RESEARCH
My research is rooted theoretically in Indigenous feminisms and makes critical interventions into the fields of settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, and educational research by historicizing how the discursive construction of “benevolent whiteness” informs the contemporary perpetuation of white supremacy vis-a-vis loving intentions and a performative clinging onto a social justice ethos by white women teachers. Broadly speaking, I explore issues of gendered settler colonialism and anti-blackness as enacted and reproduced by schooling. Specifically, my ethnographic and archival research engage both European post structuralism, particularly Foucauldian theory, and Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) genealogical methods to make visible ruptures in continuity, and the continuity present in ancestral or historical lineages. Combined, these modes of inquiry help us understand how power is enacted corporeally to reconstitute particular bodies as either heroic (white women) or problematic (Black and Indigenous children). In addition to my more theoretical research, I was also recently co-PI on a three-year Spencer Foundation funded participatory action research project exploring the impact of ethnic studies curriculum with practicing elementary school teachers. This project allowed me to make productive use of my theoretical and historical work to affect change in real time with teachers in Bay Area public schools through a practice we have named “critical race inquiry” (Bauer & Watson, 2022). As an Indigenous feminist scholar, I value a balance between community based and historical research and am especially interested in tracing genealogies and unearthing counterstories that center and humanize the experiences and existences of Indigenous peoples and other communities of color.
My recent book, Tender Violence in U.S. Schools: Benevolent Whiteness and the Dangers of Heroic White Womanhood (Routledge, 2022), takes as a provocation what has become commonly known as the “discipline gap” in U.S. public schools: Contemporary data conclude that within educational systems, the over-disciplining of Black and Indigenous students is most often presented as a problem located within pathologized or misunderstood communities. That is, theories and proposed solutions tend toward those that ask how we can make students of color more suited to U.S. educational standards rather than questioning the settler colonial roots of those standards. Such a mindset results in obscenely imbalanced disciplinary trends across the country, where Indigenous and Black students are suspended and expelled from school beginning at the start of their educational careers (as young as five years old), and at the highest rates of any group. In response to this paradox, the book explores a thus far unconsidered stance and asks how white women (the majority of U.S. teachers) have historically understood their roles in the disciplining (in both the literal and Foucauldian sense) of Black and Indigenous students, and how and why their role has been constructed over time and space in service to institutions of the white settler colonial State. The central argument in the book is that we must understand the (over)disciplining of Black and Indigenous youth as a consequence of what has been framed historically as “benevolent intentions.” Additionally, the project considers how Indigenous futurities might propel us past critique and into imagining what anticolonial, antiracist teaching might look like.
My second book project, Pedagogies of Futurity: Black and Indigenous Education for Resistance, Persistence, and Survival, is an attempt to further my first book’s call for reimagined and remembered futures. Such a move takes the work from an analysis of whiteness in formalized schooling toward focusing on traditional Indigenous modes of knowledge production and dissemination and the extensive tradition of Black educational thought to imagine schooling in ways we currently deem impossible. During the now three years long global pandemic, there has been much public and intellectual discourse comparing the advantages of affluent white families with private tutors with the imagined deficit for students of color who are always already left behind. Such an imagined binary neglects a nuanced understanding of student experiences in formalized schooling to begin with, not to mention preliminary data that demonstrate a significant decrease in anxiety and other mental health challenges for students of color who, during online schooling, were free of the often violent institution of traditional educational systems. Inspired by this complexity, I am interested in further uncovering and analyzing nuanced histories of Black and Indigenous educational experiences, particularly those led by families and community members. Further, in this project I propose reimagining schooling and its potential for post-pandemic reinvention through a lens of Blackness and Indigeneity as assets rather than deficits. The goal of the project is to construct a genealogy of Black and Indigenous educational futurisms and futurity that will serve as a guide toward building equitable and revolutionary educational experiences for BIPOC communities. In short, compared to my first book, Pedagogies of Futurity looks at the other side of schooling, when it is employed for emancipation rather than control and indoctrination.
Further building upon my use of moʻokūʻauhau as methodology, this new project will employ Indigenous storytelling methodologies and center Native and Black voices through the creation of an oral history archive. I will also apply for a NEH digital humanities grant to support an oral history repository that will live on in a publicly accessible site, in addition to the published book. Confirmed research participants include past and present directors, teachers, students, and parents of revolutionary BIPOC educational movements, including: Ericka Huggins of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School and Madonna Thunderhawk of the We Will Remember Survival School for Indigenous Youth. I am currently mentoring undergraduate research assistants in the early phases of this project.
In both Tender Violence and Pedagogies of Futurity, as in all my work, I take seriously the Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) tradition of storytelling and genealogy as legitimate research methods emphasising the importance of understanding one’s place in the world contemporarily, historically, and interrelatedly, an understanding that stands in diametric opposition to a western understanding of the self as independent individual disconnected from land, history, and consequence. Kanaka genealogical methods – moʻokūʻauhau as methodology – allow us to trace an ancestral and historical lineage of Native and Black resistance to and survivance within settler colonialism; more importantly, it guides us in imagining a way out, forward, and back to ourselves. It is this imagining I continue to center in my research, and would love to expand to undergraduate and graduate student researchers, whether through my own research, student guided projects, courses on research methodologies, or community based participatory action research with Indigenous peoples and other communities of color.
