Whiteness Studies

"At times of economic uncertainty the position of new migrants is subject to ever closer scrutiny. While the main focus of attention tends to be on the world of employment the research on which this paper is based started from the proposition that leisure and
sport spaces can support processes of social inclusion yet may also serve to exclude certain groups. As such, these spaces may be seen as contested and radicalised places that shape behaviour. The paper draws on interviews with White migrants from Poland and Black migrants from Africa to examine the normalising of whiteness. We use this paper not just to explore how leisure and sport spaces are encoded by new migrants, but how struggles over those spaces and the use of social and cultural capital are racialised."

"Abstract:

The National Geographic magazine is a popular and influential educational resource with a wide subscriber base. There is evidence that readers regard the image content in the publication as a serious resource for garnering general information about cultures and peoples. A content analysis of photographic and illustrative images from the period between 1960 and 1988 shows that four underlying themes had been prevalent in the depiction of Africa: Africans on display, Africa in need, Africa dominated, and Africa in transition. At the same time there has been a lack of imagery with regard to intergroup conflict and progress toward modernity. Arguing that National Geographic has maintained a colonial narrative of sub-Saharan Africa, I suggest the publication’s content be critically assessed by those making use of it as an educational resource or reference tool for Africa. 
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"Product Description
This landmark book represents the first text to pay critical and sustained attention to Whiteness in Canada from an impressive line-up of leading scholars and activists. The burgeoning scholarship on Whiteness will benefit richly from this book's timely inclusion of the insights of Canadian scholars, educators, activists and others working for social justice within and through the educational system, with implications far beyond national borders. Naming Whiteness and White identity is a political project as much as an intellectual engagement, and the co-editors of this collection must be commended for creating the space for such naming to take place in public and academic discourses. Is it noteworthy to acknowledge that both Paul and Darren are White, and that they are overseeing this work on Whiteness? I believe that it is, not because others cannot write about the subject with clarity and insight, as is clearly evident in the diverse range of contributors to this book. Rather, naming their positions as White allies embracing a rigorous conceptual and analytical discourse in the social justice field is an important signal that White society must also become intertwined in the entrenched racism that infuses every aspect of our society. As Paul and Darren correctly point out, race is still a pivotal concern for everything that happens in society, and especially in schools. Excerpt from the Foreword by George J. Sefa Dei Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology and Equity Studies, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto (OISE/UT) The Great White North? provides a timely and important mode of addressing and examining the contradictions of Whiteness, and also challenging its insinuation into the very pores of the Canadian social universe. While the context of the book is distinctly Canadian, there are urgent messages here on race and anti-racism for the international community. Carr and Lund have provided educators with a vibrant contribution to the critical anti-racist literature. This is a book that needs to be put on reading- lists across the disciplines! Peter McLaren Professor, Graduate School of Education and Information Studies University of California at Los Angeles
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With Mexican Americans constituting a large and growing segment of U.S. society, their assimilation trajectory has become a constant source of debate. Some believe Mexican Americans are following the path of European immigrants toward full assimilation into whiteness, while others argue that they remain racialized as nonwhite. Drawing on extensive interviews with Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants in Texas, Dowling’s research challenges common assumptions about what informs racial labeling for this population. Her interviews demonstrate that for Mexican Americans, racial ideology is key to how they assert their identities as either in or outside the bounds of whiteness. Emphasizing the link between racial ideology and racial identification, Dowling offers an insightful narrative that highlights the complex and highly contingent nature of racial identity.

If color-blindness is the dominant posture of the post-racial era, then “color-deafness” is the racialized affect of the captions and subtitles used to render black language spoken by select white characters, in the episodic series Breaking Bad. Our polyschematic anaylsis of sound, text, and image based on viewings of  the five seasons of Breaking Bad supports this assertion. Furthermore, this analysis shows how screenwriters, captionists, and subtitlers present a racialized perspective to audiences. The racialized perspective of screenwriters and transcriptionists presents viewers with a narrative structure steeped in whiteness that “never has to speak its name” (Lipsitz 67). Such a construction, we argue, obscures audiences’ own identifications with white privilege. This recognition locates whiteness as a series of scenes by which notions of the post-racial manifest in textual misrepresentations. To view this “sound in between,” we listen with “a third ear” (Kochhar-Lindgren 421) and analyze whiteness as a mediascape of auditory and image fragments as a means to better discern how whiteness interferes with the intended meanings of dialogue across cultural settings.

This was supposed to be an open issue. However, as the essays poured in and the responses to the important work done in 8.1 grew, the issue galvanized around a few, key, central ideas. Graham and Joe write presciently, on the eve  of the election, NOT after it: It is our wager that even though the forms of race, racism, and empire have changed considerably since he was at the height of his powers - as evidenced perhaps most starkly by the ascendancy of Kenyan-descended, African American, Barack Obama, during the recent U.S. Presidential race - Richard Wright's writings remain invaluable; even with their obvious limitations, they continue to yield insight, inspiration, and even injunction for those of us seeking to understand and to change the world in 2008.

"For purposes of trade, exploration, conquest, colonial rule, anthropological fieldwork, development aid, or tourism, the option and practices of going East have a long history in the West and have made temporary Western visitors a permanent feature of many Third World localities.
Mirroring the “occidentalist” bias in much academic research, these practices are typically discussed in fora on travelling, tourism or maybe orientalism rather than migration and diaspora – though there are signs in recent research that this pattern is about to be confronted. Starting out from the local ethnic group of Kuire (Western people) in Nepal, this paper explores the diasporic dimensions of Western travelling and dwelling in the East."

"Australia is a relatively new nation state built on colonisation and settler migration.
These origins situate Australia’s First Peoples and Indigenous/settler and
nation-state relationships as central aspects of contemporary Australian society.
It would seem logical to conclude that Australian sociology curricula would
include a substantial range of units and courses with Indigenous themes and
content. Yet, this is not the case. Indigenous sociology is largely absent from
the sociology curriculum within tertiary education. In this article we argue that
the lack of the Indigenous is not an oversight but can be linked to a normalisation
of a more general disengagement of the discipline with the key social
force of race. Apart from consistent description of Indigenous disadvantage,
Indigenous and race issues are presumed to sit outside the realm of mainstream
Australian sociology. We use Whiteness and Critical Race theories to
explain how this curriculum absence can be seen as a particular Australian
praxis of Whiteness and colour-blind racism. Our own experiences as
Aboriginal sociologists in mainstream sociology departments provide the
empirical base to show how Whiteness, and its privileging practices, pervades
the Australian sociology curricula. Our argument extends to addressing the
pedagogic challenges faced by lecturers presenting Indigenous content to a
largely Euro-Australian student body."