Rationalizing liberation: Producing knowledge-practices and subjects in an antiracist training.

摘要

Seeking to move beyond de-politicized "diversity" discourse, a seasoned group of antiracist organizers and a nascent collective of antiracist "helping professionals" are collaborating to problematize and transform power relations in the domain of social work. This thesis is an ethnographic analysis of the training workshops that serve as foundation and threshold to this budding social movement. Through participant observation and semi-structured interviews, this study examines the co-/reproduction of knowledge-practices through which organizers work with and on participants to remake them into antiracist subjects. Moreover, it considers the ways that workshop participants strategically and inadvertently appropriate and mediate the knowledge-practices of antiracist subject-making in light of intervening knowledges, relations, and experiences. This project thus reveals that participants engage in unpredictable ways in their own subjectification with and against organizers' intentions and that the (dis)junctures between organizers' subject-making efforts and participants' "self-making" have important and unexpected consequences for this movement of professionals-cum-activists.