- Title
- Unreliable allies: mapping the effects of whiteness in adult education
- Creator
- Shore, Sue
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2000
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This study charts the connection between policy making and scholarly practice and the discursive constitution of the 'effective' citizen in contemporary adult community education in (ACE) Australia. It positions ACE as a racial project in terms of its policy making processes, and the scholarly practices guiding pedagogy. The research uses the notion of a writing subject to explore how discourse, representation, some features of Whiteness emerging from recent interdisciplinary studies, and the assemblages between, colonialism and Whiteness are activated to effect how the subject in/of adult education can be written. Four stories of living and leaning about racial life in Australia help to ground the discussion about policy making and theory building, as do analyses of transcripts and material produced from two government inquiries into ACE during the 1990s. The study achieves two things: first, it develops an argument to show how the writing subject is implicated in producing disguised discourses about Whiteness in ACE, and, second, it provides a set of supplementary narratives about ACE that offer a way of thinking otherwise about static categories of identity and linear notions of social change. The study challenges the underlying discourses of loyalty and unity commonly used to describe ACE work, suggesting that these discourses disguise other ways of understanding how ACE as a racial project distributes hope across diverse social groups, whilst using Whiteness as a measure for this distribution. It supplements this analysis with narratives of social training, polite whiteness, the search for respectability, the mandate for unity and the unreliability of critical reflection in helping to know the stories of our lives. The narratives tell a different story from the more conventional ones of progress and benevolence commonly associated with this field. The study acknowledges the importance of 'social change' and its problematic nature. It suggests that such change is often based on the desire to help the non-White Other. This desire needs careful analysis, in order that White scholars and educators might be more aware of the effects of Whiteness, especially in settings where people of colour are not present and therefore Whiteness must find other ways to recognise itself.
- Subject
- policy making; scholarly practice; adult community education; race; ethnicity
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1312943
- Identifier
- uon:22497
- Rights
- Copyright 2000 Sue Shore
- Language
- eng
- Hits: 1310
- Visitors: 1235
- Downloads: 0