Dr Shona Hunter

This handbook offers a unique decolonial take on the field of Critical Whiteness Studies by rehistoricising and re-spatialising the study of bodies and identities in the world system of coloniality.

This chapter offers a decolonial approach to the critical study of whiteness. It focuses on twenty-first century global coloniality, characterised by neoliberalism's mix of necro-biopolitics and dependent on the toxic fantasies, materialities and global institutional, and interpersonal relationalities of whiteness. Critical race, decolonial, and black feminist theories are drawn together to confront the reproduction of whiteness in scholarship and practice and bring into view Global North/South relationalities. Starting with a critique of the politics of crisis in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the layered argument references South Africa as Southern exemplar of the workings of global whiteness. We probe liberal and neoliberal shifts in whiteness before engaging the latest defensive reversion to a more explicitly violent whiteness in the form of a globalised ‘Apartheid 2.0’. Our friendly but challenging critique of the contested field of Critical Whiteness Studies includes questioning its key epistemologies: The ‘invisibility–ignorance–innocence’ triad and, lately, ‘white fragility’. The analysis problematises the field as part of the same possessive, narcissistic, masterly logic of coloniality whereby white subjects are understood to control mind over matter. In conclusion, the chapter reflects on a broader rehumaning effort to disrupt (neo)liberal colonialities’ organisation of life, death, and existence through race.

This paper contributes to debates on potential connections between care ethics and decoloniality from within Global North West European whiteness. It adopts a feminist psychosocial position which understands everyday lived realities as shifting dynamic entanglements, produced relationally though complicated spatially and temporally expansive material, discursive and affective practices. First, it situates the liberal welfare state as part of a global project of North Western European colonisation which violently establishes a fantasy of whiteness as the human ideal rooted in individual sovereignty and rights to possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). Next it unpacks how the historical institutionalisation of care via state welfare sustains ‘white ignorance’; (Mills, 2007) in the face of the contemporary reality of ongoing systematised racial violence of coloniality. Finally, it offers the idea of ‘relational choreography’ (Hunter, 2015a; 2015b) as a way into resisting binary liberal individualist self-understanding underpinning this possessive logic of whiteness.

This article uses empirical material from a qualitative study of adult and community learning (ACL) to explore issues around leading for equality and diversity in educational organisations. What the author is interested in is the way that the commitment to a ‘community’ context in ACL opens up (or keeps open) certain possibilities for ‘diverse’ educational leaders because of the connection it draws between pedagogic practice and the politics of equality. By calling for a mainstreaming of political knowledge around unequal social relations, participants problematise notions of leadership currently circulating in education. Whilst homogenising tendencies in their accounts may be read as going against the very grain of contemporary debates around the recognition of ‘difference’ and diversity, they also pose significant challenges to neo-liberal imaginings of diversity.

This paper challenges dominant analyses of policy documents and documentation practices as coercive welfare technologies. Instead it develops an interdisciplinary feminist psychosocial analysis which posits policy documents as material semiotic actors in the process of governance, produced through and productive of the social relations of public service provision. It uses an empirical case study from the author's experience in equalities policy making in education to develop an understanding of the multiple social relations constituted through document production. It applies the concepts of boundary object and transitional phenomena to understand the ways in which policy documents enable collective resistance to dominant constructions of otherness and alterity in equalities work and policy. The paper also considers how this sort of analysis highlights `uncomfortable truths' around the position of critical social researchers in document production for policy purposes.

This paper considers the relationship between white shame in contemporary UK health care contexts and historically idealized forms of white pride derived from nineteenth-century British colonialism. It uses excerpts from qualitative interview material to highlight the contemporary figures of the "white worried man" and the "white women savior" and the relationship between them. Through this, it explores how shifts from white pride to white shame reflect shifts in the focus of whiteness away from civilizing the racialized Other to civilizing the white self. Through this analysis, it further complicates shame theory arguing for an understanding of [white] shame as constituted through a relational economy, differentiated through class and gender as well as race. © The Author 2010.

