\"This won't take long…\": Interviewing,ethics and diversity

In this paper, the focus is on one particular research project, conducted in the UK, which studied the role of parent groups and organizations in relation to the mainstream education system. The authors seek to analyze and evaluate access to the different \"structures of feeling\" inhabited by the various respondents involved in the project. Using the project as a lens, a critical case, the relationships between respondents and researchers are problematized, highlighting a number of issues with broad applicability. These include negotiating access, securing informed consent, the debates around symmetry and asymmetry between researcher and respondent, the processes of interviewing, data analysis and dissemination. The authors also comment on the formation and development of relationships with respondents, trying to tease out the differences and similarities of age, race, social class, language, and gender, and to suggest how these disjunctions and connections affected the process of datacollection and analysis. Finally, the article concludes with a brief consideration of the implications for future research design and conduct of the arguments put forward.     

How private ‘everyday racism’ and public ‘racism denial’ contribute to unequal and discriminatory educational experiences

The study uses ethnographic research from four classes in secondary school as well as from two groups in upper secondary school, to examine everyday racism as an element of the daily institutional lives of students and teachers. The study is based on long-term participant observation and 89 interviews. These were all audio-recorded and transcribed. In Sweden the education of ethnic groups is couched in a discourse of integration and inclusion. However, the research presented shows that the aims of integration and inclusion were not achieved. Unequal and discriminatory educational experiences operated through two related actions: by private everyday racism and through public racism denial.     

For whose benefit? Black and Minority Ethnic training programmes in higher education institutions in England,UK

Inequalities continue to exist in higher education, with Black and minority ethnic (BME) academics less likely to be professors or occupy senior decision-making roles compared to their White colleagues. In order to increase BME representation in senior decision-making roles, specific programmes targeted at BME groups have recently been introduced in higher education institutions (HEIs). This article draws on research carried out on two such programmes in England. By using principles of critical race theory (CRT), I argue that racism continues to play a key role in the lack of BME groups in senior leadership roles and that such programmes benefit HEIs rather than contributing to a commitment to inclusion, equity and creating a diverse workforce. Furthermore, such programmes work for the benefit of HEIs to perpetuate and reinforce White privilege, rather than addressing structural inequalities.     

‘Latino spaces have always been the most violent’: Afro-Latino collegians’ perceptions of colorism and Latino intragroup marginalization

Abstract

This study centers on the racialized experiences of Afro-Latino undergraduates at historically White institutions. Of particular interest, I examine how six Afro-Latino collegains experience intragroup marginalization due to colorism. The research design is undergirded by critical race theory and a critical race methodology. Participants’ narratives reflect how colorism manifests in the lives of Afro-Latino collegians. In drawing attention to a population that has been rendered invisible in higher education, findings from this study guide implications for future research and practice for higher education and student affairs leaders.     

The White Working Class,Racism and Respectability: Victims,Degenerates and Interest-Convergence

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that race and class inequalities cannot be fully understood in isolation: their intersectional quality is explored through an analysis of how the White working class were portrayed in popular and political discourse during late 2008 (the timing is highly significant). While global capitalism reeled on the edge of financial melt-down, the essential values of neo-liberalism were reasserted as natural, moral and efficient through two apparently contrasting discourses. First, a victim discourse presented White working people, and their children in particular, as suffering educationally because of minoritised racial groups and their advocates. Second a discourse of degeneracy presented an immoral and barbaric underclass as a threat to social and economic order. Applying the ‘interest-convergence principle’, from Critical Race Theory, the discourses amount to a strategic mobilisation of White interests where the ‘White, but not quite’ status of the working class (Allen, 2009 Allen, R.L. 2009. “What about poor White people?”. In Handbook of Social Justice in Education, Edited by: Ayers, W., Quinn, T. and Stovall, D. 209–230. New York: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]) provides a buffer zone at a time of economic and cultural crisis which secures societal White supremacy and provides a further setback to progressive reforms that focus on race, gender and disability equality. The existence of poor Whites, therefore, is not only consistent with a regime of White supremacy – they are actually an essential part of the processes that sustain it.     

The Anti-Black Order of No Child Left Behind: Using Lacanian psychoanalysis and critical race theory to examine NCLB

During a period in which institutions have been refashioned to meet the demands of a complex social and political economy, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has helped to alter the public educational system. As scholars and researchers examine the material effects of NCLB, efforts to improve the educational system and its effects must also explore the relationship between policy and racial ideologies including discursive fantasies. This article examines the relationship between NCLB and racial fantasies of Black youth as problematic others in order to help education reform scholarship and advocacy examine the violence of NCLB.     

