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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.

The purpose of this paper is to show the complex positionality and the complexity that comes with the study of whiteness in South African higher education by Dutch, white academics. This complexity stems from the long-standing relationship between Dutch universities, the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) in particular, with their South African counterparts, which predominantly supported apartheid with reference to a shared religious (Protestant) background.

The paper rests upon a literature review of the development of South African higher education, and an assessment of the prominent role played by the Dutch Vrije Universiteit in support of the all-white, Afrikaans Potchefstroom University (presently North-West University). The authors, who are both involved in the institutional cooperation between Vrije Universiteit and South African universities, reflect on the complexity of this relationship by providing auto-ethnographic evidence from their own (religious) biography.

The paper reflects the ambiguous historical as well as contemporary contexts and ties that bind Vrije Universiteit to South African universities, especially formerly Afrikaans-speaking ones. The ambiguity is about the comfort of sharing an identity with formerly Afrikaans-speaking universities, on the one hand, and the discomfort of historical and political complicities in a (still) segregated South African society on the other hand.

This auto-ethnographic paper breathes an atmosphere of a “coming out” that is not very common in academic writing. It is a reflection and testimony of a lifelong immersion in VUA-South African academic research relations in which historical, institutional, and personal contexts intermingle and lead to a unique positionality leading to “breaking silences” around these complex relations.

This review addresses how student organizations are conceptually framed in the scholarly literature—organizations the authors referred to as “ethnicized student organizations” or “ESOs,” which include both Black Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) student organizations and ethnically white student organizations such as mainstream fraternities/sororities and clubs that are normalized as not having a racial/ethnic affiliation.

Critical race theory informs the analysis of 175 articles that address ESOs from 2002 to 2016.

Analysis revealed that a majority of scholarship conceptualizes ESOs in ways that can minimize the role of institutional whiteness where they are positioned as either serving or hindering both individual students and institutional goals. Findings also reveal a smaller body of literature that emphasized institutionalized power dynamics and honors the transformative work of BIPOC students through ESOs.

Despite widespread public commitments to diversity among institutions, whiteness remains a core institutional presence. This study illustrates the relationships among student organizations, white supremacy and higher education transformation.

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).

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.

Developing leaders for a diverse democracy is an increasingly important aim of higher education and social justice is ever more a goal of leadership education efforts. Accordingly, it is important to explore how dominant leadership models, as blueprints for student leadership development, account for and may unwittingly reinforce systems of domination, like racism. This critical discourse analysis, rooted in racialization and color-evasiveness, examines three prominent college student leadership development models to examine how leaders and leadership are racialized. We find that all three leadership texts frame leaders and leadership in color-evasive ways. Specifically, the texts’ discourses reveal three mechanisms for evading race in leadership: focusing on individual identities, emphasizing universality, and centering collaboration. Implications for race in leadership development, the social construction of leadership more broadly, and future scholarship are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First it offers an innovative conceptual framework for exploring how whiteness shapes ethnic privilege and disadvantage at work. Second it offers empirical evidence of the complexity of ethnic privilege and disadvantage explored through experiences of migrant workers from post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) on the UK labour market.

Using a Bourdieuian conceptual framework the paper begins from the historical and macro socio-economic context of EU enlargement eastwards in order to explore whiteness and the complexity of ethnic privilege at work through semi-structured in-depth interviews with 35 Polish and Slovenian migrant workers in the UK.

The findings highlight racial segmentation of the UK labour market, expose various shades of whiteness that affect CEE workers’ position and their agency and point to relational and transnational workings of whiteness and their effects on diverse workforce.

Research has implications for diversity policies within organisations and wider social implications for building solidarity amongst diverse labour. Future research could increase generalisation of findings and further illuminate the complexity of ethnic privilege.

The paper contributes to management and organisational literature by offering a Bourdieuian conceptual framework for analysing whiteness and the complexity of ethnic privilege at work. It uncovers intersectional, transnational and relational workings of whiteness that shape ethnic privilege and disadvantage at work and speak of ongoing colonising and racialising processes that are part of contemporary capitalism.

At first glance, it might seem from the statistics that 18- to 20-year-old members of minority ethnic groups are doing relatively well in terms of higher education. They are in fact better represented in UK colleges and universities than young whites. However, this is far from the whole story. Certain black groups, such as African–Caribbean males and Bangladeshi females, are significantly underrepresented in higher education in general and certain programmes in particular. For example, there has been difficulty recruiting Black and ethnic minority students into teacher training programmes (DfEE, 1998). The experience of participating in higher education is also often different for black and white students. Black and minority ethnic students are more likely to be concentrated in the new universities. In the mid-1990s, only 0.5 percent of the students at the older established universities came from a Black or minority ethnic background, compared with 14.4 percent in the new universities (DfEE, 1998). This inequality helps to perpetuate a system of white privilege, one that is entrenched in other areas of public life in the UK. Black and minority ethnic students are also more likely to study part-time than white students, are more likely to drop out of courses, and more frequently opt for lower-level qualifications (i.e., a diploma rather than a degree).