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Rolf Straubhaar’s 2015 article, “The Stark Reality of the ‘White Saviour’ Complex” is the author’s critical self-reflection as a young development worker in Mozambique confronting and developing his understandings of his position and privilege as an upper-middle income, White American. Drawing from his journal entries during a year working as an ethnographer for an education development project, Straubhaar interprets his activities and interactions as a Freirean educator and not surprisingly, finds himself falling short of those ideals. As a similarly situated upper-income White male whose earliest professional experiences were cross-cultural, and then international, many of Straubhaar’s reflections and self-checks rang true to me. But it also made me reflect on how the contexts in which I taught – a proudly community-controlled school on the Navajo Nation, and in public schools in Japan, were profoundly different from that of the author. In this chapter, I argue that Straubhaar’s experience wrestling with this the “White Saviour” necessitates deeper historical and cultural contextualization. In addition, I argue that Straubhaar’s interpretation of his hosts’ actions can be re-conceptualized through a reading of Marcel Mauss’ The Gift, as neutralizing the “White Saviour” by reciprocation. I will finish the article by briefly articulating some principles for pre-departure training for (White) Americans involved in international education and development to neutralize the White Savior.

This paper aims to engage nine women English teachers in exploring their personal memories centered around the perception of their raced, classed and gendered teacher bodies, and led them to conceptualize teaching as invasion.

The process of collective memory work (CMW), a qualitative feminist research method, was used to structure collaborative sessions for the nine women English teachers. In these sessions, the group took up the CMW process as the memories were written, read, analyzed and theorized together.

The analyses of two memories from our group's work builds understanding of how the use of new materialism and a conceptualization of emotions as social, collective and agentic, can expand the understanding of the teacher bodies and disrupt normalizing narratives of teaching and learning. The post-humanist concept of intra-action leads one to better understand the boundaries in the teacher – student relationships that is built/invaded, and to see the ways materials, humans, emotions and discourses are entangled in the teaching encounters.

This study demonstrates how sustained and collective research methodologies like CMW can open space for teachers to more fully explore their identities, encounters and relationships. Further, unpacking everyday classroom moments (through the framework of literacy-as-event) can yield deep and critical understanding of how bodies, emotions and non-human objects all become entangled when teaching becomes an act of invasion.

This research applies social identity theory (SIT) to examine how White diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) professionals perceive their role and contributions to advancing workplace DEI.

Interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) was used to structure and guide the study, and data were collected from interviews with 16 White DEI professionals.

The SIT concept of social categorization was selected as a framework to discuss the findings, which were divided into two sections: in-group identity and out-group identity. The participants' in-group identities demonstrated how the participants leveraged the participants' Whiteness to grant the participants the influence and agency to perform DEI work. The participant's out-group identities revealed how the participants attempted to decenter the participants' Whiteness and unpack insecurities related to the participants' White identity and DEI contributions. Each of these findings has been associated with a specific role: leader, beneficiary, ally and pathfinder.

The practical implications of this study are critically examining White DEI employees' lived experience to develop an understanding of Whiteness while holding White people accountable for DEI efforts within workplaces.

Deeper and more honest conversations are needed to explore the phenomenon of how White DEI professionals enact and perceive the DEI contributions of the White DEI professionals. Therefore, this paper will provide further discussion on literature concerning White individuals engaged in organizational-level DEI work.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the conditions under which racial/ethnic minorities are promoted to top leadership positions in American corporations. In addition to testing the glass cliff theory for racial/ethnic minorities, the paper also develops and test two additional theoretical mechanisms: bold moves and the savior effect. While the glass cliff theory predicts racial/ethnic minorities will be promoted to struggling firms, the bold moves theory predicts the opposite, that racial/ethnic minorities will be promoted to strong firms. The savior effect predicts that minority CEOs will be replaced by white male leaders if firm performance struggles during their tenure.

This paper relies on conditional logistic regression to analyze all CEO transitions among Fortune 500 companies over a 15-year period.

Consistent with the bold moves thesis but contrary to the predictions of glass cliff theory, the results suggest that racial/ethnic minorities are more likely than white executives to be promoted CEO in strongly performing firms. As predicted by the savior effect theory, the paper also finds that when firm performance struggles under the leadership of racial/minority CEOs, these leaders are likely to be replaced by white CEOs.

The findings contradict theory of the glass cliff and suggest additional mechanisms that shape the promotion probability of minority leaders.

Race and ethnicity shape promotion and replacement decisions for top leadership positions in important ways. While minority leaders are not set up to fail, as glass cliff theory would predict, the authors do find that confidence in the leadership of minority leaders may be tenuous. To overcome the risks of replacement of minority leaders, firms should seek to eliminate bias by allowing minority leaders enough time and resources to overcome declines in firm performance and increase the transparency of replacement decisions.

