This paper contrasts two relatively independent forms of human development: waking up, the process and practices of psychospiritual awakening , and growing up, the process of moving from lesser narcissistic and ethnocentric self-identities towards mature postconventional self-identities with greater degrees of inclusion, perspective-taking, caring, and compassion. Each is a unique type of growth, contemplative and transformative, with different ways of engaging and differing goals and results. The former is about transcending or deconstructing the ego and the latter about building, strengthening, (...) and diversifying the ego. Whereas the Buddhist tradition and contemplative practices aim at awakening and transcending samsara (worldly conditions) by cultivating compassion and taming the mind, the Western tradition cultivates greater degrees of care and compassion by developing a mature ego within samsara that is both social-justice and eco-justice informed. The project of transcending the ego should not be confused with growing and maturing the ego. Self-transcendence and self-development must inform each other, and both are necessary for realizing our full human potential. (shrink)

The competing expressions of ideology flooding the contemporary political landscape have taken a turn toward the absurd. The Radiance Foundation’s recent anti-abortion campaign targeting African-American women, including a series of billboards bearing the slogan “The most dangerous place for an African-American child is in the womb”, is just one example of political "discourse" that is both infuriating and confounding. Discourse with these features – problematic intelligibility, disinterest in the truth, and inflammatory rhetoric – has become increasingly common in politics, the (...) press, and even the arguments made by ordinary folk. It is often criticized for its falsehood or its hurtfulness; however, these critiques tend to miss its pernicious potential. This essay characterizes this insidious discourse as purposeful nonsense. Part of the way that purposeful nonsense functions, we argue, relies on taking advantage of harmful stereotypes and denigrating narratives that are already present in our culture. Purposeful nonsense both draws upon harmful ideology and fortifies it. The effect is that members of oppressed social groups are confronted with disparaging ideology, while its authors are free to deny responsibility for it. Black feminist and intersectional analysis – particularly in the discussion of race, abortion, and reproductive justice – are useful in identifying and criticizing the harmful subtext in the Radiance Foundation’s billboard campaign. The notion of purposeful nonsense serves to extend the reach of these criticisms. Purposeful nonsense – disguised as merely logically confused discourse – is a key factor in maintaining an oppressive and unjust society; however, feminist, black feminist, and intersectional analysis contextualizes purposeful nonsense, potentially disrupting its harmful influence. We conclude that purposeful nonsense employs a variation on stereotype threat, a phenomenon in which being reminded of negative stereotypes about one’s social group causes stereotypical performance failures. We suggest that the notion of stereotype threat combined with intersectional analysis offers a fruitful avenue along which research on this sort of discourse might be expanded. (shrink)

In this article I argue that a critical theory of whiteness is necessary, though not sufficient, to the formulation of an adequate explanatory account of the mechanisms of racial oppression in the modern world. In order to explain how whiteness underwrites systems of racial oppression and how it is reproduced, the central functional properties of whiteness are identified. I propose that understanding whiteness as a structuring property of racialized social systems best explains these functional properties. Given the variety of conceptions (...) of whiteness in the literature, the several uses of the term are analysed and it is shown that there is a unifying concept underlying these various senses of whiteness. Lastly, some of the implications of this account of whiteness for anti-racist engagement are considered. Key Words: critical theory • Anthony Giddens • Jürgen Habermas • race • racial contract • racism • social structure • white supremacy • whiteness. (shrink)

: How should socially privileged white feminists (and others) address their privilege? Often, individuals are urged to overcome their own personal racism through a politics of self-transformation. The paper argues that this strategy may be problematic, since it rests on an over-autonomous conception of the self. The paper turns to Simone de Beauvoir for an alternative account of the self, as "situated," and explores what this means for a politics of privilege.

This study provides a short review of certain anomalous experiences such as glossolalia and out-of-body experiences, which are frequently experienced by a number of the healthy as well as the pathological population. Research also suggests that these experiences may be of a transformative and transcendent nature and linked to positive psychological well-being. Further, they may share similar phenomenological and semiological features. They all belong to the category of altered states of consciousness and are mostly treated by current psychiatry as pathological (...) problems, rather than spiritual or religious, as suggested by some studies. (shrink)

