(Un)familiar materials: Using dis/assemblage to think critically about race and racism

Molly Doherty

doi:10.37291/2717638X.202563650

Authors

Molly Doherty University of North Texas https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1098-4368

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37291/2717638X.202563650

Keywords:

Whiteness, Justice-centered pedagogies and practices, Arts-inspired research, Critical friend communities

Abstract

This study investigates how white educators engage with justice-centered pedagogies and practices in early childhood spaces. It is situated in the Southwestern United States where local/state/federal contexts are attempting to silence Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging initiatives and enact violence towards communities of Color. Rooted in Critical Whiteness Studies as a critique of white supremacy, this work interrogates past-present-future histories of white immunity and domination while forefronting the resistance of communities of Color across time, place, and space. The focus group session shared here is part of a larger study that uses photovoice and arts-informed analyses to move white early childhood educators across-between-within-beyond allyship, activism, and co-conspiracy. Coming together as critical friends to unearth and confront enactments of race, racism, and whiteness«antiBlackness in early childhood spaces, co-researchers dis/assembled familiar-now-unfamiliar-to-be-familiar-again materials to make sense of previously-taken photographs. This individual and collective artmaking moved co-researchers with/in spaces of un/certainty – both with artmaking and speaking about race and racism. This study illustrates how artmaking set the stage for bravery, positioned co-researchers as critical friends, and provoked critical reflexivity. In doing so, it asserts dis/assemblage as a literal and metaphorical re-making process through which white educators build, break, and re-build art, themselves, and their early childhood spaces. This article calls for researchers to engage with methods and analyses processes outside of the whitestream and posits analytical artmaking as pivotal to whitewomen’s critical reflexivity.

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