Books by nichole grant
Book chapter from Hacking Education in a Digital Age (2018; Smith, Ng-A-Fook, Radford & Smitherma... more Book chapter from Hacking Education in a Digital Age (2018; Smith, Ng-A-Fook, Radford & Smitherman Pratt, Eds.).
Recent anti-racist campaigns have sought social media as a means to circulate and gather. Yet the effects of assembling elements of digital identities with the material bodies they relate in and with digital media is important to consider. Using a particular example of a Tumblr photo campaign started by racialized students of colour at Harvard University, we map the complex assemblage of bodies, technologies and coding with(in) the campaign and Harvard’s institutional reaction. Hacking into these complex entanglements of bodies and technological capacities of circulation, objectification, and signification in the campaign and institutional reaction reveal that the material and the technological components that make up our identities and campaigns in social media are not separate interacting appendages, but a shifting symbiotic fusion. As such, bodies in/with social media movements carry multiple, contradictory capacities in their processes of assembly, encouraging us to think through the complex contexts in which digital technologies and social, material and cultural representations interact as cyborgian bodies (Haraway, 1991). From this we offer the notion of cyborg politics to conceptualize how power, histories of interaction, and marking processes of territoriality continually (re)constitute our bodies and identities in and with social media campaigns.
Critical Multicultural Perspectives on Whiteness: Views from Past and Present , 2018
This chapter from the edited collection Critical Multicultural Perspectives on Whiteness: Views f... more This chapter from the edited collection Critical Multicultural Perspectives on Whiteness: Views from the Past and Present (2018, V. Lea, D. E. Lund & P. R. Carr Eds.), analyzes the satirical blog ‘Stuff White People Like’ (stuffwhitepeoplelike.com) and the user comments using critical discourse analysis (Gee, 2011; van Dijk, 1993). The blog lists attributes, practices and performances common-sensically linked to whiteness, creating a racialized space where the framework of the blog acts as a grounding point for everyday discussions on racialized identities of whiteness. In particular, this chapter looks at two posts and their user comments, the first post ‘Coffee’ and the post ‘Book Deals’ where the author of the blog relates that he has received a book contract for the premise of the blog. The comments within these posts reveal the active construction, policing and contestations of racialized identity and performance showing the ways in which understandings of whiteness are constructed and circulated in a digital social media environment. The critical analysis of the posts and the engagement of the user comments articulate how whiteness comes to occupy not a singular essentialized category of ‘race’, but reveals three prominent registers, each occupying a different understanding of ‘race’ and whiteness in particular. The first sees race and whiteness as largely determined through visual cues of biological ancestry. The second register sees race as largely a cultural performance where whiteness is understood through a person’s ability to perform the requisite attributes to ‘be(come) white’. The third register sees race as hierarchy where whiteness links to dominance in relation to a racialized Other. The chapter then engages the dynamics of these registers as major positionalities of racialized identity and whiteness in particular showing the complexities of racialized identity and knowledge construction more largely.
Patterns of dominance, which are often repeated to the point of banality, become the wallpaper of... more Patterns of dominance, which are often repeated to the point of banality, become the wallpaper of everyday culture, invisible to those who re-enact dominance even as they do so. In the following we explore the wallpaper of popular racism in the form of White supremacy in online social media, particularly through a case study of the blog ‘Stuff White People Like’. We argue that the wallpaper becomes visible in the moments of disruption – the bumps, holes, and tears in the discursive fabric of online social frameworks – and shows it to be papering over relations of dominance. The blog ‘Stuff White People Like’ acts as a site through which these negotiations and processes of dominance and disruption can be seen and engaged. What this analysis reveals is that young people’s understandings and negotiations of representations online in social media spaces like blogs, particularly racialized representations, are not separate from their offline realities, but rather powerfully articulate with broader meaning-making processes of their world and therefore continue the patterns of dominance and the moments of disruption in the wallpaper.
Papers by nichole grant
Disney, Culture, and Curriculum, 2016
A presence for decades in individuals' everyday life practices and identity formation, The Walt D... more A presence for decades in individuals' everyday life practices and identity formation, The Walt Disney Company has more recently also become an influential element within the 'big' curriculum of public and private spaces outside of yet in proximity to formal educational institutions. Disney, Culture, and Curriculum explores the myriad ways that Disney's curricula and pedagogies manifest in public consciousness, cultural discourses, and the education system. Examining Disney's historical development and contemporary manifestations, this book critiques and deconstructs its products and perspectives while providing insight into Disney's operations within popular culture and everyday life in the United States and beyond. The contributors engage with Disney's curricula and pedagogies in a variety of ways, through critical analysis of Disney films, theme parks, and planned communities, how Disney has been taught and resisted both in and beyond schools, ways in which fans and consumers develop and negotiate their identities with their engagement with Disney, and how race, class, gender, sexuality, and consumerism are constructed through Disney content. Incisive, comprehensive, and highly interdisciplinary, Disney, Culture, and Curriculum extends the discussion of popular culture as curriculum and pedagogy into new avenues by focusing on the affective and ontological aspects of identity development as well as the commodification of social and cultural identities, experiences, and subjectivities.
