School of Sociology and Social Policy

International White Spaces Research Network Launched

19 October 2009 | Carolyn Weaver

A high profile international collaboration 'White Spaces- Racialising White Femininities and Masculinities' led by Dr. Shona Hunter, held its first conference in July 2009.

This interdisciplinary, international collaboration looks at the reproduction of white male organisational power in a range of contemporary multicultural societies. It is funded through the World Universities Network and taps into a high profile area of international political and media debate and one of the fastest growing areas of international research and debate across public policy, governance, management and organisational studies: the challenges and prospects of increasingly ethnically diverse societies.

The ‘White Spaces’ collaboration bringing together nine partners from the UK, Australia, USA, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa adds a fresh perspective on these debates through engagement with scholarship, practice and the arts from different cultural contexts and across the whole field of ‘white studies’.

The conference was the first of its kind to be held in the UK and Europe with over 60 delegates from 11 different countries including Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, South Africa, United States and the UK (England, Scotland, Wales). Thirty nine papers were presented under twelve conference themes.

These included: Educating whiteness; White masculinity, power, subversion and resistance; White lives, emotions and resistances; Reproducing bourgeois whiteness; Civilising/violating whitenesses; White sexualities and space; Benevolent whitenesses; Constructing white educational authority; White embodied ideals; Desiring privilege; Constructing white families; Defining whiteness.

The common focus across these conference sessions was critique of the institutional mechanisms, ideological beliefs and state practices that maintain white privilege even as multicultural policies and practices purport to challenge its dominance.

Through this focus, the conference was important to positioning the network within what France Winddance Twine and Charles Gallagher call the ‘third wave’ of whiteness studies. Through innovative and exciting and carefully crafted empirical work this burgeoning new wave of scholarship explores the nuanced and locally specific ways in which whiteness as a form of power is defined, deployed, performed, policed and reinvented.

The network is active on various different fronts. The postgraduate research arm of the network led by Say Burgin in History is to be formally established in November 2009 and the network’s inaugural virtual seminar series begins in January 2010.

Seminars are being held in the UK, Australia and South Africa, with virtual link-up to network partners. Other future plans include PGR student and staff exchanges and a second network conference in 2011. The network website will be up and running by December 2009.

As well as conference reports, pod casts from virtual seminars and other key network documents the website will house working paper series from network events, the first is from the 2009 conference. Other collaborative publications include a Special Issue of the Journal Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State and Society, to appear in December 2010.

Any interested staff or students (current or prospective) are encouraged to contact Dr. Hunter in the first instance. We particularly welcome new PhD applications in the area or in MA students interested in pursing ‘white studies’ in their dissertations.