Self-Reflection Around the Issues of Race and Racism as a Mirror Stage: A Psychoanalytic Perspective

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: Racing Minds: Curriculum Scholars Making Sense of Race, Gender, and Pedagogies of Justice

Abstract

Reading psychoanalytic theory of the unconscious desire for wholeness in the light of the notion of white racial supremacy, this study explores a constituted difficulty that self-reflection around the issues of race and racism confronts by exploring three white male pre-service teachers’ emotional experiences inscribed in their responses to the process of engaging in self-reflection. This study seeks to elaborate problems inherent in teachers’ self-reflection and why and how unknown and unconscious emotional world filters and at times hinders the participants’ willingness to inquire into their own relationship to race and racism.

Author

• Jenna Min Shim, University of Wyoming