ABSTRACT: The process of engaging students in the negotiation of their place in historical landsc... more ABSTRACT: The process of engaging students in the negotiation of their place in historical landscapes is vitalized through the development of historical consciousness as a pedagogical tool for instruction in social studies. This study uses student reflection collected from a graduate course to examine how historical consciousness is understood and expressed through experiential interaction with historical sites and the role of people, places, and historical events in the creation of social history. The participants in the study reflected on how public memory is constructed and individualized within grand and personal narratives of their chosen area of commemoration. The study’s participants showed an eagerness to incorporate interactive technology to express their understanding of historical events, further highlighting technology’s role in democratizing information through digital historical narratives. The student-participants also internalized and articulated their experiences wi...
Given the popularity of historical consciousness within history education (Anderson, 2017; Seixas... more Given the popularity of historical consciousness within history education (Anderson, 2017; Seixas, 2006, 2017), there is a need to pause for reflection to consider the stakes, tenets, and presuppositions in taking on, continuing, and teaching, a traditional historical consciousness in disciplinary history. Drawing on Seixas’ (2006) definition of historical consciousness, that being the intersection between public memory, history education and citizenship, we argue these underlying principles maintain and sustain oppressive, exclusionary practices. Such an understanding of historical consciousness fails to account for the ways in which histories are embodied, living in/through bodies, and cannot be separated from daily realities. Further, a dis-embodied historical consciousness does not allow for understanding histories as co-constitutive processes, which interweave and assemble in relational flows. In turn, we seek to work through an embodied historical consciousness, arguing thi...
The process of engaging students in the negotiation of their place in historical landscapes is vi... more The process of engaging students in the negotiation of their place in historical landscapes is vitalized through the development of historical consciousness as a pedagogical tool for instruction in social studies. This study uses student reflection collected from a graduate course to examine how historical consciousness is understood and expressed through experiential interaction with historical sites and the role of people, places, and historical events in the creation of social history. The participants in the study reflected on how public memory is constructed and individualized within grand and personal narratives of their chosen area of commemoration. The study’s participants showed an eagerness to incorporate interactive technology to express their understanding of historical events, further highlighting technology’s role in democratizing information through digital historical narratives. The student-participants also internalized and articulated their experiences with histor...
One of the biggest challenges of antiracist education is moving beyond critique to transformative... more One of the biggest challenges of antiracist education is moving beyond critique to transformative practices, policies and discourses against racism (Dei, 2006). In light of the rise of ubiquitous digital mobile technologies and digital learning (Liu, 2012) there is a need for antiracist advocates and educators to find new methodologies for understanding and combating racisms and engaging antiracism practices. I propose looking at the methodological opportunity of these very digital social technologies for antiracist education. Specifically, I suggest the methodological possibilities of mobile app (application) technologies as they interact, interconnect and interrupt social life in the everyday. Drawing on Stanley’s (2011; 2014) framework for understanding racisms and antiracisms, I engage how this framework can articulate with the methodologies of app technologies through flagging (Billig, 1995), revealing the organization of spaces and the inclusion of excluded narratives and know...
Canadian Journal of Education, 2017
Hosted in the nation’s capital, the multisensory/digital historical performances displayed on Cen... more Hosted in the nation’s capital, the multisensory/digital historical performances displayed on Centre Block at Parliament Hill have had over one million viewers, making the shows a popular summer attraction. Upon closer inspection, however, the historical narratives in both Mosaika and Northern Lights focus on limited, exclusionary, and mythological representations of Canada’s beginnings, but perhaps more importantly, the artistic and technological element, “the spectacle,” creates something new altogether—which we are calling pop-history. Pop-history, a cultural understanding of popular history, is the emphasis of the theatrical over the historical, making history a performance to be consumed, but not critically thought through, or engaged with. Through this, we argue that although technologically striking, the narrowly imagined pop-history spectacle contributes to the shaping of a limited Canadian historical consciousness based on a normalized version of the past.
