Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State

Arathi Sriprakash, Sophie Rudolph, Jessica Gerrard

Pluto Press, 2022 - Education - 165 pages

Whiteness is not innate - it is learned. The systems of white domination that prevail across the world are not pregiven or natural. Rather, they are forged and sustained in social and political life.

Learning Whiteness examines the material conditions, knowledge politics and complex feelings that create and relay systems of racial domination. Focusing on Australia, the authors demonstrate how whiteness is fundamentally an educational project - taught within education institutions and through public discourse - in active service of the settler colonial state. To see whiteness as learned is to recognize that it can be confronted. This book invites readers to reckon with past and present politics of education in order to imagine a future thoroughly divested from racism. Whiteness is not innate - it is learned. The systems of white domination that prevail across the world are not pregiven or natural. Rather, they are forged and sustained in social and political life.

Learning Whiteness examines the material conditions, knowledge politics and complex feelings that create and relay systems of racial domination. Focusing on Australia, the authors demonstrate how whiteness is fundamentally an educational project - taught within education institutions and through public discourse - in active service of the settler colonial state. To see whiteness as learned is to recognise that it can be confronted. This book invites readers to reckon with past and present politics of education in order to imagine a future thoroughly divested from racism.

About the author

Arathi Sriprakash is Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney. She has written and co-edited a number of books including 'Education, Society and Change'. Arathi is also a founding director of the international podcast FreshEd which promotes educational ideas to the public. Sophie Rudolph is Lecturer in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. Her PhD thesis was awarded a Chancellor's Prize for Excellence in 2016 from the University of Melbourne and has been recently published as 'Unsettling the Gap: Race, Politics and Indigenous Education'. Jessica Gerrard is Senior Lecturer in Education, Equity and Politics at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of 'Radical Childhoods: Schooling and the Struggle for Social Change' and 'Precarious Enterprise on the Margins: Work, Poverty and Homelessness in the City'.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State
• Authors: Arathi Sriprakash, Sophie Rudolph, Jessica Gerrard
• Publisher: Pluto Press, 2022
• ISBN: 0745342140, 9780745342146
• Length: 165 pages
• Subjects: Education / General; History / Australia & New Zealand; History / Social History; Political Science / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism; Political Science / Imperialism