This article seeks both to highlight a current imbalance in approaches to social identity in social policy and to make suggestions as to how this might be redressed in future work employing the concept. The concept of identity and specifically social identity is increasingly employed in the discipline of social policy as a theoretical device with which to bridge the individual/social divide. The argument presented here suggests that the concept is, however, unevenly deployed in policy analysis and therefore lacks the impact it might otherwise have had. The predominant focus of current analysis lies on policy change precipitated by groups of `new' active welfare constituents organized around differentiated and fragmented social identities, whereas the identities of welfare professionals also involved in the policy making process have disappeared from analytical view. The current emphasis on the discursive context of policy formulation perpetuates an unacknowledged misconception concerning the asociality of those involved in policy making, whereby their principal role is perceived as the maintenance of the status quo in terms of social policy responses to welfare constituents' needs. Redressing this false dichotomy between those developing and those using welfare services might be avoided by further exploring the concept of relational identity.

Many of the recent reforms in public services in the UK have been driven by the image of the ‘responsible citizen’ – the service user who not only has rights to receive services but also has responsibilities for the delivery of policy outcomes. In this way, citizens’ everyday conduct is shaped by governmental action, yet there is much evidence that both front-line staff in public services and the people who use them can sometimes act in ways that modify, disrupt, or negate intended policy outcomes. This book presents an examination of how official policy objectives can be ‘subverted’ through the actions of staff and users. It discusses the role of public policy in the creation of ‘good citizenship’, such as making appropriate choices about what to eat and how much to save, to being an active participant in the local community. The book also examines how the roles of service delivery staff have changed substantially, and how theories of ‘power’ and ‘agency’ are useful in analysing the engagement between public policies (and those employed to deliver them) and the citizens at whom they are targeted. The idea of subversive citizenship is explored through theoretical and empirical analyses by a range of social researchers. Many of the recent reforms in public services in the UK have been driven by the image of the ‘responsible citizen’ - the service user who does not only have rights to receive services but also has responsibilities for the delivery of policy outcomes. In this way, citizens’ everyday conduct is shaped by governmental action, yet there is much evidence that both front-line staff in public services and the people who use them can sometimes act in ways that modify, disrupt or negate intended policy outcomes. “Subversive citizens” presents a highly original examination of how official policy objectives can be ‘subverted’ through the actions of staff and users. It discusses the role of public policy in the creation of ‘good citizenship’, such as making appropriate choices about what to eat and how much to save, to being an active participant in the local community. It also examines how the roles of service delivery staff have changed substantially, and how theories of ‘power’ and ‘agency’ are useful in analysing the engagement between public policies (and those employed to deliver them) and the citizens at whom they are targeted. The idea of subversive citizenship is explored through theoretical and empirical analyses by a range of prominent social researchers and will be of interest to students of social policy, sociology, criminology, politics and related disciplines, as well as policy makers involved in public services. Citizens’ everyday conduct is shaped by governmental action, yet there is much evidence that both front-line public service staff and service users can sometimes act in ways that modify or disrupt intended policy outcomes. This book presents a highly original examination of how policy objectives can be ‘subverted’ through the actions of citizens. This chapter takes a detailed look at the way in which one healthcare professional resists and negotiates his personal and professional identity in the context of a modernisation discourse that creates dilemmas for him through its categorical assumptions concerning ‘older’, male Asian GPs. It begins by considering the ways in which the professional and the social intertwine in public sector modernisation, and in particular how this plays out in the construction of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ professionalisms in primary care. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to a feminist psychosocial analysis of Navneen’s narrative, through which the chapter demonstrates the difference between what he says about gender, race, and generation, and what he feels about them.

This paper draws on work conducted for a qualitative interview based study which explores the gendered racialised and professional identifications of health and social care professionals. Participants for the project were drawn from the professional executive committees of recently formed Primary Care Groups/Trusts. The paper discusses how the feminist psychosocial methodological approach developed for the project is theoretically, practically and ethically useful in exploring the voices of those in positions of relative power in relation to both health and social care services and the social relations of gender and ethnicity. The approach draws on psychodynamic accounts of (defended) subjectivity and the feminist work of Carol Gilligan on a voice-centred relational methodology. Coupling the feminist with the psychosocial facilitates an emphasis on voice and dialogic communication between participant and researcher not always captured in psychosocial approaches which tend towards favouring the interviewer as a 'good listener'. This emphasis on dialogue is important in research contexts where prior and ongoing relationships with professional participants make it difficult and indeed undesirable for researchers to maintain silence. © 2005 GAPS.

