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This chapter seeks to open a conversation around the increasingly pressing question of what is the role of the white researcher in qualitative Critical whiteness Studies (CwS) research in higher education. While the past 30 years have seen an increase in scholarship that critiques the ways that whiteness operates in higher education at both individual and institutional levels, to date no work exists that explores how this research should be conducted. In introducing a Critical whiteness Methodology (CwM) for higher education, this chapter is intended to provide an initial framework to inform the ways that white CwS scholars conceptualize, and conduct themselves throughout the research process. Grounded in core theoretical frameworks in CwS and influenced by critical race theory (CRT) and critical race methodologies (CRM), we propose five tenets that serve as a starting point in the conceptualization of a CwM. Utilizing these tenets, we then provide suggestions that white researchers can utilize to intentionally structure their research designs, protocols, and practices to actively challenge whiteness through CwS scholarship in higher education.

Within North American institutions of higher education, the sociopolitical construct of whiteness comprises an often implicit set of lessons that are reflected not only in policy and curricula but also in the teaching practices of faculty. Such lessons perpetuate white centricity and supremacy, at enormous costs to those who have been negatively racialized. Therefore, it is critical for white faculty to engage meaningfully with ongoing processes of self-reflection, self-education, and skill development so that they can contribute positively to the interrogation and disruption of whiteness in higher education. This chapter discusses seven processual considerations for white educators who seek to interrogate and disrupt the problem of whiteness in teaching and learning.

Purpose – Reality TV shows that feature embodied “transformations” are popular, including Intervention, a program that depicts therapeutic recovery from addiction to “health.” The purpose of this chapter is to address the ways whiteness constitutes narratives of addiction on Intervention.

Methodology – This analysis uses a mixed methodology. I conducted a systematic analysis of nine (9) seasons of one hundred and forty-seven (147) episodes featuring one hundred and fifty-seven individual “addicts” (157) and logged details, including race and gender. For the qualitative analysis, I watched each episode more than once (some, I watched several times) and took extensive notes on each episode.

Findings – The majority of characters (87%) are white, and the audience is invited to gaze through a white lens that tells a particular kind of story about addiction. The therapeutic model valorized by Intervention rests on neoliberal regimes of self-sufficient citizenship that compel us all toward “health” and becoming “productive” citizens. Such regimes presume whiteness. Failure to comply with an intervention becomes a “tragedy” of wasted whiteness. When talk of racism erupts, producers work to re-frame it in ways that erase systemic racism.

Social implications – The whiteness embedded in Intervention serves to justify and reinforce the punitive regimes of controlling African American and Latina/o drug users through the criminal justice system while controlling white drug users through self-disciplining therapeutic regimes of rehab.

Originality – Systematic studies of media content consistently find a connection between media representations of addiction and narratives about race, yet whiteness has rarely been the critical focus of addiction.

This article draws from ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis to examine commonsense knowledge about whiteness and white racial identities. In order to get at that which most broadly passes as matters of commonsense in the United States, the research design includes analysis of both interview and television data. I make two sets of concurrent arguments, one that regards the production of whiteness as a kind of normalcy against which race and racialization is made meaningful and another concerned with the analytical power derived by combining ethnomethodology and poststructural discourse analysis. I illustrate local practices for interrupting hegemonic reproductions of whiteness and conclude with methodological considerations.

In late 2020, a group of librarians at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) came together to pursue the design of a diversity audit for monograph collections. After initial research and reflection, the authors realized that evaluating their existing collection on its racial or ethnic representation would not only be problematic, but also unnecessary, because it was clear to the authors that their collections are dominated by white voices and perspectives. How could they be otherwise? They were built for a primarily white audience as part of a system of knowledge production dominated by whiteness. The authors questioned whether the framework of a “diversity audit” really addressed their goal of a systematic anti-racist approach to collections management. This chapter details the authors’ process of rejecting the diversity audit framework for a large-scale review of monographs in a large academic library collection in the United States. It reviews the literature regarding diversity audits, as well as background on whiteness studies, as it leads to the authors’ rationale for instead developing a workbook for collection selectors. This workbook will position collection management practices within the white institutional presence (WIP) conceptual framework developed by scholar Diane Gusa (2010).

