This dissertation asks how we should conceptualize white identity in the United States. I examine how we should measure white identity and assess the characteristics of white identity, primarily the robustness and durability of white identification. Taken together, the four papers offer two conclusions. First, traditional measures of white identity underemphasize the relationship between political preferences and white identification. I argue that we should instead characterize white identity in terms of adherence to white racial norms. Second, as opposed to narratives that portray white identity as reactionary, I find that white identity is remarkably durable in the face of both positive and negative information about whiteness.

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A most deafening silence is the effect created by the omission of Whiteness from racial discourses. Those within the social work profession, who seek to eradicate racism have for the most part, restricted their analyses to dissecting and defining the racial "Other". This has perhaps unwittingly implied an acceptance of "Whiteness" as an all-powerful, unnamed normality, exempted from the requirement of definition. This examination of White racial identity is an attempt to engage in a discussion of a different sort---exploring racism at its source. Those actively involved in the practice and/or study of Social Work in Montreal (Quebec) were asked to contemplate the meaning of "Whiteness" in society and in their own lives. Their interpretations were aligned with social and cultural interpretations, as well as my own interpretations. This study illustrates that, in spite of its elusive nature, Whiteness does indeed have very powerful meanings for those who have access to this racial category, those excluded, and the society in which we live.

Mindfulness has woven through American education for decades as an enduring concept aimed at reforming teachers, students, and classrooms. Signified as a quiet revolution in media and education policy today, our youth have been rebranded and schools remarketed as A Nation at Hope, with promises of mindfulness and contemplative Social Emotional Learning (SEL) strategies. Yet, competing discourses of mindfulness incite youth across various goals and subjectivities. While the predominant global and national mindfulness discourse in education marks out students with preferred characteristics from those deemed insufficiently prepared to experience wellness, connectedness, and success, counter-narratives construct mindful students as transcending dominant social norms and movement toward collective freedom. In considering how such highly politicized discourses are mobilized in SEL curricula, this study problematized the decontextualized circulation of mindfulness discourses in the construction of a silenced and mindful subject. As a White teacher attending to the development of a critical lens that questions curriculum and policy, this study disrupts the researcher’s position as a former SEL trainer in a diverse school district. A critical whiteness studies lens established that several commonly used mindfulness-based interventions apprised a construction of students that works better for mass schooling systems rather than for distinct sociocultural identities. This inquiry provided a different lens on curricular decision- making by working from a local schooling context where stakeholders collaboratively decide on students’ social, emotional, and behavioral needs. In drawing on a conceptualization of discourse communities that recognizes how language and agency are mobilized in advocating for community goals, this interpretive case study inquired about community decision-making alongside stakeholders grappling with concepts and power relations to legitimize their work. The case was theoretically bound by critical discourse analysis, which traced the meaning-making of this community across individual andcollective texts. Thus, a collaborative study of individual and collective stakeholder discourse was read alongside the school’s curricular materials for a translocal comparison of discourse across individual and collective responses. This study may explain some ways that anti-racist discourse(s) figure in negotiating mindfulness and SEL for marginalized youth and how practitioners navigate toward humanizing, race-visible responses to mindfulness practices in their communities.

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International schools have proliferated globally since the second half of the twentieth century to meet the demands of a global mobile community and of families seeking an education in English for young people. While research on international schools has accompanied this growth, few studies have explored gender dynamics at international schools, which bring together diverse students, families, teachers, administrators, and staff. This study explored how four white women teachers at an international school in Morocco read womanhood and gender in different social locations. Employing feminist concepts and theories such as nomadic subjectivity, transnational feminism, and postfeminism, I produced a narrative ethnography of their readings through interviews, journals, and a focus group over the course of the 2020-2021 school year. Individual narratives reveal how the four women teachers engaged gendered discourses divergently, with two participants leaning towards postfeminist ideas of gender equality and individual empowerment and the other two participants highlighting the gender inequities they perceived in their lives. I also looked across all participants to explore their shared experiences as white, foreign-hire women teachers, which included a superficial belonging in Moroccan communities outside of the international school and readings of gender and womanhood shaped by structures such as whiteness and coloniality. This study offers a needed perspective on gender dynamics in international schools as experienced by teachers and also suggests the importance of location and culture in studies on women, gender, and teaching.

Discrimination has many effects on the individual/group being discriminated against regardless of the reasons for the discrimination. Further exploration on discrimination processes and their relationships to physiological and psychological outcomes, both of which, over time may become problematic and affect the health and well-being of individuals.

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Thesis (M.A. (Drama))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, Wits School of Arts, 2016 / This report is the final piece of a performance as research project exploring what it means to be white and English-speaking at the southern tip of Africa. The report is coupled with an autobiographical one man play about myself. The play explores, through a series of monologues, what it means for me to be a white South African. It moves from the specifics of my life to more general assumptions about whiteness and back again. This report runs parallel to the play almost as an extension of it working in dialogue to explore complicity and identity. As an extension of the creative project I have chosen to negate traditional chapters and style for more poetic language intertwined with analytical thinking, which links into the style of the play. The idea behind this is that every world, be it, performance onstage or analytical report writing is merely a part of the continuum called life and by blurring the lines between these it is easier to fuse the learning and the living into a cohesive whole. The creative research shows how the rehearsal and performance process of theatre-making helps to strip away the deceptions that people tell themselves making them complicit in the injustice of post-apartheid white privilege but in doing this it also creates a space where people can feel safe to dialogue about this complicity. / GR2017

It has almost been a decade since the inception of a 'New South Africa', without apartheid, which separated South Africans and classified them hierarchically according to their 'race'. The 'eradication' of apartheid has meant that South Africans have had to re-look at issues around racial identity without a dominating apartheid ideology. The purpose of the research was to describe and to look at some of the features and dynamics concerning racial identity that are prevalent in a post-apartheid South Africa. This was done by exploring the nature and type of interactions University of Natal Durban (UNO) students (doing a Human Behaviour and the Environment module) had with persons not from their own racial group, prior to coming to UNO as well as at UNO. The possible challenges, threats and opportunities students felt were afforded them because of their racial group were also explored. Literature concerning issues of racial identification in South Africa and other parts of the world was also examined. A descriptive research design, using a triangulated research methodology incorporating both quantitative and qualitative methods was used in the study. A non-probability sampling method with reliance on 83 available law, community development, nursing and psychology students representing the four racial classifications in South Africa, namely black, white, coloured and Indian was used. Data were collected through observations as well as through a self administered structured questionnaire. The findings of the research suggest that issues related to racial identification in a post-apartheid South Africa, for black, white, coloured and Indian students is in turmoil and requires reconstruction. The findings further indicated that questions about affirmative action and the future of non-black South Africans in South Africa is believed to be uncertain and negative. The issue of poverty and the internalised oppression and inferiority of black students was also identified to be problematic. / Thesis (M.A.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2003.