In this article, I offer the idea of relational choreography as a way of understanding white positionality as responsible for, as well as resistant to, racialising practices. My argument develops through a self-reflexive analysis of my response to a photographic exhibition by Black British photographer, Vanley Burke, entitled ‘By the Rivers of Birminam’. Looking at Burke's photographs as a counter-archive that is explicitly resistant to the hegemonic practice of white looking, as this is enacted through a (post)colonial racialised visual schema which objectifies blackness as a means to produce whiteness, I consider the ways in which this archive can nevertheless ‘prick’ the white looker affectively. This pricking can prompt the sort of momentary self-objectification that allows the white self to be seen and understood through the Black gaze. It flips the script of whiteness. But the idea of relational choreography understands this flipping differently to a simple inversion of Manichean racialising power dynamics. Instead, a focus on the relationally dynamic interaction between objectification and subjectification as they are choreographed through multiple intersecting relations of power and vulnerability provides a realistic (albeit not romanticised) starting point for resisting the dehumanising objectifications that support a racialised visual schema desirous of whiteness.

This book brings recent developments in emotional geography into dialogue with social policy concerns and contemporary issues of governance.

This is a state characterised by the ascendency of neoliberal whiteness; a state where no one is innocent and we are all responsible for the multiple intersecting exclusionary practices creating its unequal social orderings.

Disobedient Bodies: Disobedience in Five Acts (Halász and Hunter, 2025) is an artistic intervention into Whiteness as global coloniality and bodily enacted discomfort. It was installed in Seoul, South Korea in June 2025 at the 'Absolute Disorder' Exhibition for the International Visual Sociology Association at the Suwon Cultural Centre. It combines video with installation art, into which the viewer physically enters and thus produces the work with their corporeal presence and embodied situatedness (Bishop 2005; Halász 2017, 2019, 2023). The video is integrated into an arranged environment, using a single screen projection, objects, and a carefully laid table as a central space for participants to gather. The installation works with the affective embodied relationality of race within our current global coloniality (Hunter and van der Westhuizen 2021). The aim is to explore the (im)possibility of disrupting Whiteness through the practice of collective gathering and the situatedness of the knowing bodies of creators and participants. As two cis hetero white women artists working together from a feminist decolonial abolitionist identified point of view we are investigating the (im)possibilities of being Otherwise in the global colonial Northwest. The essay film at the heart of the artwork explores racialised and gendered disobedience in the artistic process of producing and engaging with the video installation You Are Invited (Halász and Hunter, 2023), which was manifested at the 2024 IVSA annual conference at the Universidad Veracruzana (Xalapa, Mexico), at the Critical Making & Justice exhibition (2023, The Pratt Institute, NYC) and at the Gender, Work & Organization annual conference (2023, Stellenbosch University, SA). It is organised in five Acts, each considering the question whether global power dynamics of race and gender relations could be affectively decentred through the artistic process of creating (authors and collaborators) and participating (visitors) in the affective bodily practice of disobedience. The five Acts of ‘Care’, ‘Investment, ‘Interest’, ‘Expectation’ and ‘Stakes’ respectively gesture towards the relationally extended interdependences across global colonial time and space. For more information on the installation and to watch the essay film in full please go to https://www.whitespaces.org.uk/post/disobedient-bodies-disobedience-in-five-acts