The Psychosis of Race offers a unique and detailed account of the psychoanalytic significance of race, and the ongoing impact of racism in contemporary society. Moving beyond the well-trodden assertion that race is a social construction, and working against demands that simply call for more representational equality, The Psychosis of Race explores how the delusions, anxieties, and paranoia that frame our race relations can afford new insights into how we see, think, and understand race's pervasive appeal. With examples drawn from (...) politics and popular culture--such as Candyman, Get Out, and the music of Kendrick Lamar--critical attention is given to introducing as well as explicating on several key concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis and the study of psychosis, including foreclosure, phallus, the Name-of-the-Father, sinthome, and the objet petit a. By elaborating a cultural mode to psychosis and its understanding, an original and critical exposition of the effects of racialization, as well as our ability to discern the very limits of our capacity to think through, or even beyond, the idea of race, is provided. The Psychosis of Race speaks to an emerging area in the study of psychoanalysis and race, and will appeal to scholars and academics across the fields of psychology, sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and the arts and humanities. (shrink)

Both autistic adults and families of autistic children rely heavily on blogs and other digital platforms to create community and gain experiential knowledge about autism, but research on autism blogs has failed to distinguish between the perspectives of autistic adults and neurotypical parent bloggers. Furthermore, intersections in the experiences of BIPOC autistics are rarely examined. Using a content analysis with a feminist Critical Disability Studies lens, I explore six autism parent blogs from diverse demographics: a white neurotypical father, a white (...) autistic mother in an interracial relationship, a white neurotypical mother, an Indigenous autistic trans father, a Black autistic nonbinary mother, and a Black neurotypical mother. I examine the attitudes of these bloggers to get a sampling of their opinions on autism, how they parent autistic children, and how their social location, specifically race, impacts their experiences. More intersectional research needs to be done to boost the perspectives of BIPOC autistics and the expertise of autistic parents. (shrink)

Suffering can make sacred, so it may partly be nature, and not culture alone, that leads us to apprehend a sacred aspect in victims of oppression. Those who recognize this sacredness show piety—a special form of respect—toward members of oppressed groups. The result is a system of social constructions often dismissed as “identity politics.” This essay starts with an analysis of the intentionality of piety and sacredness and how they relate to suffering, sacrifice, sanctions, pollution, and purification. It then argues (...) that the sacralization of oppressed groups is an expression of the perennial human disposition to acknowledge sacredness and to respond piously. The essay then analyzes this sacred status as socially constructed. Based on the sacred-making power of suffering, the sacred status elicits piety, gives its bearers special authority, surrounds them with sanctions, and calls for symbolic sacrificial punishments of the impious. By dissecting sacrificial politics as a system of social constructions, we see that, although the oppressed groups are made sacred, certain people in the oppressor groups—“the Pious”—continue to exercise fundamental power. This essay, by displaying the inner logic of this cultural phenomenon, helps us both to sympathize with and to critique the system and then to pose questions about what good or bad the system might be doing. (shrink)

How do technically-skilled women negotiate the male-dominated environments of technology firms? This article draws upon interviews with female programmers, technical writers, and engineers of diverse racial backgrounds and sexual orientations employed in the San Francisco tech industry. Using intersectional analysis, this study finds that racially dominant women, who identified as LGBTQ and presented as gender-fluid, reported a greater sense of belonging in their workplace. They are perceived as more competent by male colleagues and avoided microaggressions that were routine among conventionally (...) feminine, heterosexual women. We argue that a spectrum of belonging operates in these occupational spaces dominated by men. Although white and Asian women successfully navigated workplace hostilities by distancing themselves from conventional heterosexual femininity, this strategy reinforces inequality regimes that privilege male workers. These findings provide significant theoretical insights about how race, sexuality, and gender interact to reproduce structural inequalities in the new economy. (shrink)

There are a plethora of issues within higher education which continually reinforce aspects of inequality and discrimination. These particular issues are aligned to institutionally racist struc...

In part I of this paper, I argue that #MeToo testimony increases epistemic value for the survivor qua hearer when experiences like hers are represented by others; for society at large when false but dominant narratives about sexual violence and sexual harassment against women are challenged and replaced with true stories; and for the survivor qua teller when her true story is believed. In part II, I argue that the epistemic significance of #MeToo testimony compels us to consider the tremendous (...) and often unappreciated costs to the individual tellers, and the increased credibility they are owed in virtue thereof. (shrink)

