11 October 2021

Speaker: Professor Ann Phoenix, UCL Institute of Education

Chaired by: Katucha Bento, University of Edinburgh

In this RACE.ED seminar, Professor Ann Phoenix discusses how schools perpetuate and amplify racial and gendered inequalities.

It has long been a commonplace that schools reproduce and amplify existing inequalities and ample evidence shows differences in attainment by racialisation, social class and gender. Equally, inequalities in how children are treated, by teachers and peers, have been helpfully identified in many countries. Less is understood, however, of the processes that reproduce these inequities and the long-term impact of such inequities on children and young people subjected to unequal treatment. With the unexpected, transformational conjunctions produced by the COVID-19 global pandemic and the resurgence of Black Lives Matters following public viewing of George Floyd’s murder, the outpouring of public testimonies from black people and others subjected to racism, have highlighted the psychosocial impact of racism and the pivotal place of schools in processes of subjectification to racialisation.

This talk aims to discuss the ways in which schools are central to young people’s negotiations of their racialised intersectional positioning. It draws on a variety of sources, including research and autobiography to develop a holistic view of how racism is understood, experienced and emotionally engaged with. It shows that intersectional positioning is central to the significance accorded to racialisation and racisms and narratives of how temporality makes a difference to understanding. The talk first briefly discusses the plethora of racialised understandings that we know from research are learned at school before considering in more detail how that learning comes to be holistically embodied. In recognition that all identities and subjectification are intersectional, it focuses on intersections of whiteness, middle classness and masculinity as well as intersections of class and gender with blackness.

Professor Ann Phoenix
Ann Phoenix is Professor of Psychosocial studies at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, Social Research Institute, UCL Institute of Education and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Academy of Social Sciences. She is on the Nuffield Foundation Trust Board. Her research is mainly about the ways in which psychological experiences and social processes are linked and intersectional. It includes work on racialised and gendered identities and experiences; mixed-parentage, masculinities, consumption, young people and their parents, the transition to motherhood, families, migration and transnational families. Much of her research draws on mixed methods and includes narrative approaches. Her recent books are Environment in the Lives of Children and Families: Perspectives from India and the UK. Policy Press, 2017. (with Janet Boddy, Catherine Walker and Uma Vennan) and Researching Family Narratives. SAGE, 2020. (with Julia Brannen, Corinne Squire and the Novella project research team). Nuancing Young Masculinities (with Marja Peltola) will be published by Helsinki University Press in 2022.

Dr Katucha Bento
Katucha Bento is a Lecturer in Race and Decolonial Studies at the University of Edinburgh with a background rooted in the Black Movement in Brazil, samba community and quilombo territory. Her focus in theory and praxis are centre Black Feminisms, (De)coloniality, Queer Studies and anti-racist pedagogies to work creatively with subversive language (in translation and neologisms), artistic expressions in Queer and Black subculture, and in collaboration with peers attentive to promoting ethics of caring and power to the people.