School of Human and Community Development (Journal Articles)

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10539/37884

Browse

Browsing School of Human and Community Development (Journal Articles) by Author "Durrheim, Kevin"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The anatomy of ‘race trouble’ in online interactions
    (Taylor & Francis, 2014-01) Cresswell, Catherine; Whitehead, Kevin A; Durrheim, Kevin
    South Africa has a long history of race-related conflicts in a variety of settings, but the use of the concept ‘racism’ to analyse such conflicts is characterized by theoretical and methodological difficulties. In this article, we apply the alternative ‘race trouble’ framework developed by Durrheim, Mtose, and Brown (2011) to the examination of racialized conflicts in online newspaper forums. We analyse the conflicts using an approach informed by conversation analytic and discursive psychological techniques, focusing in particular on the emergence and use of race and racism as interactional resources. Our findings reveal some mechanisms through which the continuing salience of race in South Africa comes to be reproduced in everyday interactions, thereby suggesting reasons why race continues to garner social and cultural importance. Disagreements over the nature of racism were also recurrent in the exchanges that we examined, emonstrating the contested and shifting meanings of this concept in everyday interactions.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Race trouble: Attending to race and racism in online interaction
    (2014) Durrheim, Kevin; Greener, Ross; Whitehead, Kevin A
    This article advocates the concept of Race Trouble as a way of synthesizing variation in racial discourse, and as a way of studying how social interaction and institutional life continue to be organized by conceptions of “race” and “racism”. Our analysis of an online discussion at a South African University about the defensibility of a characterization of (black) student protesters as “savages” revealed a number of familiar strategies: participants avoided explicit racism, denied racism, and denied racism on behalf of others. However, the aim of analysis was not to identify the “real” racism, but to show how race and racism were used in the interaction to develop perspectives on transformation in the institution, to produce social division in the University, and to create ambivalently racialized and racializing subject positions. We demonstrate how, especially through uses of deracialized discourse, participants’ actions were observably shaped by the potential ways in which others could hear “race” and “racism”. Race trouble thus became manifest through racial suggestion, allusion, innuendo and implication. We conclude with a call to social psychologists to study the ways in which meanings of “race” and “racism” are forged and contested in relation to each other.