Race Space Research Articles

Picturing white women on campus: risks and possibilities of critical whiteness photo elicitation

In this methodological inquiry, we ask: What are the walls that block the examination of whiteness for white women when using photo-elicitation interviewing? What are the methodological possibilities and risks of photo elicitation with white women when critically studying whiteness? Framed by concepts of white complicity, white vulnerability and vigilance, and Critical whiteness Methodology, the inquiry reveals key risks and possibilities of photo elicitation in critical whiteness research: 1) white racial bonding, 2) (de)racialization of space and place, and 3) refusals and silences from white participants. We discuss practices of white vigilance within qualitative research that resist racist harm and further interrogate the visual modes by which whiteness moves on college campuses via the white cisheteropatriarchal gaze. We propose Critical whiteness Photo Elicitation (CwPE) methodology as one methodological strategy for cracking the walls of whiteness.

Designed Segregation: Racial Space and Social Reform in San Juan’s Casa de Beneficencia

Designed Segregation: Racial Space and Social Reform in San Juan’s Casa de Beneficencia

Historical and legal aspect of establishment and activities of Ad Hoc PAROS (Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space) Committee

The article examines the historical and legal aspects of the establishment and activities of the Ad Hoc PAROS (Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space) Committee, which operated from 1985 to 1994 as a subsidiary body of the Conference on Disarmament. The historical prerequisites for the creation of the Ad Hoc PAROS Committee and the resolution of the UN General Assembly together with the working documents of the Conference on Disarmament related to the activities of the Committee and the areas of its work were analyzed. Key functions of the Committee included processing proposals of regional groups, holding meetings, involving experts, and developing documentation on issues related to the prevention of an arms race in outer space. Emphasis was placed on the active involvement of delegations in the development of measures to prevent an arms race in outer space, with the aim of preserving its peaceful use for future generations. It was revealed that at the meetings of the Committee, delegations proposed to strengthen the support and the existing international norms and rules; to develop new international agreements that would regulate problematic issues of outer space activity; to create measures to increase transparency and trust between states, through the creation of monitoring international agencies; to promote cooperation and partnership in outer space exploration.
 The article justifies the importance of the Committee's contribution in providing an opportunity to states, which are seeking to settle the issue of disarmament not only on Earth, but also in outer space, to put forward proposals for strengthening confidence and to resolve the issue of the legal vacuum created by the incomplete regulation of the use of outer space. The opinion was expressed that the Committee had great potential to become a permanent body of the Conference on Disarmament and, despite the lack of a negotiating mandate, received the support of states for updating existing international treaties, creating confidence-building measures. However, subsequent historical events made their adjustments, and the Committee was not renewed.

Learning to Be Black in America

Whereas a lot has already been written on the manifestations, representations, and effects of race and racism on Black people generally, not as much attention has been paid to the meaningful distinctions in the racial experiences and perceptions of continental Africans who migrate to the United States. This paper presumes that continental Africans experience race differently from African-Americans, and that this experiential and notional difference complicates relations between these two groups. Upon arrival, African immigrants learn to live Black in a matured racial space – the United States – which does not often differentiate ethnic and national differences in racial experience. It is this learning to live black and becoming Black that I call racial enculturation. In thinking through this friction, this paper contrasts Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me to unearth the divergences in their accountings of racial encounters.
 I posit a taxonomy of four enculturation anxieties that African immigrants to the US face: racial levelling, fraternal nervousness, racial etiquette, and political will. I propose these four nodes as a lens by which to see racial experience from the African immigrants’ viewpoint and how it destabilizes the predominant view from the African American and white perspective. This paper will also show that the variance in the historical experiences of colonialism, slavery, and apartheid among different groups of Black people globally has material implications for how we represent and theorize race and racism.

“Education is a white woman’s world”: theorizing race, gender, and geography in a liberatory Black pedagogical space

ABSTRACT In this Black feminist critical inquiry, I theorize the politics of race, gender, and geography in the context of a liberatory Black pedagogical space located in the United States. Using curated interview and observation data, I position an anti-racist pedagogue as a cartographer who employed method, content, style, and technique to map freedom routes away from schooling, a Dumasian site of suffering for Black students. I paint a narrative portrait that foregrounds sights, sounds, and felt tensions emerging from two manifestations of Black affective networks that constellated in the Black male critical pedagogue’s classroom. Ultimately, I call for attention to the construction of liberatory education spaces created to address the comfort and needs of not only racially minoritized learners but also students who embody sexes, genders, and gender performances marginalized in white-dominant culture. Such pedagogical spaces, I argue, can be a refusal to indulge the ontological, epistemological, and existential project of whiteness.