Abstract‘Representing Race and Gender’ was the first course in the undergraduate curriculum of the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney to foreground race. This paper provides a critical reflection of our embodied and affective experiences teaching this course as women of different racial and cultural backgrounds (Korean American and Anglo Australian). We draw on feminist pedagogies to illuminate the strategic ways we have performed our own intersectional identities in lecture and tutorial spaces. In particular we (...) focus on the different ways we have approached and taught material on whiteness and white privilege and how students of various backgrounds have responded to the same material when it is taught by a white or non-white lecturer. Through this discussion, we think through how ‘Representing Race and Gender’ functions as a space where pedagogical decisions and approaches are inextricably linked to our goal of developing students’ capacities for engaging with racial difference and racism in critically conscious ways that extend beyond the classroom. (shrink)

Changes in US society have found their way into the adoption arena, resulting in new policies and participants in the adoption process and altering the discourse of adoption. Although the discourse of modern adoption has shifted, the legacy of race in adoption remains. Drawing on popular adoption literature, information in the public domain, and discussions in an adoption forum, this paper argues that despite efforts at reconstruction, racial inequalities are often reified in current adoption discourse, implemented through the very practices (...) designed to help children. Interpreted both as a device for categorization and as discursive formation, the language of adoption continues to empower some groups and disempower others. The Internet presents a zone of possibility for reconstructing relations of power in adoption via symbolic and linguistic resources as asymmetries between adoption participants are contested and reconstructed. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 1 Seiten: 86-102.

For all the talk there has been lately about privilege, few have commented on the moral obligations that are associated with having privilege. Those who have commented haven't gone much beyond the idea that the privileged should be conscious of their privilege, should listen to those who don't have it. Here we want to go further, and build an account of the moral obligations of those with a particular kind of privilege: race privilege. In this paper we articulate an understanding (...) of race privilege, say how a person can know when she has it, and argue that a race-privileged person has obligations to offset her privilege. We make concrete suggestions for how she can, at least approximately, do this. We use particular racial group disparities in the United States as our running example throughout the paper, although our conclusions generalize. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race provides up-to-date explanation and analyses by leading scholars of contemporary issues in African American philosophy and philosophy of race. These original essays encompass the major topics and approaches in this emerging philosophical subfield that supports demographic inclusion and diversity while at the same time strengthening the conceptual arsenal of social and political philosophy. Over the course of the volume's ten topic-based sections, ideas about race held by Locke, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are (...) supplemented by suppressed thought from the African diaspora, early twentieth-century African American perspectives and Native-, Asian-, and Latin-, American views. The contributors bring philosophical analysis to bear on the status of racial divisions as categories of humanity in the biological sciences, as well as within contemporary criticism and conceptual analysis. Essays present the special applications of American philosophy and continental philosophy to ideas of race as methodological alternatives to more analytic approaches. As a collection of analyses and assessments of 'race' in the real world, the volume pays trenchant and relevant attention to historical and contemporary racism and what it means to say that 'race' and racial identities are socially constructed. The essays analyze contemporary social issues including the importance of racial difference and identity in education, public health, medicine, IQ and other standardized tests, and sports. Additionally, the essays consider the societal limitations and structures provided by public policy and law. As a critical theory, the volume compares the study of race to feminism. Historical and contemporary, academic and popular, racisms pertaining to male and female gender receive special consideration throughout the volume. While this comprehensive collection may have the effect of a textbook, each of the original essays is a fresh and authentic development of important present thought. (shrink)

The authors illuminate the process of preservice teacher learning about race through a narrativized case study of Michelle, a White elementary teacher. Michelle displayed elements of White resistance to race but also a desire to engage in teaching about race. When race is viewed as a threshold concept ( Meyer & Land, 2006 ), Michelle's struggles with race highlight important considerations for teacher education.

This article identifies philosophical tensions and limitations within contemporary intersectionality theory which, it will be argued, have hindered its ability to explain how positioning in multiple social categories can affect life chances and influence the reproduction of inequality. We draw upon critical realism to propose an augmented conceptual framework and novel methodological approach that offers the potential to move beyond these debates, so as to better enable intersectionality to provide causal explanatory accounts of the ‘lived experiences’ of social privilege and (...) disadvantage. (shrink)

Contemporary Western feminism and transpersonalism are kaleidoscopic, consisting of interlocking influences, yet the fields have developed in parallel rather than in tandem. Both schools of praxis developed during the climate of activism and social experimentation of the 1960s in the United States, and both share a non-pathological view of the human experience. This discussion suggests loci of synthesized theoretical constructs between the two disciplines as well as distinct concepts and practices in both disciplines that may serve the other. Ways in (...) which a feminist-transpersonal perspective may catalyze social change on personal, regional, and global levels are proposed. (shrink)

