This article examines the relationships among bodies, identities, and performances of whiteness in an Interracial Communication course. The article uses the concepts of positionality and performativity to discuss the shifting articulations of White identities in relation to whiteness as a pedagogical concept. In doing so, the study focuses on the class' narrative, positionality with regard to the narrative (including resistance), and positionality regarding the teacher of the course. The study draws from theoretical work on whiteness, critical pedagogy, pedagogy of discomfort, and the pedagogy of performance. Davies and Harre's (1990) discussion of positionality with regard to narrative and identity provides the framework for the analysis of student narratives and focus group conversations."No one is telling you what they really feel," she said, looking around at the class in exasperation. "If I was that woman, and I saw something suspicious, you better bet I would be on the phone to the police. You don't think if I could have prevented what happened on September 11th, I would have? That's what it means to be a good citizen."It was the anniversary of September 11th, 2001, and my Interracial Communication class had been discussing patriotism, race, and what it meant to be an American one year later. We were discussing a recent (at that time) incident in Florida in which three medical students had been detained for 17 hours after their car was pulled over and they were taken in for questioning by the state police and the FBI. According to news reports, a woman in a restaurant (in Georgia) at which the men were eating had overheard their conversation and had become anxious. She called the FBI to warn them that the men were terrorists and plotting an attack. Several hours later the men were pulled over on a major interstate highway in Southern Florida. Although the men were eventually released, the hospital in Miami at which they were to continue their schooling (and the destination of their long road trip) now denied them admittance. While a few students in the class protested the treatment of these men and racial profiling in general, the majority of students sat silent, not wanting (or possibly not caring) to enter into the dangerous territory of this conversation.As the instructor for the class, I raised the possibility that fear played a part in the (White female) tipster's response to the three men and was now playing a role both in how the students were interacting and in how they were judging others' responses. What seemed known to all, no one dared to say: how the men looked played a major role in how their actions were assessed. Their words were already Leda Cooks (PhD, Ohio University, 1993) is an Associate Professor at

No abstract

This article explores the discursive construction of ethics as the product of professional guidelines for behavior and as the process of telling stories about moral dilemmas. First, the authors focus on five codes of conduct for mediators and identify disputant self‐determination, informed consent, mediator impartiality, and mediator neutrality as central themes in each of these documents. Second, they examine the tape‐recorded remarks of participants in a seminar dealing with fairness, social justice, ethical concerns, and the responsibility of mediators to address these considerations. The four themes identified in the codes of conduct are shown to delineate the grounds on which ethical concerns were addressed by the seminar participants.

Thus, their new subjectivity emerges in the process of drawing borders around their old subject positions, a process that constitutes them as nascent specular border intellectuals. Their contemplation of the condition of their lives represents a freedom, or at least an attempt to have freedom, from the politics of imaginary identification and opposition, from conflation of identity and location, and so on ‐ in short, from the varied and powerful forms of suturing that are represented by and instrumental in the construction of their sedimented culture. The process of decoding as well as the emerging command of literacy permits them a gradual shift from the confines of the imaginary to the outer edges of the symbolic realm.

No abstract