Caracas Is Not Paris: The Moderate Modernity of Mestizaje in Teresa de la Parra’s Ifigenia (1924)

Abstract: Through her epistolary correspondence and her novel Ifigenia 1924, Teresa de la Parra (1889–1936) questions racial stratification systems reminiscent of colonial times and still present in twentieth-century Venezuela. Parra establishes the malleability of racial categories through a moderate racial discourse that intends to re-classify whiteness as the sole marker of economic wealth. Via its young and naïve protagonist, Ifigenia depicts how white elites reluctantly adapted to modernity’s significant socioeconomic changes, leaving previous racial stratification systems—and their whitening projects—obsolete. Parra’s moderate approach to race has been consistently overlooked by numerous scholars who often focus on Ifigenia ’s feminine discourse. However, Parra’s novel thrives in the nuanced juxtaposition between racial purity and mestizaje that mirrors the tension between Paris and Caracas as opposing geographical and racial spaces. Parra’s nuanced discourse reveals a moderate racial theory that underscores the importance of controlled racial mixing and intends to negotiate between a European ideal of racial purity and a Venezuelan mestizo reality at the turn of the twentieth century. Ultimately, her protagonist willingly sacrifices herself for the continuation of a national narrative where modernity has enforced an acceptance of mestizaje .

“They’re Just Lost”: Student Navigation of Racialized Campus Space

Educators working toward creating inclusive learning environments for diverse student populations need to consider the educational landscape in which colleges and universities operate. Using racialized space and the Culturally Engagement Campus Environments (CECE) model, this study examines students’ navigation of racialized spaces on campus. Using data from cognitive interviewing, students shared narratives of their experiences of avoiding, seeking out, and disengagement with campus spaces grounded in concerns of whiteness and racism on campus.

‘You either go on the gang life, or you go on that football life’: class, race, and place in imaginaries of South London’s sports cages

ABSTRACT In considering the spatialization of race and the racialization of space, this article explores dominant media representations of sports cages in the UK. To date, media interest in these cages, often found on social housing estates, has revolved around the role they have played in the childhoods of a small number of young, almost exclusively Black, footballers, primarily from London. In the first academic article to engage with these issues, we adopt a critical approach, examining white spatial imaginaries which promulgate the naturalisation of poverty, and which produce and reproduce social pathologies associated with Black communities, and young Black men in particular. The enduring racialised tropes of lone parent families, gang affiliation and violence, and Black footballers being skilful and athletic but ‘difficult’ or ‘lacking’ in tactical acumen are discussed. We highlight examples of commodification, exploitation and glamourisation of these spaces. In addition, the reasons for the centrality of cages in the lives of large numbers of young Black men in London, rarely examined in media representations, are explicated. We end by proposing potential areas of research that are worthy of exploration.

The Racial Ambiguities of American Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews

This paper analyzes the racial ambiguities of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in American law by examining three Supreme Court cases: DeFunis v. Odegaard, Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb, and Bennun v. Rutgers State University. Despite being classified as a religious group, Jews have also been subjected to racial categorization, with Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews often occupying different racial spaces. Through a close reading of these cases, the paper explores how the Supreme Court has grappled with the complexity of Jewish identity in America, and how these cases have shaped the legal understanding of Jewishness as both a religious and a racial identity. Ultimately, the paper argues that these cases highlight the need for a more nuanced and inclusive approach to understanding race and ethnicity in American law, particularly in how it relates to the Jewish community.

Space Diplomacy

Summary After the Cold War and the race in space, space activities increasing became a geopolitical arena of co-operation. This article is based on my personal experience gathered over fifteen years leading European space institutions: in 2007 I became the Chairman of the Executive Board of the German Aerospace Center. In that position I led the German delegation to the European Space Agency (ESA). From 2015 to 2021 I had the honour and pleasure of being the Director General of ESA. During the whole period from 2007 to today I have had various political interactions that developed my current mindset. Even in times of geopolitical difficulties we need some aspects of international interaction; space can play this role.

The Moving Target: Brazilian Pardo Identity and its Constitution of Racial Space

In the field of Critical Race Studies, Brazil continually proves to be a unique case with its diverse population, incredible nuanced racial classification system, and claim to “racial democracy” and transcending its history of racism and slavery. At the heart of these claims is a large pardo, or mixed race, population that is often characterized as the apex of Brazilianness and multiraciality. The mixed-race body is romanticized and the entire Brazilian populous is placed in a racialized “third space” beyond the recognized system of Black and white identities. How do pardo people conceptualize themselves in this idealized world of racial democracy? How do the systems of Brazil’s history and national identity formation impact the modern understanding of mixed identity? Where do mixed-race people fit in the spectrum of racialized space— if they even do? This project will examine the history of miscegenation, critical race theory, media discourse, and Brazilian census data to evaluate the space that pardo bodies take up in Brazil. Through analyzing and contextualizing these components with the experiences of pardo people, this work will put into focus the moving target that is mixed-race identity in Brazil. As a result, the study will contribute a new perspective of spatiality to mixed- race discourse as well as question our perceptions of racial identity and who it benefits.

