Conference de Shona Hunter, Leeds Beckett University
How whiteness is established [and amassed] through a range of normalised and normalising academic practices, including through the establishment of critical and progressive academic projects which ostensibly work to expose whiteness as ‘bad’. This normalising works via forms of competitive, individualising relationality which bring people together around the desire to be (the) good, to be the one to do good, to know the good, to decide the good, to execute and control the good. This sort of acquisitive possessive colonising orientation to the good is foundational to the oppressive [global] coloniality of (neo)liberalised higher education, it is the principal way in which it establishes whiteness as a form of governmental omnipotence and belonging. This acquisitive and possessive colonising orientation is also a self-contradictory and self-destructive process internal to the contemporary higher education. From within such an internally contradictory institutional context, how can we live different relationalities which challenge this massification of whiteness within the higher education project?
Dr Shona Hunter is a writer, researcher and educator on power, privilege, oppression, currently Reader in the Centre for Race Education and Decoloniality at Leeds Beckett University UK. She has published a range of single authored and edited works on race, racialisation and whiteness and its lived, material and affective dynamics with a particular interest in the way these dynamics are constitutive of liberal and neoliberal state practices as these relate to the production of global colonial whiteness. Her 2015 book Power, Politics and the Emotions: Impossible Governance, brings together these various themes to rethink the state itself. Her WhiteSpaces work now in its thirteenth year moves across academic and public locations, bringing together academics, activists and practitioners from 17 disciplines across 23 countries who have an interest in thinking critically about the meaning of whiteness in our current global coloniality. Her most recent editorial project with Christi van der Westhuizen of Nelson Mandela University South Africa is the (2021) Routledge International Handbook of Critical Studies of Whiteness. She is currently working on discomfort with Katalin Halász (Brunel, UK) and pessimism with Mark Schmitt (Dortmund, Germany).