic Essays
Amanpreet Ahluwalia Karma Chameleons, Power and Privilege: Can Relationality Advance Our Understandings of White Anti-Racism?
Awarded BA Sociology & Social Policy Best Dissertation Prize, University of Leeds
Abstract
There remains a large contrast between the volume of literature which focuses on the process and particularities of racism and oppression, and the literature which theorises the move towards equality. For academics, often anti-racism is an after-thought; presented as existing in a linear, coherent and predictable opposition to racism. In this research I use relational theory to analyse my experiences of working in a community development organisation with white people who were committed to anti-racist practice, as well as a critical reading of Critical Whiteness Studies. In it, I evidence that substantialist theorisations of actors committed to anti-racist practice simplify the lived realities of every day racialised experience. Instead, I endeavor to show that anti-racism at best must be understood as a lens through which to interpret the world and see power. Such vision however, does not exist essentially as occupying a critical or anti-oppressionist perspective, it belongs to the subjectivity of the person who possesses it; and in the case of belonging to white people, is in constant negotiations with the way in which privilege continues to blind them. As well as the subjective nature of what people see; the anti-racist lens must also be accompanied by action; a praxis which acts in the world; such practices are also subjective; what actors think to do in the world is also a subjective conception which is entangled in a relationship with privilege. Such actions are complicated further by the concept of scale; an action can both contest and reproduce privilege simultaneously; depending on the level from which we theorise. This research calls for further theorisation on the subject in order to move towards a fuller and richer understanding of the complexities that occupy the fight towards equality.