Papers by Gardner Seawright
The Social Studies, 2024
This paper reports on a qualitative participatory curriculum study where 5th graders from southea... more This paper reports on a qualitative participatory curriculum study where 5th graders from southeast Wisconsin investigate the concept of community through a process of countermapping. Framed by place-based education and spatial justice, this counter-mapping curriculum centers student collaboration and analysis, which provides a way for students to share and complicate their relations to place and implicit spatial knowledge of community. Through this curriculum students demonstrated the ability to collaboratively analyze normative assumptions embedded in the idea of community. In the process, they interrogated economic, racialized, and colonial politics of place, and started to interrogate dominant white spatial epistemologies. Counter-mapping as a curricular method not only facilitates new understanding through a shared critical spatial analysis but can also cultivate new ways of relating to and being with one another that are essential for more-just spatial imaginations.
Whiteness and Education, 2024
This paper examines how mundane forms of white supremacy unfold within everyday classroom interac... more This paper examines how mundane forms of white supremacy unfold within everyday classroom interactions, and how they extend from the way that classroom spaces are oriented to specific relational norms. Drawing upon a qualitative study of classroom relationships, relational philosophy and phenomenologies of space, race, and gender, this paper argues that normative spatial orientation in classrooms corresponds with white students being afforded a racialising access to being at ease in the classroom while students of colour are exposed to forms of existential enclosure. In response, this paper argues that classroom management practices need to directly consider strategies for reorienting classroom spaces away from mundane forms white supremacy. To do so, teachers must move away from traditionally individualising classroom management approaches that are rooted in a racial capitalist paradigm, and towards relationally explicit and ontologically dynamic approaches that are fundamentally cooperative.
The common is an inherently relational concept. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth ... more The common is an inherently relational concept. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Belknap Press, 2009) put it in Commonwealth, “we all share and participate in the common” (p. viii). The shared participation of the common flows through the “common wealth of the material world—the air, the water, the fruits of the soil, and all nature’s bounty” that we are all bound to and dependent upon (p. viii). Secondly, the common is the result of social production—of interaction and movement across social worlds—and “cohabitation in a common world” (p. viii). As I walk out of my house each day to face the world, the common serves as the field and medium for experiential and relational engagement.
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 00131946 2014 965938, Nov 17, 2014
The racialized body is of obvious, or at least implicit, concern for the qualitative study of Whi... more The racialized body is of obvious, or at least implicit, concern for the qualitative study of Whiteness in education. Whiteness, as an organizing principle that conditions normative ways of being in society, is predicated upon the raced body as a social signifier. It is curious then, that the body remains under-examined and not treated as a serious analytic. How bodies interact in real time—how educational spaces are brought to life—are left to the analytical wayside in favor of reflective approaches. This paper questions prominent approaches to studying Whiteness in education, and subsequently proposes expanding the methodological repertoire to encompass a phenomenology of racial embodiment as a way to make-meaning of the subtle interactions between bodies unfolding in unique educational places.
Educational Studies 50(6), 2014
Book Chapters by Gardner Seawright
The Handbook of Critical Theoretical Research Methods in Education, 2021
This chapter illustrates how to put phenomenology of racial embodiment (PRE) to work as a researc... more This chapter illustrates how to put phenomenology of racial embodiment (PRE) to work as a research method. First, using the work of WE.B. Du Bois and Sylvia Wynter I present white humanity as an analytic through which to consider the need for PRE as a method. Following this, I provide an overview of the philosophy of phenomenology, and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and a review of phenomenology racial embodiment as propelled by Frantz Fanon, Linda Alcoff, and other contemporary thinkers. For the second half of the chapter I work through a recent research project guided by PRE. This project focuses on the ways that space and student voice become intersubjectively racialized in mundane classroom interactions. Working through this example highlights the ways by which PRE functions as
a method across the research process. In conclusion I discuss how PRE applies to further research.
The Wiley Handbook of Global Educational Reform, 2018
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Papers by Gardner Seawright
Book Chapters by Gardner Seawright
a method across the research process. In conclusion I discuss how PRE applies to further research.
a method across the research process. In conclusion I discuss how PRE applies to further research.