Greg Vass – författare

This edited collection examines the ways in which the local and global are key to understanding race and racism in the intersectional context of contemporary education. Analysing a broad range of examples, it highlights how race and racism is a relational phenomenon, that interconnects local, national and global contexts and ideas.

The current educational climate is subject to global influences and the effects of conservative, hyper-nationalist politics and neoliberal economic rationalising in local settings that are creating new formations of race and racism. While focused predominantly on Australia and southern world or settler colonial contexts, the book aims to constructively contribute to broader emerging research and debates about race and education. Through the adoption of a relational framing, it draws the Australian context into the global conversation about race and racism in education in ways that challenge and test current understandings of the operation of race and racism in contemporary social and educational spaces. Importantly, it also pushes debates about race and racism in education and research to the foreground in Australia where such debates are typically dismissed or cursorily engaged.

The book will guide readers as they navigate issues of race in education research and practice, and its chapters will serve as provocations designed to assist in critically understanding this challenging field. It reaches beyond education scholarship, as concerns to do with race remain intertwined with wider social justice issues such as access to housing, health, social/economic mobility, and political representation.

This edited collection examines the ways in which the local and global are key to understanding race and racism in the intersectional context of contemporary education. Analysing a broad range of examples, it highlights how race and racism is a relational phenomenon, that interconnects local, national and global contexts and ideas.

The current educational climate is subject to global influences and the effects of conservative, hyper-nationalist politics and neoliberal economic rationalising in local settings that are creating new formations of race and racism. While focused predominantly on Australia and southern world or settler colonial contexts, the book aims to constructively contribute to broader emerging research and debates about race and education. Through the adoption of a relational framing, it draws the Australian context into the global conversation about race and racism in education in ways that challenge and test current understandings of the operation of race and racism in contemporary social and educational spaces. Importantly, it also pushes debates about race and racism in education and research to the foreground in Australia where such debates are typically dismissed or cursorily engaged.

The book will guide readers as they navigate issues of race in education research and practice, and its chapters will serve as provocations designed to assist in critically understanding this challenging field. It reaches beyond education scholarship, as concerns to do with race remain intertwined with wider social justice issues such as access to housing, health, social/economic mobility, and political representation.

Autoethnography allows researchers to make sense of the ‘ethno’ – the cultural – by studying their own experiences – the ‘auto’. It links the self to the cultural, allowing for an inductive grounding of theoretical insight into researchers'' lived experiences. But what happens when the culture that we research is not conventionally or entirely our ‘own’? What happens when our culture does not neatly conceptualise the ‘auto’ as an individual, Western self? And does autoethnographic writing risk reducing cultural ‘Others’ if we cannot help but see them through ‘imperial eyes’?

Questions of Culture in Autoethnography showcases how cross-cultural autoethnographies might be done effectively, ethically, and reflectively. Chapters include: identity work among Tibetans in India and among the descendants of Spanish conquistadores in Appalachia; insider/outsider identities in myriad contexts from Mexico to Japan; embodied (gendered, raced, sized) intercultural experiences from Samoa to Aotearoa/New Zealand and from Canada to Malawi; and language stories from Korea to Singapore and from Somalia to Australia. It also explores cultural Otherness within ‘a’ culture, including researchers’ accounts of working with Indigenous Australians, of contesting mainstream cultural narratives from a body positive perspective, and as a US American man in New Zealand’s ‘bloke culture’, only seemingly sharing the same English-language-speaking, ''Western'' culture.

For all scholars of qualitative methods and autoethnography, the book has a dual purpose – to show and to tell. It presents evocative autoethnographies of and about ‘culture’, as it is variously understood, and discusses the issues inherent in autoethnographic writing.