- Convenors:
-
Lieke Wissink
(University of Applied Sciences Inholland University of Amsterdam)
Emma Lengle (University of Oslo)
Alexandra Oancă (KU Leuven)
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- Chair:
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Lieke van der Veer
(Delft University of Technology)
- Discussant:
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Insa Koch
(University of Sankt Gallenis)
- Formats:
- Panel
- Network:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
While Institutional Whiteness has gained interdisciplinary attention, its everyday workings in European state settings remain ethnographically underexplored. Addressing this lacuna, this panel gathers anthropological studies into state practices that attend to Institutional Whiteness across Europe.
Long Abstract
This panel addresses the need for more ethnographic and contextual insight into the everyday workings of Whiteness within institutional cultures across Europe. Whereas anthropologists have ethnographically attended to what critical race scholars have coined Institutional Whiteness, this was mostly done in the context of the US (e.g. Bridges 2011; Shange 2020). While anthropological studies on state practices that are situated in Europe have convincingly shown how forms of governance imagine those who are racialized as non-White outside of sociality and how the racialization of non-Whiteness takes shape in institutional cultures, further insight is needed into the (re)production of Whiteness as dialectical counterpart therein. We therefore welcome papers based on ethnographic research across Europe that advance insight into how, where, why and by what or whom Whiteness gets (re)produced. We are also interested in processes that render Institutional Whiteness implicit and normative – such as colorblindness, white ignorance, and white habitus formations. We seek to collect papers in a wide range of state-saturated sites, including (but not limited to) state bureaucracy, EU policymaking, urban governance, social policy, welfare regimes, and postcolonial advocacy. Our overall aim is to bring forward situated occurrences of Whiteness and to identify how and where it operates as an institutional norm – considering postcolonial and postsocialist European contexts. We hope to collectively advance anthropological knowledge on (histories of) contemporary European Institutional Whiteness and the inequalities, polarizations and power dynamics that it generates.
This Panel has 1 pending
paper proposal.
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