Interpersonal/Institutional, Micro/Macro: Where Does Whiteness Live?

• In Event: Pedagogies of Whiteness

Abstract

Performances of whiteness in the classroom, as well as resistance to those performances, often rely on constructions of meaning at micro and macro levels. In other words, we communicate whiteness by drawing on broad ideological norms supported by institutional structures, and by expressing a particular sense of agency that invokes a range of attitudes and beliefs. Whiteness scholars have noted that communication education and instructional communication research has tended to focus on individual attitudes toward racial and cultural “others,” with little to no attention to structural power dynamics (Cooks & Simpson, 2007, p. 15). Communication courses and subfields (for example, interpersonal communication and mass communication) can also encourage a split between the everyday, immediate press of communication and the ways in which ideologies, social norms, and institutional power intersect with that communication. Related to whiteness, how is racism both interpersonal and institutional? How do instructors communicate the inseparableness of both, particularly when expressions of whiteness might focus primarily on individualized notions of the self, of race, and of racism? This presentation will offer a rationale for pedagogically linking the micro and macro, or interpersonal and institutional, when addressing race, racism, and whiteness; and will examine related challenges and possibilities in pedagogical contexts.

Author

• Jennifer Simpson, Univ of Waterloo