My research is rooted theoretically in Indigenous feminisms and makes critical interventions into the fields of settler colonial studies, critical whiteness studies, and educational research by historicizing how the discursive construction of “benevolent whiteness” informs the contemporary perpetuation of white supremacy vis-a-vis loving intentions and a performative clinging onto a social justice ethos by white women teachers. Broadly speaking, I explore issues of gendered settler colonialism and anti-blackness as enacted and reproduced by schooling. Specifically, my ethnographic and archival research engage both European post structuralism, particularly Foucauldian theory, and Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) genealogical methods to make visible ruptures in continuity, and the continuity present in ancestral or historical lineages. Combined, these modes of inquiry help us understand how power is enacted corporeally to reconstitute particular bodies as either heroic (white women) or problematic (Black and Indigenous children). In addition to my more theoretical research, I was also recently co-PI on a three-year Spencer Foundation funded participatory action research project exploring the impact of ethnic studies curriculum with practicing elementary school teachers. This project allowed me to make productive use of my theoretical and historical work to affect change in real time with teachers in Bay Area public schools through a practice we have named “critical race inquiry” (Bauer & Watson, 2022). As an Indigenous feminist scholar, I value a balance between community based and historical research and am especially interested in tracing genealogies and unearthing counterstories that center and humanize the experiences and existences of Indigenous peoples and other communities of color.
My recent book, Tender Violence in U.S. Schools: Benevolent Whiteness and the Dangers of Heroic White Womanhood (Routledge, 2022), takes as a provocation what has become commonly known as the “discipline gap” in U.S. public schools: Contemporary data conclude that within educational systems, the over-disciplining of Black and Indigenous students is most often presented as a problem located within pathologized or misunderstood communities. That is, theories and proposed solutions tend toward those that ask how we can make students of color more suited to U.S. educational standards rather than questioning the settler colonial roots of those standards. Such a mindset results in obscenely imbalanced disciplinary trends across the country, where Indigenous and Black students are suspended and expelled from school beginning at the start of their educational careers (as young as five years old), and at the highest rates of any group. In response to this paradox, the book explores a thus far unconsidered stance and asks how white women (the majority of U.S. teachers) have historically understood their roles in the disciplining (in both the literal and Foucauldian sense) of Black and Indigenous students, and how and why their role has been constructed over time and space in service to institutions of the white settler colonial State. The central argument in the book is that we must understand the (over)disciplining of Black and Indigenous youth as a consequence of what has been framed historically as “benevolent intentions.” Additionally, the project considers how Indigenous futurities might propel us past critique and into imagining what anticolonial, antiracist teaching might look like.
My second book project, Pedagogies of Futurity: Black and Indigenous Education for Resistance, Persistence, and Survival, is an attempt to further my first book’s call for reimagined and remembered futures. Such a move takes the work from an analysis of whiteness in formalized schooling toward focusing on traditional Indigenous modes of knowledge production and dissemination and the extensive tradition of Black educational thought to imagine schooling in ways we currently deem impossible. During the now three years long global pandemic, there has been much public and intellectual discourse comparing the advantages of affluent white families with private tutors with the imagined deficit for students of color who are always already left behind. Such an imagined binary neglects a nuanced understanding of student experiences in formalized schooling to begin with, not to mention preliminary data that demonstrate a significant decrease in anxiety and other mental health challenges for students of color who, during online schooling, were free of the often violent institution of traditional educational systems. Inspired by this complexity, I am interested in further uncovering and analyzing nuanced histories of Black and Indigenous educational experiences, particularly those led by families and community members. Further, in this project I propose reimagining schooling and its potential for post-pandemic reinvention through a lens of Blackness and Indigeneity as assets rather than deficits. The goal of the project is to construct a genealogy of Black and Indigenous educational futurisms and futurity that will serve as a guide toward building equitable and revolutionary educational experiences for BIPOC communities. In short, compared to my first book, Pedagogies of Futurity looks at the other side of schooling, when it is employed for emancipation rather than control and indoctrination.
Further building upon my use of moʻokūʻauhau as methodology, this new project will employ Indigenous storytelling methodologies and center Native and Black voices through the creation of an oral history archive. I will also apply for a NEH digital humanities grant to support an oral history repository that will live on in a publicly accessible site, in addition to the published book. Confirmed research participants include past and present directors, teachers, students, and parents of revolutionary BIPOC educational movements, including: Ericka Huggins of the Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School and Madonna Thunderhawk of the We Will Remember Survival School for Indigenous Youth. I am currently mentoring undergraduate research assistants in the early phases of this project.
In both Tender Violence and Pedagogies of Futurity, as in all my work, I take seriously the Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) tradition of storytelling and genealogy as legitimate research methods emphasising the importance of understanding one’s place in the world contemporarily, historically, and interrelatedly, an understanding that stands in diametric opposition to a western understanding of the self as independent individual disconnected from land, history, and consequence. Kanaka genealogical methods – moʻokūʻauhau as methodology – allow us to trace an ancestral and historical lineage of Native and Black resistance to and survivance within settler colonialism; more importantly, it guides us in imagining a way out, forward, and back to ourselves. It is this imagining I continue to center in my research, and would love to expand to undergraduate and graduate student researchers, whether through my own research, student guided projects, courses on research methodologies, or community based participatory action research with Indigenous peoples and other communities of color.