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Title: When Becky Pulls ‘a Karen’: How university research ethics processes expose Black women to White rage
Date: Tuesday, November 18th
Time: 12:30 – 2:00 p.m.
Location: PCN 2012 6445 University Blvd
Description:
Dr. Doharty is developing a theoretical turn to anti-Blackness (as distinct from anti-Black racism). She will discuss the ways in which university research ethics processes are failing racialised Black researchers by offering them too few protections when presenting research findings that shed light on institutional racism.
These ethical procedures are rooted in Enlightenment principles of ostensibly objective, neutral, and reasoned researchers that are incongruous to the racial stratification of our social world. Consequently, studies such as racism are labelled ‘high risk’ and subject to further scrutiny. However, ‘high risk’ considerations are for the participants rather than researcher. While this presentation recognises that participants are observed to be people with complex backgrounds and experiences that the researcher must pay attention to, less attention is paid to the researcher whose role it is to produce knowledge and who cannot be divorced from the research process. They are implicated in rather than distanced from the research process, and any claims to neutrality is upholding anti-Blackness.
Taking one of the researcher’s own projects, this presentation will bring together theoretical perspectives from Cultural Studies and Black Critical Theory to explore white rage and institutional complicity in Black ‘death’. It will explore the consequences of being a racialised Black academic woman presenting findings about inequalities that dominant white audiences refute because they ‘read’ the researcher in ways that are consistent with the unequal racial and gender stratification of wider society.
Taking the meme of a ‘Karen’, this presentation argues that racialised Black women are being exposed to and harmed by ‘Karens’ who continue to police Black bodies in academe because research ethics procedures pay too little attention to the impact of (non)being, and thus, a target of ‘white rage’ (Anderson 2017).
Bio:
Nadena Doharty joins us from England as an Associate Professor in Education and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Black Experiences in and through Education. Nadena’s work brings together the theoretical strands of: critical race feminism, the sociology of emotion, and, more recently Black Critical Theory. Nadena’s theoretical frameworks have been applied, principally, to Black African and Caribbean young people and adults in school and post-secondary institutions. Nadena’s CRC work, here, complements and extends her recently awarded Economic and Social Research Council large grant by making a new theoretical pivot to Afropessimism. Specifically, Nadena’s research programme will improve post-secondary institutions’ understanding of Black students’ mental health and well-being by examining both the socio-cultural and institutional discourses and structures mediating their experiences, and centring how Black students conceptualise and respond to their mental health and well-being. There continues to be a lack of knowledge in the specificity of anti-Blackness – distinct from anti-Black racism – in academe, and Black students are locked out of meaningful ways to inform universities’ responses to their distress. Therefore, the objectives of this research programme are: first, establishing a conceptual break with anti-Black racism by adopting Black Critical Theory as the framework for examining the functions and effects of anti-Blackness; second, applying de-pathologising methodologies that surface how Black students understand and address their mental health needs, providing post-secondary institutions with valuable insights for the effective implementation of the Scarborough Charter.
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