Conversations from Within: Critical Race Feminism and the Roots/Routes of Change

Abstract

This chapter explores our personal encounters with community-university engagement (CE). Using Critical Race Feminist Theory (CRFT) and Critical Whiteness Studies, we seek to illustrate the interconnection of racism, sexism, and classism and how these underpin the dominant charity model of CE. An autobiographical approach informs this discussion, a method of counter-storytelling which legitimizes the voices of women of color and White feminist allies speaking about social injustice. As a racialized administrative staff member and doctoral student, and a White professor in a University in Canada, we offer our narratives and critical reflections of the politics of privilege and exclusion. We conclude that the reproduction of the dominant charity model is closely associated with the Whiteness of higher education institutions which also creates barriers to bringing an anti-racist and anticolonial approach to CE.KeywordsService LearningMulticultural EducationCritical Race TheoryWhite SupremacySenior AdministratorThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.