You Are Invited is an artistic intervention into Whiteness as global coloniality and bodily enacted discomfort. It combines video with installation art, into which the viewer physically enters and thus produces the work with their corporeal presence and embodied situatedness (Bishop 2005; Halász 2017, 2019, 2023). The video is integrated into an arranged environment, using a single screen projection, objects, and a carefully laid table as a central space for participants to gather. The installation works with the affective embodied relationality of race within our current global coloniality (Hunter and van der Westhuizen 2021). The aim is to explore the (im)possibility of disrupting Whiteness through the practice of collective gathering and the situatedness of the knowing bodies of creators and participants. As two cis hetero white women artists working together from a feminist decolonial abolitionist identified point of view we are investigating the (im)possibilities of being Otherwise in the global colonial Northwest. It was manifested at the 2024 IVSA annual conference at the Universidad Veracruzana (Xalapa, Mexico), at the Critical Making & Justice exhibition (2023, The Pratt Institute, NYC) and at the Gender, Work & Organization annual conference (2023, Stellenbosch University, SA). In You Are Invited, participants get together around a lavishly set dinner table using materials from the local environment to sit, eat, and watch a four-minute video projected large onto the wall before them. The video features a split screen, with a different story unfolding on each side. On the left-hand side, the video blends the life and death of two white women: Alice Harris Kester, an anti-racist preacher’s wife active during the civil rights movement in the American South, and the British Queen Elizabeth II, who died in 2022. Excerpts of oral history interviews with Kester’s husband Howard Kester and daughter Nancy Kester Neale are displayed in subtitles and interwoven with images of the procession and the coffin of Elizabeth II, and with multiple film footages evoking the subtitled words and the reported inability of Kester to keep her food down when eating at the same table as African Americans (Yancy 2008, 2017). On the right-hand side of the split screen, the video features images of white children playing in the snowy mountains of Switzerland. The soundtrack of the video combines a funeral score with a child’s voice reading excerpts from the American writer James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village”, in which he reflects as a Black man on the racial politics of America from the vantage point of his stay in the mountain village of Leukerbad, Switzerland. A short impact film and further information can be found at this blog post: https://www.whitespaces.org.uk/post/you-are-invited

This article takes the form of a conversation concerning the latest iterations of our ongoing artistic interventions into Whiteness1 as global coloniality and bodily enacted discomfort. We created two interconnected video installations—You Are Invited (Halász and Hunter 2023) and Disobedient Bodies: Disobedience in Five Acts (Halász and Hunter 2025)—which we have presented over the past two years in various White institutional spaces across the USA, South Africa, Mexico, and South Korea2. This conversation captures our thinking as it has developed in the making of the artworks and in a constant exchange with participants in the installations. Engaging with extended reflections of one participant who experienced the video installation You are Invited in the USA, we consider why we are invested in confronting global colonial Whiteness as white makers and how we grapple through our own ongoing investments in Whiteness as we seek to challenge it through our artistic practice. As an entry point into our discussion, we consider our use of the African American writer James Baldwin’s 19533 essay “Stranger in the Village” in the artwork’s staging of a confrontation with the collective wound of race. We start here because critically analysing this use from the point of view of installation participants tells us something about the way Whiteness works through the tensions between representational and affective registers. If heeded, this tension can assist the move towards racialised accountability with care in artmaking. Where this tension is not heeded, it risks reproducing the same old White story.

In the British context of April 2025, where this commentary is positioned, one could hardly be in a more obviously contested and anxious time for Global Northwestern liberal democracies and their governance of citizenship. Coming from the perspective of an interdisciplinary feminist decolonial psychosocial critique of liberal democratic governance and with its author similarly located in the global colonial Northwest, this commentary works with the critical thrust of the contributions of the volume’s “Bordering Citizenship” section. The commentary highlights the multiple interrelated problematics and prospects of the contested relationship between citizen subjects and the liberal democratic state. The aim is to draw out how the contributions invite further analysis of the reproduction of global colonial power carried through the neoliberalisation of the citizen subject in our contemporary capitalist coloniality. It frames and invites extension of their analysis from within a critical engagement of our current global coloniality as intersectionally cisheteropatriarchally white and hyper-capitalist; technically enabled through the expansion of techno-fascist “surveillance capitalism” but also, under extreme pressure through a range of economic, social, and environmental crises and liberal democratic political institutional decline.