Race, affect, and marginalized communities: navigating racialized emotions in community-engaged pedagogy

ABSTRACT

Extending earlier scholarly discussions surrounding whiteness as a social construct in community-engaged higher education, this paper argues that affect theory provides a promising lens for studying the racialized emotions underlying whiteness in community engagement. Pairing affect theory with antiracist discussions, this paper examines the presence of racialized emotions in community-engaged projects, with the aim of contributing to antiracist dialogues in higher education. This paper focuses on analyzing four narratives of community-engaged projects collected through interviews with 12 college instructors in the United States. The instructors’ narratives reveal both racialized emotions about marginalized community members and ways to counter these emotions within community partnerships. The paper concludes with implications for educators and students to attend to the affective formation of community-engaged work and reflect on their emotions toward communities of color.

KEYWORDS:

• Community-engaged pedagogy
• communities of color
• antiracist action
• affect theory
• higher education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

This study has been approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at the authors’ affiliated institution.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the National Council of Teachers of English [Emergent Researcher Grant].

Notes on contributors

Jialei Jiang

Jialei Jiang is a teaching assistant professor of composition at the University of Pittsburgh. His Routledge title includes Designing for Social Justice: Community-engaged Approaches in Technical and Professional Communication (forthcoming 2025). She is interested in exploring issues surrounding digital writing, multimodal composition, and antiracist pedagogy. Her works have appeared in Computers and Composition, the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Postdigital Science and Education, Teaching in Higher Education, and edited collections. Currently, she serves as an assistant editor of the journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy.

Jason Tham

Jason Tham is an assistant professor of technical communication and rhetoric at Texas Tech University. His Routledge titles include Design Thinking in Technical Communication (2021), Designing Technical and Professional Communication (2021), and UX Writing (forthcoming 2023). He is editor of the collections Keywords in Design Thinking (2022, The WAC Clearinghouse) and Keywords in Making (forthcoming 2023, Parlor Press). Currently, he serves as associate editor of the journals Technical Communication Quarterly and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication. He is vice president of the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication. He is an inaugural faculty fellow of the engaged scholarship mentoring program sponsored by Texas Tech University Outreach & Engagement via the provost’s office.