Expanding the Boundaries of White Racial Imagination: Supporting Antiracist Praxis Among Postsecondary Education Staff/Administrators

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 10:50 am
  In Roundtable Session: Understanding the Self: The Tensions of Identity, Racial Diversity, and Sociocultural Geopolitics (Table 32)

Abstract

This paper presents a novel mode of inquiry in the field of postsecondary education, the research questions that future studies will explore, and the methods we adopt to pursue those questions. Specifically, this work examines how white staff and administrators working in postsecondary institutions conceptualize antiracism in their professional roles and navigate tensions around their antiracist praxis. Our research design consists of two phases: (1) eliciting participants’ conceptions and enactments of antiracist praxis in their professional roles using qualitative interviewing, and (2) exploring the possibility of shifting their antiracist praxis by using a focus group method that includes a racial imagination prompt (IP) and the “emergent strategy facilitation” approach defined by adrienne maree brown (2021) and adapted for our purposes.

Authors

• S Shiver, University of Utah

• José Francisco Gutiérrez, University of Utah