This paper critiques institutional whiteness and racial categorisation in UK higher education. This is done through the representation of the complex narratives of “mixed race” women navigating their PhD experiences in predominantly white institutions, when their identities have proximity to whiteness.

This study introduces five vignettes of “mixed race” women, gathered from a wider study of 27 PhDs and early career researchers in UK higher education. The paper employs Yuval-Davis’ framework of belonging and bell hooks' approach to chosen versus forced marginality to create a conceptual framework based on fluid agency and empowerment, recognising belonging as an ongoing process.

The findings reveal how “mixed race” women can occupy a liminal space between belonging to and rejecting racial categorisation, as they attempted to situate their self-identifications within the boundaries of institutional whiteness.

The study only utilises a small sample size of five counter-stories from a larger study on PhD career trajectories, limiting its empirical claims. It also only engages with “mixed race” women who have proximity to whiteness, encouraging research on different “mixed race” intersections.

This paper encourages more discussion around “mixed race” experiences of UK higher education and critical engagement with higher education’s reliance on statistical data to understand racialised communities.

This paper contributes new empirical insights into how whiteness is experienced when “mixed race” women negotiate their relation to it in UK higher education. It also provides theoretical advancements into understanding of institutional whiteness and critically engages with racial categorisation.

Exploring how racism continues to persist throughout public and nonprofit organizations is central to undoing persistent society-wide injustices in the United States and around the globe. The authors provide two cases for identifying and understanding the ways in which philanthropy’s whiteness does harm to K–12 students and communities of color.

In this article, the authors draw on critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, specifically Cheryl Harris' work to expose the whiteness of philanthropy, not as a racial identity, but in the way that philanthropy is performed. The authors characterize one of the property functions of whiteness, the right to exclude, as working through two mechanisms: neoliberal exclusion and overt exclusion. Drawing on this construction of the right to exclude, the authors present two cases: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the City Fund.

Whether intentional or not, the Gates Foundation and the City Fund each exclude communities of color in several ways: from changes to schools and districts, parents' experiences navigating school enrollment due to these changes, to academic assessments and political lobbying.

These cases provide a way for researchers and practitioners to see how organizations in real time reify the extant racial hierarchy so as to disrupt such organizational processes and practices for racial justice.

Guided by an interest in how K-12 history teachers think about teaching race and related concepts in their courses, this paper explores the impact of a workshop put on by a history and civics professional learning organization that explicitly focused on historicizing race, racism and whiteness as a method for furthering teachers' understandings and commitments to antiracist teaching.

This paper draws on Critical Race Theory and Critical Whiteness Studies to make sense of the idea of history teaching as a racial project. Using surveys and a focus group discussion as data.

The authors found that, after the workshop, teachers reported increased comfort and interest in teaching more about race and racism, while fewer stated explicit commitments and plans to teach about whiteness. The authors also found that teachers' definitions of whiteness were largely framed as habits of mind and individual practices and situated within an educational sphere. Additionally teachers initially grappled with systemic interpretations of whiteness, yet ended up landing on identity as the starting point for critical history instruction.

These findings prompt the authors to discuss the continued challenges of linking whiteness with antiracist history teaching and also grapple with the affordances and pitfalls of identity as a starting point for race work.

Assumptions about race in the discipline of organization studies are explored by introducing the notion of “interrogating whiteness”. Standpoint epistemology, which assumes people’s experiences are relevant to the ways they know, allows the apparently unmarked, neutral category of whiteness to be seen as one standpoint among many. To encourage a useful discussion of race, key terms are situated linguistically and historically, background is given on paradigms for thinking about race, and there is a consideration of the consequences of whiteness and blackness. I examine what writers say about race when it is not the topic about which they claim to write. The organizational life of the discipline and authorship is explored. I then turn to the organizational literature for further illustration of whiteness as unmarked, stereotypical examples, and distancing language.