Thanks for attending!

Thank you for tuning in to the fifth and sold out, webinar of our 2022 series, Critical Public Conversations: Undoing Australia on 17th  August. This webinar titled ‘Whiteness in Education’ featured University of Melbourne academics Sophie Rudolph and Jess Gerrard discussing the production and reproduction of whiteness in settler colonial education systems.

272 people joined over zoom, with 32 excellent questions asked during the Q&A

Themes raised

• Whiteness is not innate, it is learned. It is a structural formation that is mutable, adaptable, and intrinsically linked to settler colonialism. It is foundational to racial dominance in Western coloniality and is articulated through the apparatus and technologies of the racial state.

• Distinguished Goenpul Professor Aileen Moreton-Robinson emphasised the possessive logics bound in whiteness; how its dominance is predicated on the (dis)possession of Indigenous lands; and how this possession forms the foundations of capitalist economies.

• Educational institutions and practices are part of the settler colonial apparatus, a key mechanism in which whiteness is relayed intergenerationally.

• The book prompts a challenge for Education to go beyond closure and redemption, towards material, epistemic and affective reparations. Divesting from racial domination requires historical literacy and is a collective political project.

Some questions from the audience

• How will developing an awareness of whiteness change teachers' existing practices? What would we see them - white settler teachers - doing differently in the everyday?

• Do you think there is a place for exploring the concept of whiteness in early childhood education?

• As a non-white Australian a lot of this information is very familiar, especially when you read and centre Bla(c)k and postcolonial scholarship (e.g., Sara Ahmed) so is a risk of re-centring and upholding whiteness? As you say makes whiteness stay in place....by the very act of writing a book like this?

• How can the work you are doing help with reducing racism/bullying against Brown and Black children in schools? - this is a big problem.

Links to the Authors’ work

Learning Whiteness: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745342153/learning-whiteness/

Class in Australia: https://www.historyvictoria.org.au/product/class-in-australia-edited-by-steven-threadgold-and-jessica-gerrard/

Unsettling the Gap: Race, Politics and Indigenous Education: https://www.peterlang.com/document/1057305

Undoing Australia

Critical Public Conversations webinar series 2022 

The Australian Centre acknowledges the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples (Parkville, Southbank, Werribee and Burnley campuses), The Yorta Yorta Nation (Shepparton and Dookie campuses) and The Dja Dja Wurrung people (Creswick campus) stand and respectfully recognises Elders past and present. Based on the Parkville campus of the University of Melbourne which sits on sovereign Wurundjeri lands, we at the Australian Centre are conscious we have obligations to this place and its people. We are also conscious that the University has not always valued this relationship and indeed still has a long way to go.