Researching Whiteness in a Transnational Pandemic Context
Organisers: the ChinaWhite research team (www.china-white.org), Department of Anthropology/AISSR, University of Amsterdam
Location: REC B 5.12
With the rise of Asian economies, more and more white westerners are moving to Asia to look for business and job opportunities. The outbreak of Covid-19 in China in early 2020 and its development into a global pandemic not only posed challenges to transnational mobility for various groups of migrants, but significantly restricted onsite research activities. It pushes us to ask new questions addressing the intersection of race, class, gender, nationality, language, and other demarcations of social inequalities, which have been both highlighted and contested by the global spread of Covid-19.
Steven Garner (2007) notes that “whiteness is a phenomenon unthinkable in a context where white does not equal power at some structural level” (51). He also warns against several pitfalls in critical whiteness studies, such as the reification of whiteness as an object of study; the shift from researching whiteness as power structure to researching whiteness as individual identities; and the potential to compromise and even undermine anti-racist research agendas. This international workshop aims to critically engage with Garner’s important yet provocative arguments by considering the pluralization of the meanings of whiteness in the new historical context of the rise of Asian economies, when white migrants no longer enjoy structural domination in Asian-majority societies.
This workshop is free and open to the public. Registration is required.
Please click HERE for the detailed program and online registration information.
To view the abstract of the workshop papers please click HERE and for the biographical information of the presenters and discussants, please click HERE.
This workshop is in hybrid form. We have a limited number of spaces for onsite participation at REC B 5.12 the anthropology common room. Please email Kathleen O’Farrell at