Whiteness in Real Time: Temporal Methodology and the Lived Experience of Whiteness in Educational Inquiry

• In Event: Speaking Back to Methodological Aphasia: Challenging the Foundations of Race and Coloniality in Critical Educational Inquiry

Abstract

Time has an aphasic character in educational research on whiteness. It is simultaneously there and not-there, creating a situation in which the non-engagement with the temporality whiteness ensures the subtle everyday exposure of its dehumanizing violence.This is most clearly seen in the nominal engagement with lived experience in whiteness studies. The analysis of this inherently temporal concept is removed from its social-spatial-temporal specificity and into an ideal reflective setting--into an analytic ‘time-out’ (Erickson, 2004). In response, the central objective of this paper is to illustrate the importance of engaging lived experience as a meaning-making phenomenon that is indeed lived across time.

To illustrate this, this project uses philosophies of race and time (Al-Saji, 2013, 2014; Alcoff, 2006; Mills, 2014), and feminist phenomenology and time (Fisher, 2011; Stoller, 2011;Ortega, 2016; Weiss, 2011) to engage with a narrative description of a quotidian student-teacher interaction from a six month long immersive case-study.Through this narrative interaction, I show how the common usage of lived experience does not take it up as such, but, instead, draws meaning from the act of reflecting upon it. Subsequently, this analytic use of lived experience strips away both space and time from methodology, leaving it untouched and operative in educational settings. In order to methodologically deploy a temporally grounded approach to lived experience, this paper, then, explicates what temporality is, and how to make sense of lived time in educational inquiry. Lived time cannot be separated from the body, and the means through which we engage an imminently unfolding social world (Merleau-Ponty, 2012). As such, lived time is co-extensive with our quotidian engagement with the world, and everyday social choreographies in which certain interactional velocities, moves, steps, mood, personae, attitude, etc. are expected and familiar to the world (Margonis, 2015; Seamon, 1980). Social choreographies unfold at pace with experience and delimit possible actions of participants not in an absolute sense, but a habitual and usual sense, depending on the racial and gender politics of a particular social world (Lugones, 2003). In this way, racialized temporalities impact lived experience through the inequitable possibility for action. Racialized time curates experience for white bodies in an open and continuous way, with the possibilities for action far out numbering those for bodies of color for whom possibilities are already foreclosed. A temporal foreclosure of this kind means that as bodies of color arrive to a situation, they arrive “too late”—as if in a state of “temporal discontinuity”—because habitually racialized reactions to their presence proceed their actual actions (Al-Saji, 2013, p. 9).

By the nature of lived experience though, the assertion of racialized time is not absolute or fully determined. There possibilities for slowing whiteness down, for pedagogical hesitation in the face of whiteness (Al-Saji, 2014). Ultimately, as this paper argues, through the embrace of methodology that speaks back to temporal aphasia in whiteness studies critical educational inquiry can cultivate new strategies for stalling the dehumanizing velocity of whiteness.

Author

• Gardner R Seawright, University of Utah