한국의 근대화와 도시-농촌 이분법의 재고찰

This study attempted to dismantle the sexist and racist spatial imagination between urban and rural areas of Korea based on the theoretical approach to gender and racial relations between modernization and the urban-rural dichotomy. The results of the study are as follows: First, Korea’s modernization process created an ideological rurality with a patriarchal character and ethnic purity, which created contradictions with rural reality. Second, ideological rurality began to be threatened by the changing rural society due to the influence of modernization, and the fear of rural society evoked in this process was embodied as a suicide problem for rural bachelors. The death of a rural bachelor emerged as a nationwide social problem because it was linked to the maintenance of patriarchal authority and the Korean ethnics. Third, the rural bachelor marriage project, as a solution to the suicide problem, has marginalized rural areas into a feminine and racial space, following the sexist and racist genealogy of Korean urban women, ethnic women, and underdeveloped women. This study revealing the sexist and racist ways of representing rural areas today in historical and spatial contexts is meaningful in that it has opened up a new approach to understanding inequality in Korean rural areas.

Psychological Lynching: An Examination of Educational Trauma and Identity Development

This article seeks to shed light on the ways urban educational spaces aid in the traumatization of Black students and their identity formation. Educational spaces and experiences have continued to shape identity development for many individuals who encounter this contextual setting (Clayton, 2020; Leath et al., 2019). This article positions the theories of critical race (CRT) and racial space (RST) as a vehicle to more intentionally explore and link trauma work to discussions of identity development. In these spaces, identities are strengthened or disrupted, with implications for academic and social well-being. This study highlights the voices of eleven Hampton Roads, Virginia teachers. These teachers reflect and share their traumatic experiences and provide insight into how those experiences influenced their identity development. Additionally, this article contributes ideas for conducting identity-conscious trauma research and building race-conscious pathways for supporting trauma-exposed youth in urban educational spaces.

Police redistricting reforms and urban governance

AbstractPolice redistricting reforms are surprisingly understudied. While many understand redistricting in other realms as a mechanism of social inclusion and exclusion, police redistricting is often overlooked as merely technocratic. We argue that, in fact, police redistricting reforms are substantively and theoretically important because they articulate urban policy amid the pressures of neoliberal governance. Redistricting defines the functions and activities of the police, responds to political and economic pressures, and redistributes resources across racial spaces. To illustrate, we analyze publicly available materials describing 43 police redistricting reforms in 35 major cities in the United States. We find in these reforms an enduring emphasis on the role of the police as emergency service providers. Urban austerity and growth politics inflect redistricting and impact the distribution of police service across the city. While redistricting can theoretically result in more equitable policing, it can also amplify racial inequities by triaging resources toward downtowns and predominantly white neighborhoods, at the expense of police response in communities of color. We call for more attention to police redistricting as an arena of urban governance.

Russia on the way to space without weapons: problems and achievements

Оn concrete steps and initiatives of Russia on the prevention of arms race in space (PAROS) and obstacles on this way, on approaches of the key space fairing western states towards these initiatives. use of outer space for military purposes. The article asserts that the real international legal barrier on the way of transforming space into the «battle fi eld» are called to be legally binding agreements in this fi eld. The article presents analysis on the key elements of eventual international instrument on PAROS, in particular, basic defi nitions and stipulations which could lay the basis of corresponding international document as well as peculiarities of other initiatives and proposals targeted to achieving this aim — Russia's proposal concerning a Treaty on the Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in Outer Space, the Threat or Use of Force against Outer Space Objects (PPWT), which provides for a ban on the placement of weapons of any kind in outer space and on any use of force against space objects, the initial draft of which was submitted jointly with China within the Conference on Disarmament back in 2008, political commitment not to be the fi rst to place weapons in outer space (NFP) and transparency and confi dence building measures (TCBMs). The article evaluates the activities of the USA and their allies in their attempts to devaluate the initiatives of Russia and likeminded countries in this fi eld and to channel international eff orts in the stream which suits there strategic interests. The article postulates that doctrines, practical measures and science and technology elaborations of the USA, France and NATO as a whole in the fi eld of militarization of space brings closer the stage of a qualitative arms race in outer space. The article asserts that despite the window of opportunities for the preventive diplomatic measures being narrowed, practical eff orts for PAROS should be continued.

