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Based on an ethnographic study at a middle school in a Midwestern city, this article examines the difficulty in creating anti-racist educational spaces, even in schools with a stated desire to do so. The school's curriculum was mainly based on teachers' abstract ideas of social justice and was not grounded in students' everyday realities. It failed to connect students to larger histories and stories of oppression and resistance, the central tenets of culturally relevant approaches. The school also failed in its attempts to shift its culture around discipline that disproportionately impacted Black students. The school's failure to implement culturally relevant and anti-racist curriculum and disciplinary practices illuminates various barriers to such implementation, including a lack of racial and experiential diversity among teachers, a focus on individual behavior rather than classroom and school culture, and a focus on maintaining enrollment as a charter school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews two decades of work carried out at the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies, University of Leeds in the area of racism and higher education. It introduces key issues and themes in this field and also identifies a seven-point agenda for action. This article provides an overview and agenda-setting account of the theoretical and policy innovations developed by this research team, which provide a contextual background for this volume as a whole. Historical recognition of the role of universities as key sites for the production of racialised knowledge across a range of intellectual fields is an essential starting point. We urge promotion of fundamental de-racialisation and de-colonisation of the academy. This cannot be achieved by self-regulation by the sector or by the setting of minimum legal requirements, it requires strong political, institutional and intellectual leadership, alliance-building and mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With the aim of rethinking Paulo Freire’s theory and its practices in race/ethnicity and education, this article uses intersectionality to deepen our understanding of differences among the oppressed and break the opposition between the oppressed and oppressor. Based on an ethnographic study carried out at a feminist adult educational institution in Sweden, the author examines the positionality of migrant students and feminist teachers and how they react to othering in the educational process and in Swedish society. The author also argues for the importance of intersectionality as a way to help both the conscientization of the oppressed and the radical task of the liberatory teachers. It is crucial to untangle gendered and sexualized racism, especially in specific contexts where race and gender intersect to construct a binary between a ‘superior us’ and a ‘barbaric Other.’ Conscientization and intersectionality are particularly useful for probing the complicated processes of othering and combating different forms of oppression and racism in an era of globalization in Western countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on the concept of race and racism as “technologies of affect” to think with some of the interventions and arguments of critical affect studies. The author suggests that critical affect theories enable the theorization of race and racism as affective modes of being that recognize the historically specific assemblages which are practiced in schools and the society. It is also argued that rethinking race and racism as technologies of affect, a vision of anti-racist politics and practice in education can be formed in ways that go beyond recognition or resistance, but rather attend to the production of pedagogical spaces and practices that create ways of living differently. The education implications of this idea are discussed in relation to how teachers and teacher educators can begin not only to analyze the affective mobilizations of race and racism, but also to engage in political struggles that harness the affective forces of anti-racist action in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the transatlantic use of Critical Race Theory (CRT) frameworks to critically interpret racism in education internationally, and the possibilities and pitfalls this has for understanding racism in Ireland. It argues for the importance of CRT’s framework on a number of grounds, but echoes cautions against the assumed, or sole use of a white/non-white framework to understand situated anti-racisms ‘elsewhere’. This caution focuses on less on CRT principles per se, and more on typically derivative ‘nationalist’ policy appropriations of anti-racism. Education policy (and research) misrepresentations of systemic racism as happening in another place, or at another time function by deracialising and ignoring complex Atlantic and wider (neo)colonial relations. By exploring the ‘troubling movements’ of education’s emergence within Irish-Atlantic-Empire politics, the article encourages postcolonialanimationsof CRT praxis. It shows ways in which CRT can work transnationally with and beyond white/non-white dualisms, to challenge derivative ‘normative state’ dilutions of educational anti-racisms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For many educators who lead cross-racial discussions, creating ‘safe' spaces in which students can express their views is a familiar goal. Yet what constitutes safety is rarely defined or contextualized. In the absence of this contextualization, the goal of safety is most often driven by White participants who complain that they are (or fear being) ‘attacked' in these discussions. This article examines this specific complaint, which we term as the discourse of violence. We draw on data from a facilitated race discussion and identify five key effects of this discourse in cross-racial discussion about race: positions and re-inscribes Whites as racially innocent; positions and re-inscribes people of Color as perpetrators of violence; maintains White solidarity; stabilizes the ideologies of individualism and universalism; re-inscribes the narration of the ideal imagined community. The data reveal that White students draw on violent imagery to position contexts in which race and racism are under discussion as unsafe spaces; as arenas of violence. We argue that the discourse of violence ultimately functions to protect and reproduce White supremacy, specifically in a context in which the goal is to interrupt White supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]