White Spaces: racialising white femininities and masculinities

Start date: 1 June 2007
End date: 30 June 2010
Primary investigator: Dr Shona Hunter
Co-investigators: Say Burgin, (PGR network lead) Department of History, Leeds
External co-investigators: Catriona Elder, Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney; Diane Grimes, Department of Communication and Rhetorical Studies, Syracuse, NY, USA; Pauline Leonard, Sociology and Social Policy, University of Southampton; Melissa Steyn, Sociology, University of Cape Town, South Africa; Elaine Swan, University of Technology, Sydney

The 'White Spaces' project is an ongoing interdisciplinary, international collaboration between scholars across the humanities and social sciences based all over the world. Our core members are in Australia, South Africa, the USA and the UK, other members are from Canada, Denmark, France, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland.

The aim is to provide a unique space to think about how we might open up scholarship focusing on management, organisation, policy and practice to the complex debates around whiteness and white ethnicities that have been circulating for some time in cultural, postcolonial, literary and historical studies.

The focus of our empirical work is on the everyday processes of whiteness and how these get operationalised in a variety of institutions organizations and places. The sites for our research are various from the media, education, government, health, social work. We have a very active postgraduate network, which was officially launched in 2010. The PGR network is in the process of developing its own blog. We are also developing a practitioner arm of the network and an inaugural event will be running in Autumn 2011 in the UK.The sorts of themes covered are:

White governmentalitiesWhat codes of whiteness are reproduced in contemporary social politics?
White anxieties and emotionsWhat is the relationship of these codes and constituencies to organisational practices?
White migrations, memory, home and belongings

Past, current and future activities include conferences, seminars, large scale bids for funding 3rd phase empirical and dissemination work. International conferences and seminars have taken place in the UK at Leeds (in 2009, 2010), in Sydney (2010) and others are planned for Leeds in Feb 2011 and South Africa in 2011. We are also preparing a number of publications

Publications and outputs

Hunter, S., Swan E. and Grimes, D. (2010) Reproducing and resisting whiteness in organisations, policies and places, Social Politics 17(4)

Hunter, S. (2010) ‘What a white shame: Race, Gender and White Shame in the Relational Economy of Primary Health Care Organisations in England’, Social Politics Special Issue on Reproducing and resisting whiteness in organisations, policies and places Vol. 17, No. 4.