Thinking through the flesh: a critical autoethnography of racial body politics in urban teacher education

Ohito, Esther O.

doi:10.1080/13613324.2017.1294568

Cited by 50 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…The flesh, though related to the body, is by no means synonymous with it. As Spillers (1987) argues, the writing/ whiting out (Ohito, 2019) of Black bodies from 'American grammar' has been made possible through disciplining mechanisms (e.g. whips, chains, bullets) that violently mark(ed) human flesh in order to create and maintain oppressive racial hierarchies.…”

Section: The Body and The Fleshmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tuning into ‘fleshy’ frequencies: A posthuman mapping of affect, sound and de/colonized literacies with/in a primary classroom

Dernikos

2020

Journal of Early Childhood Literacy

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Within this article, I attend to the slippages among sound, silence, noise, voice and ir/rationality to map out the ways white supremacist forces subtly moved with/in a primary classroom (NYC) through a host of bodies and sounds to reinforce processes of affective assimilation – or demands for first graders to ‘ feel white’. Specifically, I explore how particular sounds as well as the insistence on silence – that is, sound directed in a certain way – circulated within Readers Workshop to discipline students into ‘white’ affective rhythms. In effect, students – mainly boys of colour – who did not consume/produce the sounds of whiteness were initially labelled as ‘struggling readers’. I then show how students resisted the norm through their affective attachments to the book character Messy Bessey and my name/physical body. Ultimately, the students’ love for Bessey/me enabled new affective entanglements between humans and nonhumans that ran ‘pedagogical interference’ into the school’s mandated literacy curriculum and racialized identity scripts, thereby opening up opportunities for ‘struggling readers’ to become ‘successful’. I conclude by inviting literacy educators to consider what it might mean to say no to those space-times that make social and cultural discriminations possible and, in turn, say yes to other ‘fleshy’ worlds where more response-able ways of listening, sounding, knowing, being and doing exist.

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Section: The Body and The Fleshmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tuning into ‘fleshy’ frequencies: A posthuman mapping of affect, sound and de/colonized literacies with/in a primary classroom

Dernikos

2020

Journal of Early Childhood Literacy

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“…Affect, as a creative, unpredictable, and vital force, offers a means of interrupting and remodulating dominant modes of power and rigid normativities ), yet-as we have previously noted-simultaneously bears the risk of re-entrenching racism, classism, and other exclusions ( Dernikos, 2018a ;Ohito, 2017 ; or doing nothing. Despite these risks, we believe that, as educators, scholars, students, and entangled multispecies beings, we have an obligation to attend to affect's promise and threat so that things might feel and become otherwise.…”

Section: Affective Otherwisesmentioning

confidence: 81%

Mapping the Affective Turn in Education

Dernikos¹,

Lesko²,

McCall³

et al. 2020

129

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Passions are high in education, and this edited volume offers bold new ways to conceive of the affective intensities shaping our present historical moment. Concerns over school practices deemed "ineffective," "disruptive," "irrational," or even "promising" are matters modulated by and through feelings, such as, optimism, shame, enhanced concentration, or empathy. The recent turn to affect offers vibrant methodological and theoretical material for an educational present marked by high stakes rhetoric, heated debate, teacher and student vulnerabilities, and extreme educational measures. Affect studies are a part of new materialist and post-humanist turns, and this volume connects these new theoretical directions within education. This comprehensive volume on affect crosses educational subfields and responds to the transdisciplinary interest in thinking through pedagogy, education, and feeling. This comprehensive reader addresses affect in education from a wide range of styles, topics, and perspectives. This collection offers an introduction to theory, empirical research studies, interviews with affect studies scholars, and an assessment of the current and future significance of affect studies in education. Contributors utilize a range of theoretical and interpretive approaches to thinking with and through schooling phenomena. Interviews with affect scholars in the humanities and social sciences address affective dimensions of teaching. The editors' introduction, different foci, and interdisciplinary genres of writing help readers feel their ways into what affect studies in education does and might do. This field-defining collection will be of interest to a range of readers-from graduate students to established scholars-with varying levels of expertise and familiarity putting affect theories to work in education. All the contributions are accessible to those new to the theory, methods, and debates in this vibrant area of educational studies.

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“…Argentinian culture Oito [7] is an author of another example of how autoethnography communicates emotions, specifically regarding whiteness, namely in a classroom in the United States. The article asks if teachers are prepared to be confronted by black youths in urban classrooms, detailing "the psychic pain that racism inflicts upon the racially othered children and youths who navigate urban classrooms under the scorching glare of whiteness" [7]. Only someone in a room "stuck in stillness" [7] (p. 251) may speak of glares and of "the loudness of the loaded silence" [7] (p. 251).…”

Section: A Look At the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The article asks if teachers are prepared to be confronted by black youths in urban classrooms, detailing "the psychic pain that racism inflicts upon the racially othered children and youths who navigate urban classrooms under the scorching glare of whiteness" [7]. Only someone in a room "stuck in stillness" [7] (p. 251) may speak of glares and of "the loudness of the loaded silence" [7] (p. 251). Such vocabulary is often absent from academic discourse and "in the name of science" we are encouraged to be formal and distant.…”

Section: A Look At the Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Using Reflexive, Introspective and Storytelling Tools: Towards Becoming More Autoethnographic in Academia

Au‐Yong‐Oliveira

2020

Education Sciences

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The aim of this article is to show how autoethnography is a useful and revealing research methodology that should be encouraged in academia, especially in higher education. With objectivity, autoethnography, which is a relatively new approach, may be a path toward deeper cultural discussions that are so important in everyday life. Moreover, autoethnography leads to important reflexive and critical observations made by students. Autoethnography is a readily accessible, low-cost methodology and thus very appealing to students and younger researchers. With this article, the author exemplifies autoethnographic accounts and narrates three different stories that occurred while trekking with three different trekking guides in Patagonia (El Chaltén), Argentina. Argentinian culture, in South America, is the focus. Researchers need to be careful of misleading statements in the literature, such as that in Argentina modesty is apparently not tolerated. We found that two of our guides and leaders – Mariano and Liz – both had modest (and pleasant) demeanors. Hence, we conclude that it is important to maintain an open mind and resist categorizing people. This is a vital point of cultural studies that is often not taken seriously. Cultures are made up of individuals and thus many differences can be found in the midst of an attempted standardization, and the desire to put everyone in the same “basket”.

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Thinking through the flesh: a critical autoethnography of racial body politics in urban teacher education

Cited by 50 publications

References 37 publications

Tuning into ‘fleshy’ frequencies: A posthuman mapping of affect, sound and de/colonized literacies with/in a primary classroom

Tuning into ‘fleshy’ frequencies: A posthuman mapping of affect, sound and de/colonized literacies with/in a primary classroom

Mapping the Affective Turn in Education

Using Reflexive, Introspective and Storytelling Tools: Towards Becoming More Autoethnographic in Academia

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