White International Graduate Students and Whiteness

Abstract

This emerging scholar’s piece explores the construct of whiteness and how it both shapes the experiences of white international graduate students in the United States as well as how they enact whiteness themselves. This dissertation study seeks not to recenter whiteness in scholarship, but to name and disrupt it in relation to a scarcely researched student population, namely white international graduate students. By way of a Post-Intentional Phenomenology grounded in Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), the study interrogates prevalent power structures in international higher education grounded in whiteness in addition to exploring the role white international students play in it.