Geography, ‘race’ and Whiteness: invisible traditions and current challenges

‘Inappropriate and incongruous’: opposition to asylum centres in the English countryside

“…Moving beyond a simply black/white dualism, contemporary work on the racialisation of space thus points to the way that privileged landscapes such as the English countryside serve to promote and defend the dominance of particular white identities (Bonnett, 1997;Henderson and Kaur, 1999;Pulido, 2000). Yet, as Sibley (1997) notes, when opposing rural transgression, the actual geographies of migration, colour and race are often claimed as irrelevant by rural dwellers, with those who defend the boundaries of the rural community against incomers repeatedly stressing their objection is not related to ethnicity per se, and that there is, in any case, no 'race problem' in the countryside (see Neal, 2002).…”

Public Sociology or Partisan Sociology? The Curious Case of Whiteness Studies

“…Largely ignored are the complicated interactions between race, class, and sex, and the struggles of many whites to acquire privileges in a class-stratified society, especially economic security and some degree of self-autonomy (Bonnett 1997;Eichstedt 2001;Hartigan 1997Hartigan , 2000bHubbard 2005;Kolchin 2002;Lee 1999;Winders 2003). Reifying the concept of race fails to capture the processes through which it acquires meaning, confers status, or exerts a "structuring effect" (Bash 2006;Lewis 2004).…”

Experiencing and writing Indigeneity, rurality and gender: Australian reflections

“…She argues for a more nuanced understanding of farming which would encompass her own smallscale and non-industrial model. At the same time, she confronts us with the 'social power' of our whiteness (Bonnett, 1997(Bonnett, , 2000. For us as white academics this includes the power to include and exclude in terms of knowledge production, as well as the power to categorise and classify so that we may largely ignore Indigenous experiences of drought or farming and label them as white.…”

“…Collectively, this literature has documented the plurality of whiteness and its historical, social and cultural specificity as well as identified ideologies, practices and discourses which have rendered whiteness invisible but hegemonic (e.g. Bonnett, 1997Bonnett, , 2000Jackson, 1998;McGuinness, 2000;Twine and Gallagher, 2007). As whiteness has become an increasingly common theoretical lens concerns have been raised about its potentially negative effects.…”