The Rise of the Creative Underclass

In this article, Tyler Denmead draws upon critical race theory to argue that the creative city discourse reproduces racial injustice for youth. In particular, the creative city invests in the property rights and profitability of whiteness by inscribing creative superiority on the bodies of young people who are more likely to be privileged by virtue of their race and class. Through evidence collected by both autoethnographic and ethnographic methods, Denmead discusses how his history as an arts educator has been entangled in the manifestation of this racist reconfiguration of urban space in one particular American city, Providence, Rhode Island. He discovered that the racial dynamics of the creative city discourse have productive power over how young people construct their identities and make life choices in this city and, further, that those dynamics operate in and through artist partnerships between those positioned as creatives and those positioned as troubled youth. As a result, Denmead argues that white arts educators, in particular, must disinvest themselves from notions of creativity that enhance the profitability and power of whiteness. This move requires advocating ceding land and resources that have been acquired through the creative city discourse and committing to reframing culture‐led urban renewal in terms of the economic and creative flourishing of communities of color.     

Examining Latina/o Students’ Experiences of Injustice: LatCrit Insights from a Texas High School

We used Latina/Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) to re-analyze survey and interview data from earlier research in which we found that Latina/o students reported less positive experiences than other students in this high school. We found racial injustice in class enrollments, in students’ experiences with stereotypes and prejudice, in student-teacher relationships, and in school policies and norms. LatCrit principles illustrate interconnections among racism, interest convergence, and colorblindness that create racial injustice for Latinas/os. We argue that counterstorytelling could emerge to resist that injustice and that educators must understand how racism functions in their schools and interrogate relevant policies and norms.     

The colour of numbers: surveys,statistics and deficit‐thinking about race and class

Drawing on the traditions of critical race theory, the paper is presented as a chronicle – a narrative – featuring two invented characters with different histories and expertise. Together they explore the strengths and weaknesses of quantitative approaches to race equality in education. In societies that are structured in racial domination, such as the USA and the UK, quantitative approaches often encode particular assumptions about the nature of social processes and the generation of educational inequality that reflect a generally superficial understanding of racism. Statistical methods can obscure the material reality of racism and the more that statisticians manipulate their data, the more it is likely that majoritarian assumptions will be introduced as part of the fabric of the calculations themselves and the conclusions that are drawn. Focusing on the case of recent national data on the secondary education of minoritized children in England, the paper highlights statisticians’ ability to define what counts as a ‘real’ inequality without public challenge or scrutiny; reflects on the dangers of statistical ‘explanations’ in the realm of public debate and policy outcomes; and questions quantitative assumptions about the intersectional relationships between different forms of oppression, including gender, class and race.     

Making moral migrants? Exploring the educational aspirations of Black African and Caribbean boys in a New York City public school

ABSTRACT

Drawing on 48 in-depth interviews with Black immigrant and second-generation boys at Bridgewood secondary school in New York City, this article points out how the high educational aspirations expressed by Black African and Caribbean boys are strategically deployed as features of an ethnic project to counter anti-immigrant sentiments and anti-Black racism in US society. The findings indicate that in a context of rising xenophobia along with the historical and continual stereotypes of Black people in the US, participants’ aspirations for elite higher education function as strategies to enhance their individual and ethnic reputations. High educational aspirations were also used to justify emigration to and worth within the US. At its core, this article illustrates how participants mobilized aspirations to represent themselves as moral migrants and ‘worthy’ ethnic minorities. Moral claims and ethnicity-based campaigns associated with aspirations are problematized because they reinforce the hierarchical racial order that informs US society.     

The Burden of Teaching Teachers: Memoirs of Race Discourse in Teacher Education

This paper presents the views and educational experiences of two African American female scholars, from a critical race and black feminist theorist perspective, teaching in the area of social justice to predominantly white female pre-service teachers. These testimonies reveal the struggles encountered by these scholars when engaging students in a historical and contemporary examination of race, privilege, and systemic inequalities. The objectives of this paper are to expand on the literary dialogue of such resistance and attempt to bring awareness into the arenas that need the most exposure, i.e. departmental, faculty, and tenure review meetings. It is commonly written and verbalized that institutions are interested in attracting and retaining faculty of color. We argue that the ways we are supported must shift. This problem of student resistance, who they resist and why, should become open for discussion on college campuses across the nation. Dawn G. Williams is an Assistant Professor of Educational Administration and Policy at Howard University. Venus Evans-Winters is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University.     

Protect and Survive: ‘whiteness’ and the middle‐class family in civil defence pedagogies

‘Civil defence pedagogies’ normalise continuous emergency through educational channels such as school, community and adult education. Using critical whiteness studies, and critiques of white supremacy from critical race theory, as a conceptual base, the protection of whiteness, and particularly the white middle‐class family, is considered to be centrally important to civil defence in education. Civil defence is not only classed and state‐centred, but a racialised and eugenic discourse where the state considers not necessarily the survival of the majority of white people, but the continuity of whiteness to be prioritised above the survival of people of colour. Within these policies, the enterprising white, middle‐class, suburban family has provided a key role as main reference, beneficiary, activist and supporter of civil defence pedagogies. Through the use of policy analysis and documentation from the USA in the 1950s and the UK in the 1980s, I discuss representations of the family, race and class in civil defence pedagogies. Although whiteness is contextualised by geography and history, there is congruence in terms of the eugenic tendencies of these seemingly innocuous pedagogies.