Racialized and Gendered Participation in a Community of Practice

• In Event: 56.060 - Designing With and for the Whole Learner

Abstract

We examine racialized and gendered expertise in an environmentalist campaign. Drawing on theorizations of doing gender and difference, we frame expertise as an ongoing, situated, interactive, and relational performance that is dialectically related to social relations of racialization, gender, and colonialism. We argue that doing expertise relies on unevenly available White masculine modes of engagement, creating a dynamic where White men’s participation is co-constructed by all participants as more valuable than that of women and people of colour. We argue that the conflation of hegemonic White masculinity with expertise drives the perception that environmental campaigns are a White masculine “default space”, with little room for expertise and engagement from people of colour and women.

Authors

• Joe Curnow, University of Toronto - OISE

• Jody Rita Chan, Teachers College, Columbia University