This masters’ thesis is a case study using an antiracist methodology and critical discourse analy... more This masters’ thesis is a case study using an antiracist methodology and critical discourse analysis to analyze a popular blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’ and asks the main research question: How is whiteness represented and understood in the satirical blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’? Grounded in theories of representation, discourse, myth and racialization, the thesis looks at two posts, “#1 Coffee” and “#92 Book Deals” and their user comments to investigate the ways whiteness is defined, understood, produced and negotiated. The two blog posts reveal major moments within the blog, as the first outlined the framework and workings of the blog and the second post analyzed here revealed two moments. The first being the adoption, and negotiation of the framework of the blog as well as a moment where the blogger/author becomes more present within the blog itself and is therefore ascribed a social, political and racial context that the users take up and work through. The blog and the comme...
Historical Encounters , 2019
Given the popularity of historical consciousness within history education (Anderson, 2017; Seixas... more Given the popularity of historical consciousness within history education (Anderson, 2017; Seixas, 2006, 2017), there is a need to pause for reflection to consider the stakes, tenets, and presuppositions in taking on, continuing, and teaching, a traditional historical consciousness in disciplinary history. Drawing on Seixas’ (2006) definition of historical consciousness, that being the intersection between public memory, history education and citizenship, we argue these underlying principles maintain and sustain oppressive, exclusionary practices. Such an understanding of historical consciousness fails to account for the ways in which histories are embodied, living in/through bodies, and cannot be separated from daily realities. Further, a dis-embodied historical consciousness does not allow for understanding histories as co-constitutive processes, which interweave and assemble in relational flows. In turn, we seek to work through an embodied historical consciousness, arguing this is necessary for an intra-relational assemblage of the past within the present, moving away from “rival histories” and their disciplinary boundaries that are inextricably tied to the state (Barad, 2007; Elmersjo, Clark, & Vinterek, 2017). This means not only being attentive to bodies in-and-as history, but making an overt space for working through affective elements, the trauma of being compared to the somatic norm (Puwar, 2004), and the national grand narratives that create a limited and exclusionary version of “common memory” to critically theorize historical consciousness.
Canadian Journal of Education , 2017
Hosted in the nation’s capital, the multisensory/digital historical performances displayed on Cen... more Hosted in the nation’s capital, the multisensory/digital historical performances displayed on Centre Block at Parliament Hill have had over one million viewers, making the shows a popular summer attraction. Upon closer inspection, however, the historical narratives in both Mosaika and Northern Lights focus on limited, exclusionary, and mythological representations of Canada’s beginnings, but perhaps more importantly, the artistic and technological element, “the spectacle,” creates something new altogether—which we are calling pop-history. Pop-history, a cultural understanding of popular history, is the emphasis of the theatrical over the historical, making history a performance to be consumed,
but not critically thought through, or engaged with. Through this, we argue that although technologically striking, the narrowly imagined pop-history spectacle contributes to the shaping of a limited Canadian historical consciousness based on a normalized version of
the past.
The process of engaging students in the negotiation of their place in historical landscapes is vi... more The process of engaging students in the negotiation of their place in historical landscapes is vitalized through the development of historical consciousness as a pedagogical tool for instruction in social studies. This study uses student reflection collected from a graduate course to examine how historical consciousness is understood and expressed through experiential interaction with historical sites and the role of people, places, and historical events in the creation of social history. The participants in the study reflected on how public memory is constructed and individualized within grand and personal narratives of their chosen area of commemoration. The study’s participants showed an eagerness to incorporate interactive technology to express their understanding of historical events, further highlighting technology’s role in democratizing information through digital historical narratives. The student-participants also internalized and articulated their experiences with history through artistic means, which permitted a free expression across multiple media. As prospective educators, the participants negotiated the role of historical consciousness in the development and extension of curricular practices, including the critical examination of official narratives in favour of a socialized history.
One of the biggest challenges of antiracist education is moving beyond critique to transformative... more One of the biggest challenges of antiracist education is moving beyond critique to transformative practices, policies and discourses against racism (Dei, 2006). In light of the rise of ubiquitous digital mobile technologies and digital learning (Liu, 2012) there is a need for antiracist advocates and educators to find new methodologies for understanding and combating racisms and engaging antiracism practices. I propose looking at the methodological opportunity of these very digital social technologies for antiracist education. Specifically, I suggest the methodological possibilities of mobile app (application) technologies as they interact, interconnect and interrupt social life in the everyday. Drawing on Stanley’s (2011; 2014) framework for understanding racisms and antiracisms, I engage how this framework can articulate with the methodologies of app technologies through flagging (Billig, 1995), revealing the organization of spaces and the inclusion of excluded narratives and knowledges. I reflect on the opening of such a methodological dialogue for furthering antiracist education in the age of the internet, smartphones, and the prominence of the digital in everyday life.