This is one of the first studies to test the glass cliff thesis with regard to racial/ethnic minorities. The paper also develops and tests two new mechanisms related to leader succession: bold moves and the savior effect.

Most traditional research approaches emerge from the position that all “good” research is “objective.” While this is critical for conducting scholarly inquiry, we contend that it is equally important to acknowledge the significant impact social, cultural, and political contexts have on the research process. That is, research is a malleable process informed and influenced by broader socio-political forces. Because research is not conducted in a vacuum, researchers have a duty to consider the context within which one engages in research. It also requires the researcher to understand their position or status along with their participants’ power and expertise when undertaking research studies, particularly in cross-contexts. In this chapter, we explore the nuances – some overt others subtle – that have informed and influenced how our cross-cultural team navigated our research spaces. The authors of this chapter are a cross-cultural team comprised of a White American and a Black African academic. Both the United States and South Africa have complex histories of race relations and racial identity within their broader socio-political context which must be considered when conducting research. Therefore, to dissociate and compartmentalize aspects of our identity when conducting research in these contexts may in fact compromise scholarly insights which might emerge from these contexts.

This paper aims to explore how and why ideas regarding “intersectional” approaches to feminism and Black activism are drawn on in marketing content related to the concept of being “woke” (invested in addressing social injustices). It considers which subject positions are represented as part of this and what they reveal about contemporary issues concerning advertising, gender, race and activism.

This study involves an interpretive and critical discursive analysis of so-called feminist advertising (“femvertising”) and marketing examples that make use of Black social justice activist ideas.

Findings illuminate how marketing simultaneously enables the visibility and erasure of “intersectional”, feminist and Black social justice activist issues, with the use of key racialised and gendered subject positions: White Saviour, Black Excellence, Strong Black Woman (and Mother) and “Woke” Change Agent.

This research signals how brands (mis)use issues concerning commercialised notions of feminism, equality and Black social justice activism as part of marketing that flattens and reframes liberationist politics while upholding the neoliberal idea that achievement and social change requires individual ambition and consumption rather than structural shifts and resistance.

This work can aid the development of advertising standards regulatory approaches which account for nuances of stereotypical representations and marketing’s connection to intersecting issues regarding racism and sexism.

This research outlines a conceptualisation of the branding of “woke” bravery, which expands our understanding of the interdependency of issues related to race, gender, feminism, activism and marketing. It highlights marketing responses to recent socio-political times, which are influenced by public discourse concerning movements, including Black Lives Matter and Me Too.

This chapter is a response to the article by Straubhaar (2015), ‘The stark reality of the “White Saviour” complex and the need for critical consciousness: a document analysis of the early journals of a Freirean educator’. Taking up a theme developed by Noah and Eckstein (1988) in relation to dependency theory, the paper argues that a Freirean analysis is an inadequate framework for the analysis of international development and intercultural exchanges. The central argument is that, by imposing a simplistic dichotomy of oppressors and oppressed, Freirean theory blinds the researcher to the nuanced interplay and complex power relationships that are involved in even apparently simple interactions. Most importantly, a Freirean analysis focuses attention on who makes a statement, rather than on what that statement is a statement about and whether it is true or not. This argument is developed through a reanalysis of some events Straubhaar documents in his account of his fieldwork.

The purpose of this article is to underscore postcolonial approaches that undercut racial inequities as they foster racial equality and inclusivity at higher institutions of learning, especially in racialised spaces in South Africa.

This article dwells on whistleblowing as a channel of demythologising Whiteness in South African universities. While the #RhodesMustFall movement at University of Cape Town enjoyed much critical attention, concurrent movements in other universities such as Open Stellenbosch movement did not. This could be attributable to the methods used, especially whistleblowing, an unorthodox method employed to radically question university symbols, to disrupt racial superiority. In revisiting the movement's campaigns, the article specifically highlights Kylie Thomas' whistleblowing to underscore the role of humanities in fostering social transformation beginning with spaces of knowledge production such as universities.

The research found that challenging apartheid murals and monuments on South African institutions of higher learning required aggressive but creative approaches. This called for unmasking foundations of White supremacism. Whistle blowing and activism against White supremacism boldly confronted apartheid legacies that appear to be well preserved.

The research is limited to the 2015 South African student movements. The emphasis is on Open Stellenbosch movement which has received lesser critical attention compared to #RhodesMustFall. It envisions equality, diversity and inclusion in learning institutions which is achievable only through robust activist approaches to institutional/systemic racism in the institutions, rather than armchair theorising.

This article examines ways in which unorthodox methods such as whistlelowing and activism work to disrupt regimented White supremacism in an institution of higher learning founded on racist ethos.