Places thatFeelRacist: How the Built Environment Re/Creates White Racial Spaces and Time

In this 2022 Janet E. Helms Award for Mentoring and Scholarship keynote, I discuss the importance of understanding how our built-environment and our physical spaces and structures are intertwined with my conceptualization of systemic racism. I describe the problems with how we study racism, systemic racism, and context, and the limitations of how we have adapted traditional psychotherapy theories. In this paper, I propose an examination of structural racism and the ways in which white spaces, white property, and white time work to displace, dispossess, and dislocate Black and other non-Black people of Color. This constant racism within white spaces allows us to understand what may be creating the psychological and physiological stresses many people of Color experience. In better understanding systemic racism, I hope we can focus our critical scholarship on centralizing the humanity of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and other people of Color.

Racialized Organizations in Racialized Space: How Socio-spatial Divisions Activate Symbolic Boundaries in a Charter School and a Public School

Much research documents the systems of racism that undergird the rise of school choice policies and charter schools, racialized organizations that reproduce racial logics. While school choice policy gets enacted at the structural level to enable the formation of charter schools, policy also interacts with a localized neighborhood context where space must be allocated to the charter school. As race scholars show, space is itself racialized. How does this localized allocation of racial space shape intra-group dynamics in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood? Evidence for this study comes from two years of ethnographic participant-observation and informal conversations with parents in a traditional public school and a charter school in a large Northeastern city. Findings show how threats to the material boundaries of school space activate symbolic boundaries between parents from each school, drawing from racialized organizational identities of traditional public schools as representing neighborhood loyalty and anti-gentrification resistance positioned against charter schools as representing dominant whiteness, superiority, and social mobility. I conclude with a discussion of implications for broader studies of racialized space and organizations, culture, and collective action.

The Secret Hurt: Exposing the Visceral Nature of Whiteness in the Academy

This article presents an autoethnographic reflection from three education scholars—a white man, a Latinx woman, and a Black woman—on the institutional presence of whiteness in the academy. We started developing this reflection when jointly conducting a study of faculty and students of color in a predominantly white institution (PWI). Ongoing discussion of that study’s interviews and themes led us to write about how that work affected us personally. As our reflection progressed and we continued to analyze what we wrote, what started as a reflection on conducting race research became a set of narratives about our experiences with whiteness in the academy more broadly. We share those narratives to highlight the visceral nature of whiteness, i.e., the emotional weight and harm of whiteness’ looming presence in the academy. We also explore how the research act—when conducted as critical, collaborative autoethnography—can serve as a form of antiracist community building and help carve out space for speaking back to the othering and silencing white narratives of white racial spaces like PWIs.

Restraining an Arms Race in Outer Space

The world is faced with an escalating arms race in outer space at the very time that this vital, if vulnerable, environment is experiencing rapid growth in orbiting satellites and the array of services they provide. After years of relative stagnation, multilateral diplomatic activity is being re-energised, spurred by the revival of debris-causing anti-satellite weapons (ASAT) tests. A British initiative has resulted in the creation of a new United Nations diplomatic forum on ‘Reducing Space Threats Through Norms, Rules and Principles of Responsible Behaviours’. Although geopolitical tensions between leading space powers make the development of cooperative security arrangements difficult, there is a common interest in avoiding the creation of more space debris that would endanger the assets of all space operators.

Deception and Reception in the Commemorative Landscape of Newcastle, Australia, 1970 to 2020

Contemporary reception of colonial monuments in Australia is informed by global debate on race, memory and representation in public space, typified in the decolonial and anti-racist movements Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter. While art historians and anti-colonial iconoclasts alike easily conceive of statues as objects for critique, non-figurative sculpture is no less effective when deployed as an ideological tool. Given the typically progressive politics of twentieth-century abstractionists, this study asks how comfortable these artists are with the nation-building function often ascribed to their work by political elites. Through a thematic survey of the commemorative landscape of Newcastle, NSW, this article describes a city punctuated by patriotic references to war, colonialism, and Indigenous absence, exemplified in modernist sculptor Margel Hinder’s (1906–1995) *Civic Park Fountain* (1966). Recounting its relaunch in 1970 as a memorial to Captain James Cook and its vandalism in 2020, the article examines changes in public reception of the fountain, from hostility towards abstract art and government spending to outrage at colonial symbols. Archival reconstruction of Hinder’s responses to local government demonstrates her silence on the fountain’s assimilation to colonial celebration. When contrasted with Hinder’s activities as a lobbyist and camouflage designer, this finding reveals a complex political biography. Without ignoring Hinder’s concern for Aboriginal rights, her attitude towards the instrumentalisation of her work is at best ambivalent. Beyond challenging the apolitical readings of Hinder’s work in existing scholarship, this study provides a key example of the ideological malleability of abstract public art. By producing “empty” signifiers to then “fill” with meaning, abstract sculptors and administrators together help to shape the semiotic and racial topography of urban space.