Psychologists have long been concerned with the welfare and competent treatment of underserved populations. However, terminology used in psychological research is not always conducive to cultural sensitivity. This article discusses why the term “non-white” may be less sensitive to diverse populations and provides practical alternatives to this nomenclature. In addition, the authors examine the literature from 2008 to 2012 to establish whether the term “non-white” is still used to describe populations in psychological research. The article concludes with several recommendations for (...) how researchers could choose to proceed in regards to identifying populations using culturally sensitive and relevant language. (shrink)

This thesis is a critical examination of the history of philosophies governing public education in the United States. The first half, chapters one through six, outlines American conceptions of the role of the school in relation to the state and to democracy. The second half is an account of critical progressive philosophies that have challenged the American status-quo since the independence. The main argument that I propose here is that the creation of an education system in America has followed the (...) philosophies of federalism and private democracy. These philosophies are economically centered and define the citizen in economic terms. Progressive educators have long questioned this definition and seek to redefine citizenship to describe participatory democracy, and communication based on experience and an ethic of care. (shrink)

Intersecting authority-language-and-symbolic power, this article tells the story of a group of continental Francophone African youth who find themselves in an urban French-language high school in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Through their narrative, one is confronted by the trauma of one's own language being declared an illegitimate child, hence becoming a ‘deceptive fluency’ in the ‘eyes of power’ thanks to race and post-coloniality. They are fully consciousness of this situation and their ‘linguistic return’, thus gazing back at the eyes of power (...) and declaring themselves ‘subjects’ capable of love and desire. I briefly address questions of hospitality and language ownership and conclude by addressing the need to re-think the connection between race, power and language. (shrink)

Over the past 15 years we have seen the rise of a field of inquiry known as Whiteness Studies. Two of its major tenets are (1) that white identity is socially constructed and functions as a racial norm and (2) that those who occupy the position of white subjectivity exercise ‘white privilege’, which is oppressive to non-whites. However, despite their ubiquitous use of the term ‘norm’, Whiteness Studies theorists rarely give any detailed account of how whiteness serves to normalize. A (...) case is made here that we can only understand how whiteness normalizes if we place the development of white racial subject positions within the context of the development of normalizing biopower that Foucault describes in his work through the 1970s. Once that context is provided, it becomes clear that a larger problem exists in Whiteness Studies, one evident in the use of the concept of ‘white privilege’. Whiteness Studies theorists have not thoroughly critiqued the juridical conception of power that they have inherited from traditional political theory; as a result, they cannot get away from psychological accounts of the origins of racism, even though they usually state very clearly that they believe racism is an institutional phenomenon and racist subject positions are formed within networks of power. If Whiteness Studies is to accomplish both its analytical and its political goals, its theorists need to pay close attention to Foucault’s work on biopower. (shrink)

Some of the literature about teaching issues of race and racism in classrooms has addressed matters of audience. Zeus Leonardo, for example, has argued that teachers should use the language of white domination, rather than white privilege, when teaching about race and racism because the former language presupposes a minority audience, while the latter addresses an imaginary or presupposed white one. However, there seems to be little discussion in the literature about teaching these issues to an audience that is in (...) fact predominantly minority. Leonardo assumes that minority students need little convincing about the reality of white domination, but students of color are not a monolithic group. The paper addresses some specific challenges the author has faced teaching theories of white domination to a predominantly minority student audience in New York City. Leonardo is right that audience matters, but audience turns out to matter in ways that defy common assumptions. (shrink)

The built environment and the organisation of public spaces reflect the normative notions of male and female. Public toilets, amongst other widely common public spaces, underline these two opposing concepts and challenge the presence of transgender. Within the boundaries of public toilets, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals become a crucial point of debate, scrutiny and controversy. Analysing the politics of such gender-segregated space, this article explores the notion of uniformity and challenges the idea of single-ness as the absolute expression of (...) the self. (shrink)

