Reencountering Whiteness in One School's Body

• In Event: 43.041 - Dis/Orientations: Mapping Whiteness in Educational Spaces

Abstract

In this paper, the author revisits and reassembles data from a process of returning to the elementary school she attended as a student in a white, affluent suburb of Boston. Working from a photocopied blueprint of the school given to her when she returned in 2015, she maps onto it encountered and remembered moments of whiteness witnessed in the school as well as the ways her own white body related to this educational space. She examines how remembered and re-encountered ordinary acts, materialities, and structures of schooling contribute to (and perhaps challenge) broader sociocultural re/productions of whiteness. Working with a range of new materialist theories, she pays close attention to the other-than-human objects composing the school and the ways they work (with) whiteness in that educational context.

The photocopied map/blueprint functions as a trigger to remember and recognize affective points, moments, and workings of whiteness, which the author maps upon the existing map visually, textually and sonically. Data include found artifacts, memories, observation notes, poems and collages. A joined mapping of past and present states of whiteness embodied by the primary school, this paper opens up questions about how whiteness is entangled within and re/produced by school bodies, as well as the ways whiteness can and does become constantly disrupted and undone.

Author

• Maya R. Pindyck, Moore College of Art & Design