I argue that there has been inadequate attention to and questioning of the dominance and normativity of whiteness in the cultural construction of bioethics in the United States. Therefore we risk reproducing white privilege and white supremacy in its theory, method, and practices. To make my argument, I define whiteness and trace its broader social and legal history in the United States. I then begin to mark whiteness in U.S. bioethics, recasting Renee Fox's sociological marking of its American-ness as an (...) important initial marking of its whiteness/WASP ethos. Furthermore, I consider the attempts of social scientists to highlight sociocultural diversity as a corrective in U.S. bioethics. I argue that because they fail to problematize white dominance and normativity and the white-other dualism when they describe the standpoints of African-American, Asian-American, and Native-American others, their work merely inoculates difference and creates or maintains minoritized spaces. Accordingly, the dominant white center of mainstream U.S. bioethics must be problematized and displaced for diversity research to make a difference. In conclusion, I give several examples of how we might advance the recommended endeavor of exploring our own ethnicity, class, and other social positioning and norms operating in U.S. bioethics, briefly highlighting "white talk" as one challenge. (shrink)

This introspective essay was inspired by a desire to reflect on the use of qualitative research methods--where I am a Caucasian woman examining work experiences of women of color. I launched a journey backward to discover respondents' motivation for participating in my focus groups over the years, to closely examine their comfort level with a cross-ethnic dyad. The exercise enabled me to reflect on how I had negotiated power issues inherent in the research process. It contributes to the ongoing dialogue (...) about autoethnography--where understanding of self in socio-cultural context is both the subject and object of the research enterprise. Overall, I interrogate epistemological and methodological practicalities of researching difference. (shrink)

Interreligious dialogues as organized activities establish religious difference among its participants as a premise. This article discusses how various ways of signifying religious difference in interreligious dialogues can impact culturally by looking at the dynamics between the dialogues’ ‘insides’ and ‘outsides’, especially regarding the ways in which differences are conceptualized. The current criticism of interreligious dialogue and the current perspectives on the dialogues’ alleged effects on conceptualizing differences are examined in the examples presented in this article. Finally, two models of (...) interreligious dialogue are suggested. First, a model where religious differences are apprehended as ‘constitutive’, and second, a model where religious differences are viewed as ‘challenge’. The first relates to a multicultural view of differences, and the second to a perspective of cultural complexity. Lastly, the two models are discussed in relation to the notion of strategic essentialism. Anne Hege Grung is a researcher at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo. (shrink)