Exploring Legacies of Whiteness and Coloniality in Anglo-American Universities Through the Knowledge Politics of Historical Reckoning

• In Event: Navigating Digital Media Analysis in Multi-Sited Justice Seeking Research

Proposal

Public historical initiatives dealing with enslavement, indigenous displacement, genocide, and eugenics have been widespread among institutions such as universities, heritage funds, museums, and public monuments in recent decades, especially following the global racial reckoning in 2020 (Oldfield, 2012; Turda, 2022). But there is also a veritable graveyard of institutional initiatives which had spawned from these moments of reckoning that are now victims of ‘DEI fatigue’ and an entrenched reluctance to confront difficult histories and their legacies (Malik, 2024; Otele, 2022).This doctoral project is a sociological investigation of how history is understood and used in contemporary projects of racial historical reckoning at prominent universities across the US and UK, specifically focused on initiatives related to legacies of enslavement, colonialism, and indigenous displacement/genocide. Leveraging theoretical lenses related to racial capitalism and the afterlife of enslavement and colonialism (Hartman, 1997), the threats posed by ‘dangerous knowledge’ (Ahmed, 2017; Bell et al., 2020) and insights from critical Whiteness studies (CWS) to explore the knowledge politics of these initiatives, this work attends to the differences between research processes and outputs across projects as an investigation of the potential for retrospective justice (Walters, 2017) or ‘epistemic reparations’ (González Stokas, 2023) within modern universities.
The project relies upon semi-structured interviews with researchers and committee members involved in these projects and critical discourse analysis of outputs including websites, online reports, documentary videos, and more to explore how these historical projects disrupt and perpetuate the racial capitalist regimes which are the objects of their inquiries. This analysis is conducted through multiple ‘sites’ of study: the use and tensions between different historical theories; the management of the research process; the labor and vulnerability of researchers; the influence different projects exert on peer institutions; and the racialized reactions towards these projects, as mediated through both campus media and local/national media. This project is designed to explore the tension between the role of the university as both platform and subject of the debate about historical accountability, justice, and reparations for past harms. Though the stated motivations for these projects often echo growing calls for justice, there are great divergences in terms of how these projects are framed and carried out, the material results of such inquiries, the media coverage they spawn, and most especially in terms of how they understand and use the notion of ‘history’ (and to what end). This work is part of a growing global initiative to not only ‘uncover’ dark historical legacies, but work towards meaningfully repairing ongoing harms and building a world and an academy that is best positioned to address ongoing forms of epistemic and material violence (Arday & Mirza, 2018; Bhambra et al., 2018; Law, 2017; Tate & Bagguley, 2017).

Author

• Connor Middleton, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge