My dissertation project, Divesting White Racial Consciousness: A Rhetoric of White Racial Un/Learning, offers an approach to understand how seven white people with actionable commitments to racial justice restructure their worldviews, challenge whiteness, and labor toward antiracist futures. I historicize un/learning whiteness as an enduring call for a just and equitable discipline that evidences explicitly a shift in consciousness that centers the needs, goals, and desires of communities of color. Theoretically informed by conversations in Black queer feminisms, critical whiteness studies, and language and literacy studies, this transdisciplinary project examines the contexts and experiences of un/learning and un/becoming as sites of literate and rhetorical action that can ultimately advance antiracist institutional transformation.  Anchored in feminist, queer, and multimodal methodologies, I designed a critical of whiteness multimodal methodology that offers a structured pedagogical experience for research partners to recover moments of un/learning and set goals for responsive coalitional action. I collected data through a three-phased process consisting of artifact-based interviews, multimodal artifact reconstructions, and reflective interviews geared toward future coalitional action.

 

By focusing on experiences of un/learning beyond rhetoric and writing studies, my research partners, who span from a range of regions and careers, offer the discipline new ways of imagining antiracist curricular, administrative, and pedagogical interventions. My findings illustrate that (1) partners un/learn whiteness through literate acts that shift to embrace pluralistic consciousnesses, such as listening to decenter, interruption in spheres of influence, and reflective action, and (2) partners sought out concrete and abstract apprentices to develop, and eventually problematize, heuristics for white racial un/learning that often moved from simplicity and certainty to complexity and slowness in their emerging orientations to antiracist knowledge and action. 

 

Below, I offer short chapter summaries of my dissertation project:

​

• Chapter 1, Radical Imaginings of a Discipline Not Yet Here: Whiteness in Writing Studies as Rhetorical, Wicked Problems. Drawing on conversations in antiracist pedagogies in English education, Black feminism, and language justice, this chapter historicizes, since the 1950s, the call by scholars of color to divest and challenge the structures of whiteness that shape the daily work of the teaching of writing. 

​

• Chapter 2, Disorientation as a Queering Un/Learning Praxis: Introducing a Critical of Whiteness Multimodal Methodology. This chapter situates disorientation in transformative learning studies alongside queer methodologies as a critical component to un/learning and shifting consciousness. I forward a critical of whiteness multimodal methodology consisting of four tenants: criticality as a habit of un/learning, racial storytelling as a method and pedagogy, multimodality as a knowledge-making activity, and disorientation as reflective action. I outline my method for data collection consisting of artifact-based interviews, multimodal reconstruction, and future-facing reflective interviews.  

​

• Chapter 3, “I am un/learning, but not un/learned”: The Literate Acts of white Racial Un/Learning. This chapter argues un/learning whiteness reflects a shift away from white supremacist worldviews that ultimately affect partners’ reading, writing, thinking, and being practices. This chapter chronicles six literate acts of un/learning: (1) listening to decenter, (2) interruption in spheres of influence, (3) accountability of past harm and commitments to change, (4) internal interrogation of socializing narratives and identities, (5) recurrent goal setting for future coalitional action, and (6) witnessing to manage structural inequity. 

​

• Chapter 4, “I do it, but I don’t call myself doing it”: Troubling Expertise, Apprenticeship, and Identification in white Racial Un/learning. Framed by disciplinary conversation around literate apprenticeship, expertise, and rhetorical identifications, this chapter highlights the complex ways research partners sought out mentors in un/learning whiteness through shared identifications with white antiracist people. My analysis reveals the ways partners initially sought simple understandings of “the work”  that became increasingly complex, flexible, and uncertain through experiences of un/learning.  

​

• Chapter 5,  Infrastructuring Un/learning as a Matter of Habit: Administrative and Programmatic Implications and Invitations for Writing and Rhetoric Studies. This chapter turns to writing center and writing program administrators to consider the pedagogical, administrative, and institutional possibilities for un/learning as a matter of institutional habit. I end by arguing for community-based and coalitional approaches to institutionalize un/learning toward justice-centered institutional politics.