Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State

Arathi Sriprakash, Sophie Rudolph, Jessica Gerrard

Pluto Press, 2022 - Education and state - 176 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.

About the author

Arathi Sriprakash is a Professor of Education at the University of Bristol. She is a founding member of the Race, Empire and Education Research Collective.



Sophie Rudolph is a Senior Lecturer in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Unsettling the Gap: Race, Politics and Indigenous Education.



Jessica Gerrard is an Associate Professor at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. She is the author of Radical Childhoods and Precarious Enterprise on the Margins.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Learning Whiteness: Education and the Settler Colonial State
• Authors: Arathi Sriprakash, Sophie Rudolph, Jessica Gerrard
• Publisher: Pluto Press, 2022
• ISBN: 0745342159, 9780745342153
• Length: 176 pages