Conference Presentations by nichole grant
American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting, 2022
Fazal Rizvi (2016) describes the privatization of public education as being “widely embraced by g... more Fazal Rizvi (2016) describes the privatization of public education as being “widely embraced by governments around the world,” taking a variety of forms across systems (p. 2). In Canada, while privatization has indeed occurred in a multitude of ways in its provinces and territories, what Verger, Fontdevila, and Zancajo (2017) have called a “polymorphic” path, there are patterns that illustrate the inner workings of privatization in educational governance (p. 758). The polymorphic yet patterned processes in privatization can be theorized and understood through Abrams’ (2016) dimensions of a commercial mindset in education. In this paper, we use two of the Abrams’ (2018) four dimensions to explore the pattern of education privatization in Canada: how producing a crisis in public education creates the need to “fix ” the system, and the use of external experts to provide solutions to manufactured problems allows for further privatization. In this process, the external expert in the form of education consultant produces reports or restructuring plans that are used to justify the need for reform. The consultant and the manufactured documentation become the voice and the reasoning for education privatization. As such, the consultant, and their ensuing report, become “influencers”; the external expert is used by governments to legitimize their plans for education privatization, and the generated report or “evidence” becomes the impetus to quickly push through changes to education governance structures, funding, and in some cases, legislation. Using two case studies from the provinces of Nova Scotia and Manitoba, we apply critical discourse analysis to official documentation and media responses showing how the pattern of education privatization have been replicated across jurisdictions. There is a pattering of the use of the same external education consultant, or “influencer,” who produced similar reform plans, with similar goals to legally change structures of education, funding, school boards, and union membership. In this pattern the positioning and employment of an outside private consultant has a dual purpose: to sway public perception into accepting changes set forth by “the influencer” as being best for the public education, while at the same time undermining the democratic foundations of the system. Together, these processes reveal an “organized abandonment” (Wilson-Gilmore, 2008, p. 31) of education as a public good in both cases, where provincial governments intentionally chip away at its foundations to increase private interests over time. The case studies show that one antidote to this abandonment through privatization, is organized resistance from education unions. As such, as an opposition to the external “influencer,” education unions have, and continue to actively protect and uphold education as a public good.
Given the popularity of historical consciousness within history education, we want to pause for r... more Given the popularity of historical consciousness within history education, we want to pause for reflection to consider the stakes, tenets, and presuppositions in taking on, continuing, and teaching, a type of historical consciousness. We won't go through historical consciousness in all of its iterations, but will draw mostly from the work of Peter Seixas (2006a; 2006b; 2017) and his colleagues, as these texts have been the most prominent in teacher education and schooling in the Ontario context in which we (mostly) work. What we present here are our nascent theorizations through questioning what an antiracist and decolonizing historical consciousness would look like, or could possibly become. As we talked, read, wrote, and discussed the potentials of something like a 'decolonizing historical consciousness' or 'antiracist historical consciousness,' several themes or sticking points kept emerging that we wish to offer as a means of opening the conversation and troubling the slow sedimentation of historical consciousness.
The question as to whether the subaltern can “speak,” posed by Gayatri Spivak in her pivotal 1988... more The question as to whether the subaltern can “speak,” posed by Gayatri Spivak in her pivotal 1988 essay, sparked debate about the politics of representing the gendered and marginalized Other from the colonial metropole of academia. For Spivak, female intellectuals are able to (indeed, compelled) to speak about the Other, yet must be critical of their speaking positions – namely to “unlearn” female privilege in order to remember that there is no such thing as the universal female subject. We are two female scholars – one white and one Indo-Canadian – who engage in a politics of “unlearning” through our viewing of popular homemade videos about desi (diasporic first generation) women. This 2012 video in particular, “Shit White Girls Say to Brown/Desi Girls,” catches our attention as an anti-racist text that attempts to poke holes in of the underlying racisms that make up our Canadian fabric, while at the same time inverting the position of power through the conventions of at-home film construction.
