Physical, Visual, and Sensory: Mapping Whiteness With Art Educators

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

Abstract

Whiteness is slippery and unstable. As Kincheloe writes, “Situationally specific, whiteness is always shifting, always reinscribing itself around changing meanings of race in the larger society” (1999, p.162). Our paper works to map the ways that educators, scholars and artists (including ourselves) position and reposition whiteness in educational spaces, and how we and they locate ourselves in relation to these ever-shifting frames.

The authors use an art education conference as the site and material for analysis, specifically a workshop that they designed to engage participants in mapping whiteness within their own educational contexts as learners and teachers. This workshop draws on a range of interactive practices of dialogue, making and body work to notice, trace, call out, sense, orient and disorient to whiteness in educational spaces. As two white women and one Black woman who work in distinct educational contexts (art education at a private university; educational studies at a public college; and co-directing an anti-oppression educational nonprofit), and inhabit differential burdens and risks in their institutional spaces and “the white space” of school (Anderson 2015), the authors also track and analyze their collaborative labor as part of the study. Data includes recorded dialogue, drawings, and notes from the workshop preparation process including collaborative planning documents and recorded conversations; workshop documentation such as participant body maps, conversation, and performed tableaus; and debrief dialogue and reflective memos from the three facilitators following the workshop. Using autoethnography, discourse analysis, and mapping methods, the authors process their own and participants’ positioning in mutable relation and opposition to whiteness.

The authors mobilize Picower’s tools of whiteness (2009), Harris’ notion of whiteness as property (1993), and Ahmed’s whiteness as habit (2007) to make sense of multimodal experiences and positions towards/ around/ in opposition to whiteness. Contrary to traditional spatial maps which depict a fixed and singular perspective, the maps they present are itinerant and unsettled, shifting to meet and mirror the instability of whiteness.

Authors

• Victoria G Restler, Rhode Island College

• Jessica Hamlin, New York University

• Vivianne Njoku, SHIFT