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Undoing Whiteness: A Political Education of One's Experience
Author(s) -
PROVOST MICKAËLLE
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of philosophy of education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.501
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1467-9752
pISSN - 0309-8249
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9752.12548
Subject(s) - undoing , politics , sociology , gender studies , pedagogy , psychology , epistemology , political science , psychoanalysis , philosophy , law
The aim of this paper is to understand whiteness as a political category which organizes ordinary experience. I will use a phenomenological framework in order to denaturalize the white experience and make it a possible object of transformation and education. A description of whiteness as a category of experience has implications not only for our understanding of political education but also for a feminist reflection on racism within the academic field. Indeed, the fight against racism has to be led not only at the level of intent or belief, but more fundamentally in terms of pre‐reflective experience, body, perception, affects. This means that a political education against racism must involve a critical attention to one's experience and perceptual habits: putting one's own experience to work. Phenomenology seems to offer a method articulating the ethical transformation of the self and the transformation of society, and then to problematize both an education of self and a reflection on educational institutions.