Race talk and white normativity: classroom discourse and narratives in Norwegian higher education

Abstract

How does the process of racialization unfold as a discursive project at the university? How do students and faculty in the classroom use racial categories in supposedly post-racial places? How do People of Color in higher education in Norway narrate their experiences of being ‘Othered’? We draw on two linked studies and use membership categorization analysis and the analysis of narrative interviews to examine the shared dynamics of racialization in classroom discourse and lived experience. We use Nirmal Puwar’s (2004. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place. Oxford: Berg) Space Invaders to explore the racialized dynamic of disorientation in academic spaces, and how disorientation and assumptions of non-belonging contribute to the condition of epistemic injustice (Fricker, Miranda. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) in higher education.