Social Policy and Change: State Initiatives to Displace Whiteness

This theme brings together work across politics, public policy, social policy and governance and cultural and historical sociology to consider the continuities and shifts in contemporary racialised governmentalities. When we talk about racialised governmentalities we are thinking about the logics, tools, techniques and mechanisms of contemporary governance across a wide variety of state formations. We are interested in how formal and informal state practices support the enactment of whiteness as a normative ideal, even as their policies ostensibly aim to combat racisms.

Work in progress explores the relationship of the policy turn to equality diversity and human rights to the reproduction of whiteness as an organisational ideal. It also includes a special issue of the journal Social Politics White Spaces? Racialising Organisational Femininities and Masculinities

This special issue provides a unique opportunity to draw on and extend insights from the international and interdisciplinary field of critical whiteness studies for feminist social politics. It will explore the processes of racialisation in institutions and organisations, specifically the operation of ‘whiteness’ and its relationship to gendering. Debates in this field have moved on from essentialist, binary understandings of white identity to consider whiteness as a social, political and ethical location caught up in and reproducing local, national and geopolitical relations.

Debates in the journal Social Politics have been important to the recognition that states maintain ‘racialized gender order’ (Boris, 1995; 2005). Recent critique focuses on the reproduction of white privilege through welfare and public policy paternalisms (Neubeck and Cazenave, 2001; Williams, 1989; 1995) and maternalisms (Brush, 2001; Crenshaw; 1989; Lambert and Bullock, 2005). Thus, there is a growing examination of the material effects of whiteness as an oppressive social relation. Nevertheless, there remains relatively little, if any explicit interrogation, as to the ‘nature’ of whiteness. What tends to happen is that popular concepts such as ‘white backlash’ (Neubeck and Cazenave, 2001; Hewitt, 2005) reduce whiteness to ‘anti-blackness’. But there is little consideration of the multiple and varied everyday experiences of whiteness. Nor of the ways in which whiteness infuses state making and organisational practice.

International and interdisciplinary theoretical understandings of whiteness and white identities and ethnicities which have been developed and debated in white studies have profoundly changed conceptualisations of racialisation and gendering, that is the processes by which we are produced as raced and gendered beings. For example these debates trouble the distinctions between ‘race’, racism and anti-racisms (Brah, 2005) paving the way for more fluid understandings of the productiveness of power, its uneven and distributed nature. Such approaches open up the possibilities for more ‘positive’ and unpredictable racialisations (Nayak, 2005). They also help us to think about the contradictions and continuities in contemporary racialised governmentalities.

This is not to suggest white studies as a panacea. This refocusing of the analytic gaze on power has not been unproblematic. White studies is sometimes characterised as promoting white narcissism, (Ahmed, 2004; hooks, 1992; Bonnett 1996) which recenters whiteness. A further critique has been the way that privileging whiteness is at odds with a world increasingly viewed in terms of nationality, nationalisms, religious and political values (Bonnett, 2008). The most fruitful analyses make contemporary geopolitics visible in how whiteness is played out in identities, institutions and everyday lives. It is for this reason that we focus on a range of organisational process and practices relevant to contemporary social politics (health and social care, education, policing, community sports) because it is these contexts which constitute the nexus between micro practice, broader discursive structures and even geopolitical change.

One of the key contributions of the special issue is to bring together papers from international and interdisciplinary perspectives. Contributions discuss Hong Kong, Switzerland, France, Canada and the UK and emanate from communication, cultural and gender studies, sociology, social policy, management and organisational studies. The papers will draw theoretical and empirical analysis to interrogate different aspects of racialisation, gendering and whiteness to open up our understandings of what constitutes institutions, politics and the social. In particular, we seek to examine the ways in which these interdisciplinary perspectives on whiteness can enrich understandings of gendered and racialised power and marginality in social politics.

In sum then this special issue, by bringing the fields of feminist social politics, organizational sociology, public policy and governance and white studies into conversation, begins the work of connecting material and experiential analyses together to consider how social politics constitutes a white space.

Further plans include a new collaboration between Shona Hunter and Jieyu Liu based in UoL White Rose East Asia Centre Producing White China, bringing together Hunter’s work on white masculinist governmentalities in welfare and public policy and Li’s research on gender and sexualities in the corporate work place.