Engaging With Race and Racism Through the Sensory: Four Pedagogical Instigations

Abstract

Teaching and learning effectively, inclusively, and critically about the power and politics of race and difference remains a protracted yet important struggle. Race is an emotionally laden and provocative issue facing many societies, and the concomitant privilege and ideology that upholds it are oftentimes surpassed through processes and mechanisms of “invisibling.” In this article, I add to the plethora of debates and discussions concerning race as an organizing principle by showing how through the sensory, seemingly one of the most mundane, banal, and quotidian aspects of social life, can be a potent epistemological tool with which to teach how “race” can be reconstructed, negotiated, and maneuvered by social actors in the context of multicultural Singapore. Social formations of “race” undergo new ways of categorization, perpetuation, and judgment with the sensory as an emotive medium of recognition and placement. I foreground some of the pedagogical strategies I have employed that draw on emotions and the senses to instigate meaningful and critical class discussions, and the variegated classroom responses to the teaching of race and multiculturalism in everyday life. More specifically, I show how students as well as their respondents deploy emotions and the sensory in practices of inclusion and exclusion upon racial selves and others. A more creative and inclusive classroom and learning environment is therefore imperative to stimulate discussion, particularly alternative, critical, and meaningful ways of thinking about race. This, I contend, will necessitate a reflexive reconfiguration and maneuvering of power dynamics within the classroom setting, and our experience in teaching undergraduate students through particular kinds of strategies I have used during discussion groups have reaped interesting outcomes, both on the parts of the instructor as a reflexive participant and the students in the classroom.