UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ FELT UNDERSTANDINGS: TALKING ABOUT RACE IN COLLEGE CLASSROOMS A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in SOCIOLOGY with an emphasis in FEMINIST STUDIES by Christie G. McCullen September 2017 The Dissertation of Christie G. McCullen is approved: ____________________________________ Professor Dana Takagi, chair ____________________________________ Professor Herman Gray ____________________________________ Professor Julie Bettie ______________________________________________ Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Table of Contents Table of Contents……………………………………………………………………..iii Abstract………………………………………………...……………………………..vi Dedication………………………….………………………………………………..viii Acknowledgements………………….………………………………………………..ix Chapter 1 – Introduction: Feelings and stalled conversations about race……………..1 Field note…………………………………………………………….…....…..1 Feelings, impasses, and the reproduction of racism………………………..…2 Feelings and impasses in classroom conversations about race………...….….7 What we know about difficulties in talking about race…………………..….11 What we know less about: How public feelings affect race talk…………….23 Research questions……………………………………………………..…….32 Cases and methodology………………………………………...……………35 Chapter overviews……………………………………………………….…..40 Chapter 2 – Literature review………………………………………………………..42 Introduction…………………………………………………………………..42 Critical race scholarship on discourse and subjectivity……………………...44 Critical multicultural pedagogies on experience and emotionality…………..56 Affect Studies: Thinking about race…………………………………………67 Conclusion……………………….…………………………………………..74 Chapter 3 – “Keeping it in” and “keeping it real”: Comparing and contrasting emotional habitus and emotional labor in the classroom………………………….…76 iii Introduction………………..............................................................................76 Field Note: Rainbow…………………………………………………………80 Field Note: Traditional classroom……………………………………..…….83 “Keeping it in”: The emotional habitus of the traditional classrooms……….84 Realness as Rainbow’s emotional habitus…………………………….……104 Conclusion…………………………………………………………….……116 Chapter 4 – (Contested) storytelling: Practices, politics, and possibilities of learning through experience………………………………………...………………………..124 Introduction: Utilizing experience in pedagogy………………………...….124 Discursive management of experience in traditional classrooms………..…128 Story and experiential knowledge in Rainbow……………………………..148 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….159 Chapter 5 – Felt understandings: Affective workings in knowledges about race……………………………………………………………………...…………..168 Introduction…………………………………………………………………168 In both: Racism as individual prejudice…………………………………….176 In traditional classrooms: Racial difference as binary categories…………..185 In Rainbow: Race as culture and community…………………………...….202 Conclusion…………………………………………………………...……..220 Chapter 6 – Conclusion: Rethinking teaching and learning about race…...………..231 Introducing concluding thoughts……………………………………….…..231 Vignette 1: The cautionary tale of Hana……………………………...…….233 iv Vignette 2: Clarifying Rainbow politics to university officials………….....239 Vignette 3: “Am I a bad POC for not feeling outraged?”………….……….244 From the uncanny valley toward a felt sociological imagination…………..251 References…………………………………………………..………………………260 v 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 vi 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. vii For Sara, who made great stories viii Acknowledgements If it were not for submission deadlines and the general conventions of academic writing, I would make this section a whole chapter. This work has my name attached to it, but it hardly belongs to me, solely. This dissertation is a product of and indebted to communities in sociology, feminist studies, critical race and ethnic studies, affect studies, critical pedagogies, post-colonial studies, and queer theory. The scholars in these fields have fought long and hard to have a place in academia. I thank you for your perseverance and now proudly stand on your shoulders to offer this work. More specifically, thank you to everyone in the Sociology and Feminist Studies departments at UCSC, as well as the Community Development Graduate Group at UC Davis. Small conversations in front of the microwave or copier have made a big impact on this, so thank you for the support and collegiality. To my cohort of Yvonne, Kirsten, and Alexis, thank you for making grad school really fun, tasty, experimental, enlightening, and heart-warming! Thanks also to faculty mentors Melanie, Laurie, Charlotte, Kim, Kim, and Karen for their support in my master’s theses and qualifying exams. Special thanks also go to Ariana, Kevin, Shannon, Toby, Claire, Matt, Kurt, Brandi, Darren, Willie, Pascal, Megan, Tracy, Jimi, Kati, Claudia, Jasmine, Justin, Maya, Bernie, Elliot and Naomi. It’s been a pleasure learning how to do this with all of you. I can’t wait to assign your books for class and then refer to you by your first name. Thanks to Barbara, Marilyn, Ann, Mizuki, Perla, ix Jessica, and Colleen for helping me navigate the paperwork that ultimately confirms this degree. You are bureaucratic angels! Huge thanks go to my dissertation committee—Dana Takagi, Herman Gray, and Julie Bettie—who collectively believed in me and patiently listened to me think out loud. Thank you for the ways that you shaped this study and my intellectual development. Dana, pardon the reference, but you really are a Zen master of academic advising. Who makes a paper Mobius strip as a form of feedback, or tells their students to stop thinking? Only you. You’ve also helped me bridge the abstract theory and the concrete evidence to answer the “so what” question. Thank you for that and for your kind words and concern when the human condition got in the way of my progress on this. Herman, thanks for really fun (and sometimes scary) prompts to “go meta.” I can always count on you to point out how, to my chagrin, discourse writes through me. Your work and provocations have pushed me past the limits of my own thinking and even taught me how to do that for myself and my students. Julie, thank you for your modeling great ethnographic methods. Your work brought me to UCSC and it continues to inspire me today. You teach me that having a foot in several camps isn’t a liability but a chance to invite an important conversation. You’ve also taught me to always look for change, transformation, and transgression. Thank you to all three of you for those gifts; I feel so grateful for your mentorship. Enormous thanks go to the lovely, talented, and sharp research assistants who generated a lot of words on paper and then helped me make sense of all of those notes—Regina, Adriana, Jessica, Mirella, Nadia, Darryl, Katie, Leanna, Clarisa, x Alex, Katrina, Alexis, Anne-Marie, Kyle, Jasmine, Denise, Taylor, Andrea, Marco, Harold, Olivia, Hanâ, Jessica, Natalie, Jacob, America, Sidney, Sonia, Ema, Sergio, Emily, Melissa, and Jordan. You not only made this project possible, but your time, insight, and feedback made it what it is. I hope that you enjoyed a behind-the-scenes tour of the research process and that you end up writing one of these things too. If so, I’d be honored to read your work. To all the students and instructors in the classes I observed, thank you for letting me be in your classrooms and giving me interviews and surveys. I am especially grateful for all of the instructors of the classes I observed. I feel indebted to you, both for graciously giving me the opportunity to create “data,” but also for what I learned from you as teachers