Teaching with the third wave new feminists - MailChimp

We did not receive feedback or even questions on our reflections upon a selfcriticalresearch methodology. Based on such experiences, we started to thinkabout how to reach people with the kind of knowledge provided by Critical WhitenessStudies. Therefore, our discussions of how to work with Critical Whitenessperspectives as a white researcher and, how to develop a research methodologyin the sense of Critical Whiteness Studies was complemented by the followingquestion: How to teach Critical Whiteness Studies in predominately whitesettings?In relation to teaching Critical Whiteness Studies, we were strugglingwith the question that emerged namely what is that prevents or obscures thepossibility for people to understand the particular research perspective of ourpresentations. Did we fail to pay attention to the background of our differentaudiences? Or did we fail to meet their expectations concerning a critique onpower relations? The answer is complex, if answerable at all.One possible explanation is related to the function of hegemonic power.Those in power hold a normative position and are consequently marked as“normal” and “invisible” whereas those who are considered to be on the marginsare marked as “different” and therefore “visible”. 10 Critical Whiteness Studiesparticularly address exclusion based on racialisation and ethnicity, culturaland religious differentiation. Visibility of the “other” is often connected toskin colour, clothing and categorises people as being “black”, “red”, “yellow”,“brown”, whereas the “white” marker remains invisible. Much research hasbeen conducted into discovering which white researchers study those on themargins; and such research that analyses representations and debates about the“other” in order to trace the effort by the dominant majority group to sustaintheir favourable position may cause irritation. However, knowledge providedfrom a critical whiteness perspective is not entirely new and, in the case of ourpresentations, it would have required us to assume completely uninformedaudiences.Critical Whiteness Studies were established in the 1970s in the Anglo-American context and have entered European universities in the 1990s. 11However, knowledge regarding the implications of whiteness for racialisationand racisms provided by Black theory and postcolonial theory was avail-10Eske Wollrad, Weißsein im Widerspruch (Königstein/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, 2005).11Gabriele Griffin and Rosi Braidotti, “Whiteness and European Situatedness”, in Thinking Differently. A Reader inEuropean Women’s Studies, Gabriele Griffin and Rosi Braidotti, ed. (London and New York: Zed Books 2002): 225,Wollrad, Weißsein im Widerspruch, 48–9.59