UC Santa Cruz

Abstract

Felt Understandings: Talking about Race in College Classrooms

Christie G. McCullen

This dissertation addresses the difficulties of conversations about race in multicultural contexts, specifically in social science, writing, and theater classrooms. While previous literature has attributed such difficulties to discursive framing issues and divergent identity-based attitudes, beliefs, knowledges, and feelings, this study understands those difficulties as also shaped by affects and public feelings of race (i.e., ineffable feelings, named emotions, and sensations that exist both at and above the level of the individual body and social subject). As such, it develops understandings of race, affect, and pedagogy both theoretically and empirically, using data-driven analysis of ethnographic field notes from eight classrooms, 45 interviews of students and instructors, and 181 qualitative surveys of students.

First, this study demonstrates how discourses about race are inextricably tied to feelings about race—feelings that are both expressed by racialized individuals and that circulate with particular ideas about race at the cultural level. The term “affect-discourse” is used to account for that mutual formation of affects and discourses. Second, by comparing the qualities of conversations about race in different classroom settings, this study shows that pedagogies shape the reach and transformation of affect-discourse in micro-sociological contexts. Students in these classrooms both reproduce the impasses and difficulties noted in public conversations about race in mass media and move through those impasses, creating new forms of coalitional bonds and publics. Third, this study documents what the discursive and affective characteristics of race talk look like in an era proclaimed as “post-race” by some, specifically as that race talk manifests in a racially-diverse and politically liberal college campus in California.