34.047 - Mapping the Contours of Niceness in Education

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

This session advances and explores the concept of Niceness as an analytic category that encompasses a wide range of practices and discourses across educational spaces. Niceness is one mechanism for reifying structural arrangements and ideologies of dominance across lines of race, gender, and social class. It functions not only as a shield to protect some educators from having to do the hard work of dismantling inequity, but also as a disciplining agent for those who attempt or even consider disrupting structures and ideologies of dominance. Papers in this session explore Niceness across a range of contexts, and as a phenomenon that is both embodied by those in more powerful and privileged positions, and demanded from those challenging power.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 2: Differences and Intersectionalities

Chair

• Angelina E. Castagno, Northern Arizona University

Papers

• "She's Such a Nasty Woman": Nice and Nasty as Gendered Tropes - Frances Julia Riemer, Northern Arizona University

• The Self-Contained Scholar: Racialized Burdens of Acting Nice in Higher Education - Colin Ben, Arizona State University; Jeremiah Chin, Arizona State University

• The Continual Centering of Whiteness and Niceness in Social Justice Education - Jia-Hui Stefanie Wong, Trinity College

• Structural Niceness: A Conceptual Consideration - Sabina E Vaught, University of Oklahoma

Discussant

• Angelina E. Castagno, Northern Arizona University