In vernacular understandings or conversations about resistance as it occurs with students in public schools, it is frequently viewed as a negative action or set of behaviours to be changed or curtailed. This paper puts forward an argument that allows for the possibility of seeing moments of resistance as something to be recognized and celebrated with students. I do not suggest that resistance must always or only be viewed in this manner, but rather that it might be viewed thus, and (...) thereby allow for multiple understandings of an action such as resistance. Beginning with my own hegemonic understanding of resistance as a necessarily bad/undesirable characteristic or behaviour, I then build on Foucault’s relational approach to understanding power (and its operations), leading then to a discussion of student engagement as also a relational process and one that has more than one possible form. By offering a possibility of understanding student engagement as a process that works both within and outside the structures that produce and maintain the White, middle class, heterosexual, abled, Christian, male child as the defacto subject of schooling, I build an argument that opens a more fluid conception of resistance than the necessarily negative action it is often perceived to be. (shrink)

In this piece, we ask, what are the risks of a pedagogy and politics that begins and ends with privilege? What does it mean to declare privilege when embedded in institutions of the settler colonial state? These questions are raised through an ongoing project where we interview provincial public sector workers on Treaty 6, 7 and 8 and Coast Salish Territories about their implications in settler colonialism through public sector work. In the project, we articulate the interdisciplinary framework of settler (...) colonial socialization to consider the space between individuals and structures – the meso-space where settlers are made by learning how to take up the work of settler colonialism. For these reasons, in our research we ask, “what do the pedagogical processes of settler colonial socialization tell us about how systemic colonial violence is sustained, and how it might be disrupted or refused in public sector work?” In this paper, we narrow our focus to the declarations of privilege that many of our interview participants are making. We reflect on these declarations and consider whether focusing on settler complicity and Indigenous refusals can better support a decolonial politics for settlers working in the public sector. We argue that declarations of privilege risk reproducing settler-centric logics that maintain settler colonialism, settler jurisdiction, and settler certainty, and we reflect on how to orient participants towards the material realization of relational accountability and towards imagining otherwise. (shrink)

This dissertation offers a robust philosophical examination of a phenomenon that is morally, socially, and politically significant – microaggressions. Microaggressions are understood to be brief and routine verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that, whether intentional or unintentional, convey hostility toward or bias against members of marginalized groups. Microaggressions are rooted in stereotypes and/or bias (whether implicit or explicit) and are connected to broader systems of oppression. Microaggressions are philosophically interesting, since they involve significant ambiguity, questions about speech and communication, and (...) the ability for our speech to encode and transmit bits of meaning. Microaggressions prompt reflection about the nature of blameworthiness and responsibility, especially for unintended acts and harms. They involve questions about how we perceive and treat one another, and whether or not people are treated as true equals in our social and political worlds. For all of these reasons, microaggressions are a critical area in need of philosophical reflection, specifically reflection in feminist philosophy, philosophy of language, moral philosophy, and social and political philosophy. This dissertation seeks to advance the philosophy of microaggressions through three distinct aims: a conceptual aim (chapters 2 and 3), an epistemological aim (chapters 1 and 2), and a moral aim (chapters 4 and 5). The conceptual aim involves clarifying how we should understand and categorize microaggressions. The epistemological aim involves identifying some of the epistemological assumptions undergirding discussions of microaggressions in the literature, including assumptions made by critics of microaggression theory, and arguing for an alternative epistemological framework for theorizing about microaggressions. The moral aim involves better understanding the harms of microaggressions, including their role in reinforcing structures of oppression and unjust social hierarchy. Taken together, these chapters make some progress on the conceptual, epistemological, and moral questions that microaggressions generate, and which philosophers have not yet adequately analyzed. It thus offers a meaningful contribution to the conversations philosophers are beginning to have about the morally and politically salient phenomenon of microaggressions. (shrink)

Although it is a relatively new phenomenon, the most popular descriptions of post-truth operate within the boundaries of the classical dichotomy between emotion and reason that dates back to Plato’s Phaedrus: both, to some extent, view emotions as impediments to knowledge and our ability to live morally upstanding lives (248a-b). Post-truth, which is seen as a threat to reason, social cohesion, and fact-based knowledge claims, is either viewed as the outcome of the failure of our cognitive apparatus, or a consequence (...) of our unchecked thirst for stories that provoke dramatic feelings. From a feminist point of view, this should give us pause, since the arguments used to dismiss post-truth resemble those that dismissed women’s experiences and emotions as idiosyncratic or irrational. Have post-truth scholars been too hasty in their judgment of emotion-based knowledge claims? In this essay, I explore the transcendental role of emotion in its relationship to epistemic knowledge claims and argue that emotion should be given a more primordial status in the analysis of post-factuality. I do this by exploring the psychoanalytic and phenomenological analysis of affect, especially Sara Ahmed’s feminist phenomenology of embodiment. (shrink)