| Description |
This dissertation is the result of a qualitative phenomenological case-study of a 9th grade Geography classroom. Using audio-video data collection to create representative narratives of everyday classroom interactions, this project illustrates the ways that the spatial, temporal, and embodied dynamics of classroom relationships come to reflect Whiteness. This project necessarily adopts an existential approach to Whiteness and thus develops the analytic White Humanity as distinct from structural and psychological conceptions of Whiteness. As an analytic, White Humanity places the structural and relational aspects of Whiteness in constructive tension with one another, focusing on the extent to which social structure curates the quality and condition of being human. As applied here, the analytic focus on White Humanity is with the relational ecology of the classroom-the social field through which experience is had the real-time and embodied aspects of a classroom's "here" and "now." Through a consideration of the degree to which White Humanity characterizes the phenomenological narratives, this dissertation shows how racializing interactions can occur as part of the mundane relational conditions of classroom life. Specifically, this dissertation suggests that White Humanity conditions the classroom in the form of imperial orientations, White Time, and racially-embodied disparate access to space. However, the narratives also show the extent to which racializing forms of meaning are compounded by ambiguity, which does not negate the dehumanization enacted, but does reveal possibilities for cultivating relationships outside the bounds of White Humanity. |
