Shame, Race, and Power in South African Higher Education

• In Event: Feeling Race: The Significance of Emotionality in Antiracist Education

Abstract

Shame is typically viewed as a generalized negative global self-assessment (Locke, 2007), an individualized emotion (Zembylas, 2008), and as an emotion that has the potential to silence, isolate and exclude (Bartky, 1996; Locke, 2007; McConaghy, 2000). However, the politics of shame (Zembylas, 2008a), as opposed to individualized shame as personal feeling only, may provide counter narratives for those in marginalized and privileged positions. Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “conscious pariah” (Locke, 2007) and Young’s (2011) “social connection form of responsibility” emphasize the foregrounding of social and political dimensions of inequity as a counter narrative to personal deficit discourses associated with shame. The politics of shame is therefore not only inevitable but desirable in dialogues across difference in teaching and learning contexts. In this paper, we view shame as a social practice (Calhoun, 2004) and contend that for some students engaging in mutual dialogues about shame are valuable in higher education for both privileged and marginalized individuals. Shame should therefore not be considered a negative emotion but one that has productive potential (Probyn, 2005) and can act as a catalyst to assist students to re-evaluate their positions in the world and their connections to others.

We drew on feminist literature on shame as a public affect, such as Sedgewick, Madianou, and Probyn, as well as Zembylas’s notions of shame. Student expressions of shame were discernibly different depending on their racialized, classed, professional, and institutional positionalities. Their responses supported the view that shame is a social rather than individual emotion, embedded in, and fueled by, multiple asymmetrical power relationships (Madianou, 2011). Expressions of shame were difficult for all students, but those occupying socially powerful positionalities were confronted with their own privilege, which came as a surprise to them and elicited expressions of shame. On the contrary, students occupying marginalized positionalities wrote about feelings of shame they were aware of, which were deeply embedded at a dispositional level.

We worked in the context of the Community, Self, and Identity (CSI) project, an interdisciplinary, inter-institutional collaborative teaching and learning project across two Western Cape, South African based universities. One is a historically advantaged White university and the other is a historically disadvantaged Black university. The module ran for six weeks, annually, for three years (2006-2008), involving a total of 282 students. We engaged three human service professions disciplines, psychology, occupational therapy, and social work. And, we used Participatory Language Action (PAL) techniques, such as community maps and rivers of life, along with online discussions, worksheets, and reflective essays as data and evidence.

This work may be useful to those who are working with the individual and structural consequences of inequities in education, especially higher education. The politics of shame creates opportunities to explore how students experience inequities across institutions, professions, and social identities. Our findings may also be interesting for those who bring students together, in the context of curriculum, to confront and understand their past and present seemingly individual experiences as political experiences.

Authors

• Ronelle L. Carolissen, Stellenbosch University

• Vivienne Grace Bozalek, University of the Western Cape