When Kindness Isn't Everything: Against Niceness and Toward Unsettling Pedagogies

• In Event: Millennium Hotel Roundtable Session 2
  In Roundtable Session: Readings of Culture and Norms in/Around Classrooms

Abstract

2016 and 2017 have abounded with calls for niceness, kindness, tolerance, politeness, and civility in liberal circles of discourse. This paper begins from the question: What does niceness do? If niceness is an encouraged and enforced norm, what is being created and defended? I suggest that niceness is a settling-for and settling-down that works socially and materially to maintain intersecting systems of patriarchy, white supremacy, and settler colonialism. Building from feminist, critical race, and Indigenous theories and from lived experience, I find that niceness is differentially demanded and imposed, yet consistently functions to inhibit critique and change. I then call for more serious attention to alternatives to niceness as the standard of interaction in educational spaces.

Author

• Julia Echternach, The University of Texas - Austin