Trainers: Luciane Ribeiro Dias Gonçalves (CES) and Gaia Giuliani (CES)
 

Abstract

Both whiteness and blackness are historical, political and cultural constructions  that profoundly shape race relations.  The confrontation between whiteness, which conveys a sense of superiority to the white population, and blackness, whereas the black population challenges the diminishing view, should be studied in a critical and revolutionary way. Such a clash has fertile ground in postcolonial studies. Concepts such as subordination, invisibility, stereotype and superiority are some points to be discussed in their theoretical approaches. Thus, we aim to reflect how theoretical framework  can contribute to building new perspectives of research and thus strengthening ethno-racial identities and contribute to the anti-racist struggle.

Key-words: whiteness, blackness, iconographic sources.

Inscrição gratuita, limitada a 25 pessoas.

Gaia Giuliani
This workshop aims to briefly trace the important contributions the intersectional and interdisciplinary take of a Critical Race and Whiteness Studies methodology has in terms of positioning privileges and highlightening devices and processes of racialised inferiorisation, bio-control and governamentalities on the level of knowledge production. This will clarify in what sense CR and WS perspectives and methodologies are to be fostered in order to build an anti-racist scholarly culture, methodology, and society at large. My assumptions draw from theoretical ideas of ‘positionality’ (Adrienne Rich) as it is reappraised by Donna Haraway (‘situated knowledge’) and intersectionality, and Stuart Hall’s conception of race as a textual thing. Given this, my brief discussion will be about the importance of critical race theory and whiteness studies in discourse analysis of texts in a broad set of disciplines in education and academia generally, and particularly in the Italian case.

Luciane Ribeiro Dias Gonçalves
Este seminário debruça-se sobre questões que buscam contestar o eurocentrismo como padrão para diversas discussões, especialmente ligadas à pesquisa e Educação. Para tanto, neste trabalho foi adotada uma postura baseada em estudos da Ladson-Billings, (2008) que busca suporte teórico na teoria da afrocentricidade de Asante (1987). Afrocentricidade é uma postura com que vários pesquisadores “descendentes de africanos veem e experimentam o mundo” (LADSON-BILLINGS, 2008). Assim, a referida teoria combate a homogeneização e o eurocentrismo tornado norma a partir do ideário da modernidade europeia. Essa naturalização produziu a ideia de civilização “como se fosse o produto natural de uma essência ocidental, logo marcada pela cor branca. Uma espécie de “ocidente absoluto” para a consciência hegemônica” (SODRÉ, 2009). A Teoria afrocentrada resiste à homogeneização eurocêntrica e apresenta como alternativa o resgate de negros e índios como “protagonistas da produção do conhecimento”, abandonando a postura de “povos discriminados, antes objeto de um conhecimento elaborado a seu respeito por quem se julgava exclusivo dono do saber científico, poderão desenvolver novos referenciais teóricos e empíricos” (NASCIMENTO, 2009, p. 28). Assim sendo, a afrocentricidade não quer negar a perspectiva europeia, apenas não concebe que toda a diversidade seja analisada através deste modelo, uma vez que a ótica eurocêntrica tem ocasionado a inferiorização e a simplificação de objetos relativos a estudos sobre a diversidade. Consequentemente, olhar uma realidade diversa obriga a buscar novos referenciais baseados na superação do racismo.

Bio notes

Gaia Giuliani (PhD: University of Torino 2005; Postdocs: University of Bologna 2009; University of Technology Sydney 2010) has been research assistant in Political Theory and Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Bologna (Italy), Dept. Social and Political Studies (2013-2015) and undergraduate supervisor at the Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge (UK) (2015). She has been honorary visiting scholar at the University of Technology Sydney, NSW (June2007-June2011), at the University of Leeds, UK (Oct-Dec2013) and at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK (April-Dec2014). Her research interests focus on visual constructions of race and whiteness from an intersectional viewpoint in British and Italian nation-building processes and colonial experiences, the US, the Pacific, and postcolonial Europe. Her methodology crosses Critical race and whiteness studies, Postcolonial Theory, Cultural and Gender studies and uses a number of texts (written and visual; political, literary, and scientific). In 2014 she has founded with several scholars the Interdisciplinary/Intersectional Research Group on Race and Racisms (InteRGRace) that is based at the FISPPA, University of Padua. In 2013 she has become Secretary of the Editors of the Italian academic journal Studi Culturali and a member of the International Advisory Board of the Australian academic journal Settler Colonial Studies. In 2013 she has also become member of the international and interdiscipinary network White Spaces at the University of Leeds. Her research project at CES (2015-) aims at a critical discourse analysis of texts coding 'fears of disasters and crisis' and their cultural, social, and political impact on European self-representations in terms of racial formations and 'white fantasies'. In order to grasp how and to what extent 'fears of disaster' engender European self-representations, it investigates the emotional coding of 'sameness' and 'otherness' at play in modern unified Europe.

Luciane Ribeiro Dias Gonçalves Conducts post-doctoral internship at the University of Coimbra, in the Centre of Social studies -CES/UC. Is PhD in education from the State University of Campinas-UNICAMP (2011), a master's degree in education from the Universidade Federal de Uberlândia-UFU (2004) and graduated in Mathematics from the University of the State of Minas Gerais-UEMG (1987), graduated in pedagogy from the University of the State of Minas Gerais-UEMG (1997). He is currently Assistant teacher in the College of Integrated Science do Pontal-UFU FACIP in the course of pedagogy.