Interrogating White Male Allyship: A Critical Ethnographic Study
Date
2022-09
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Abstract
Numerous scholars and activists have contested white men’s attempts at allyship, noting this group’s propensity to dominate discussions, assume positions of leadership, create emotional burdens for the groups they seek to support, and disengage when faced with adversity. The literature on white men’s allyship focuses largely on men’s experiences of engaging in allyship, but there are few studies that demonstrate how white men’s allyship is experienced in anti-racist, anti-colonial, and gender justice movements. Also lacking is knowledge on how white men come to engage in critical reflection and personal transformation as they aspire to trustworthy allyship. In this dissertation, I investigated the tensions and burdens imposed by white male allies on progressive social movements, and the commitments and actions necessary for white men to contribute to social change. My inquiry was guided by a theoretical framework drawing on critical race feminism, masculinities, and whiteness. I adapted a critical ethnographic methodology (Carspecken, 1996; Madison, 2019) to develop a five stage research approach in which I began by interrogating my positionality, and my own aspirations to allyship. Throughout the study, I continued to reflect on my decisions in research and allyship journals. I engaged in relationship building with two social justice organizations. I presented the study plans and recruited an Advisory Group of seven community leaders who identified as Indigenous, Black, and racialized, with whom I participated in a process of inter-relational reflexivity (Gilbert & Sliep, 2009). These members nominated six white men they identified as their allies and I conducted life history interviews and go-along interviews with these men. All participants came together to confirm the findings and plan dissemination of results after the study. The Advisory Group guided me to centre social justice, histories of resistance, and to decenter white men’s allyship. They defined whiteness and masculinities, and outlined their expectations of would-be allies. The white men shared the starting points of their allyship, the change process they engaged in to prepare for allyship, and contoured allyship practice in five relationships they engage in. I concluded the study with a suggested praxis model for allyship.
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Allyship, whiteness, masculinities, critical ethnography, settler colonialism
Citation
Halvorsen, J. (2022). Interrogating white male allyship: a critical ethnographic study (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.