In light of recent events and social media reactions, particularly those stemming from student ... more In light of recent events and social media reactions, particularly those stemming from student football players boycotting racist violence, we find that the institution of higher education has shown its monstrous head, and anti-racism has once again met the spiny scales of institutional racism. Inspired by Ahmed (2014), Lewis and Kahn (2010) and Haraway’s (1991) theorization of the ‘cultural’ immune system, we offer an analysis (a dissection) of the monstrous body of the institution, situating it in the ways “popular and official representations are of a piece, and that both exemplify modes of enforcement and transgression” (Graham, 2002, p. 13). As an assemblage of metaphorical limbs and organs, the efforts of students to push anti-racist action are positioned as ‘willful’ rebellious limbs (Ahmed, 2014), and the institutional monster reassembles, hacking off ‘limbs’ of anti-racist resistance and stitching them back on lifeless like Frankenstein's monster to recreate it's 'perfectly harmonious' body.
Monsters have long captured our imagination, providing powerful ‘bodies’ through which we can met... more Monsters have long captured our imagination, providing powerful ‘bodies’ through which we can metaphorically explore our social-cultural and educational contexts (Moretti, 1983/2005). As ‘meaning machines’ (Halberstam, 1995), and ‘border creatures’ (Lewis & Kahn, 2010) monsters offer a space to explore current problematics and contexts through a lens that has both the potential to change how we view the context at hand (Thibodeau & Borodtsky, 2011) but also offer a perspective from ‘the outside’ of normalized discourses and understandings towards more radical educational futures (Chapman, 2013). It is with this potential that this paper presentation offers a theoretical rethinking of antiracism education through the analysis of three cultural monsters: the cyborg, the zombie and Frankenstein’s monster. Each monster offers potential to push antiracism and other anti-oppressive educational practices to rethink the bounds of their work and look to the edges of culture, to unbind education from its hierarchical structures and see the potential in the fridges, the monstrous.
This workshop introduces participants to the advantages of thinking of racism as a form of exclus... more This workshop introduces participants to the advantages of thinking of racism as a form of exclusion, rather than as the attitudes of prejudiced individuals. When applied to the historical thinking concepts, it calls attention to the ways in which the historical record is skewed towards members of dominant groups, which in turn affects such things as the construction of historical significance. The workshop explores how to ask about what and who is not present in the written record of the past, how to identify the self-representations of members of excluded groups, how to bring in other knowledge from family histories and oral traditions. Participants will have the opportunity for hands on exploration of specific documents and to share teaching strategies both for contexts in which members of excluded groups are themselves present and when they are not.
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Books by nichole grant
Recent anti-racist campaigns have sought social media as a means to circulate and gather. Yet the effects of assembling elements of digital identities with the material bodies they relate in and with digital media is important to consider. Using a particular example of a Tumblr photo campaign started by racialized students of colour at Harvard University, we map the complex assemblage of bodies, technologies and coding with(in) the campaign and Harvard’s institutional reaction. Hacking into these complex entanglements of bodies and technological capacities of circulation, objectification, and signification in the campaign and institutional reaction reveal that the material and the technological components that make up our identities and campaigns in social media are not separate interacting appendages, but a shifting symbiotic fusion. As such, bodies in/with social media movements carry multiple, contradictory capacities in their processes of assembly, encouraging us to think through the complex contexts in which digital technologies and social, material and cultural representations interact as cyborgian bodies (Haraway, 1991). From this we offer the notion of cyborg politics to conceptualize how power, histories of interaction, and marking processes of territoriality continually (re)constitute our bodies and identities in and with social media campaigns.
Papers by nichole grant
but not critically thought through, or engaged with. Through this, we argue that although technologically striking, the narrowly imagined pop-history spectacle contributes to the shaping of a limited Canadian historical consciousness based on a normalized version of
the past.
Conference Presentations by nichole grant
Recent anti-racist campaigns have sought social media as a means to circulate and gather. Yet the effects of assembling elements of digital identities with the material bodies they relate in and with digital media is important to consider. Using a particular example of a Tumblr photo campaign started by racialized students of colour at Harvard University, we map the complex assemblage of bodies, technologies and coding with(in) the campaign and Harvard’s institutional reaction. Hacking into these complex entanglements of bodies and technological capacities of circulation, objectification, and signification in the campaign and institutional reaction reveal that the material and the technological components that make up our identities and campaigns in social media are not separate interacting appendages, but a shifting symbiotic fusion. As such, bodies in/with social media movements carry multiple, contradictory capacities in their processes of assembly, encouraging us to think through the complex contexts in which digital technologies and social, material and cultural representations interact as cyborgian bodies (Haraway, 1991). From this we offer the notion of cyborg politics to conceptualize how power, histories of interaction, and marking processes of territoriality continually (re)constitute our bodies and identities in and with social media campaigns.
but not critically thought through, or engaged with. Through this, we argue that although technologically striking, the narrowly imagined pop-history spectacle contributes to the shaping of a limited Canadian historical consciousness based on a normalized version of
the past.