Caring and Uncaring: White Supremacy, Diversity Work and Antiracist Pedagogies

Abstract

Care is foundational to the way we reproduce and transform the world around us. Today, in a time marked by widespread calls for racial and social justice, and simultaneous backlash against these calls, it is imperative that we understand the ways that care circulates and operates within racialized struggle. In this dissertation I engage in this through three separate scales. First, nationally, using the events surrounding the actions and trial of Kyle Rittenhouse to think through care’s sticky entanglements with the production of white supremacy. Second, I focus in on the university through diversity, equity, and inclusion work to think through how care is operationalized in these efforts, and how scale and nonperformative actions leave us with an uneven caringscape. Finally, in the classroom where I think through care as a means of safely engaging with discomfort as antiracist practice. In all, in this dissertation I argue that we need to make care messy and multiple, widening our approach to capture the totality of relations and systems produced.