Structural Niceness: A Conceptual Consideration

• In Event: 34.047 - Mapping the Contours of Niceness in Education

Abstract

Drawing from an analysis of a larger qualitative study of summer schooling, this paper focuses on the structural conceptual framing of Niceness (Castagno, 2014).

Objectives/purposes: Castagno offers “Niceness” as a complex interpersonal practice of Whiteness and theorizes the ways it “masks structural dominance” (p. 167), protecting and normalizing a system of racialized inequity or repression. In this paper I take up a small portion of her framework to consider how what Castagno describes as the “unwavering” feature of Niceness—its tandem commitment to group and institution—is central to the intra-White practice of structural dominance necessary to the structural superordination of Whiteness. Here I consider how structural Niceness might be conceptualized at sites where White supremacy and heteropatriarchy are interknit.

Perspective/theoretical framework: Grounded in the theoretical framework of Niceness, this paper elaborates Niceness along its structural vectors, taking up attention to the state, and in particular the liberal, western state’s self-imagined benevolence (Agamben, 2005; Anderson, 2006; Brown, 1992; Robinson, 2000). A capacious state feature and mechanism, benevolence masks structural dominance. This paper will offer a race, feminist consideration of Niceness in the context of state benevolence (Fraser, 1990; James, 1996; Williams, 1991).

Methodology: This paper is a conceptual examination that emerges out of a conversation with a qualitative study. However, the immediate methodological tools will be theoretical, not ethnographic. I will share a consideration of structural Niceness as a theoretical elaboration of Castagno’s (2014) rich Niceness framework.

Data: The foregrounded data are conceptual. I draw on feminist theorizations of state, and particularly benevolence, to elaborate the conversation of Niceness and imagine its promise as a descriptor for interpersonal analyses of state power. However, the background data are ethnographic—those data inform my larger thinking around these questions.

Results: I explore here the ways in which the analytic of structural Niceness affords an understanding of school-based, intra-White, race and gender transactions of Niceness as a feature of repressive state benevolence. By detailing the mechanisms of structural Niceness, the paper invites listeners to employ structural Niceness as a tool in the larger project of school-based research aimed at disrupting systemic race and gender power.

Scholarly significance: This paper offers specific conceptual ways of linking school-site interpersonal dynamics with state structural power. As such it contributes to the scholarly efforts to rigorously identify, map, and disrupt destructive power practices and to imagine new, liberatory practices.

Author

• Sabina E Vaught, University of Oklahoma