On 23rd May 2019, an open workshop on "Teaching White Feminism, Encountering (white) Resistance: challenges to gendering racism in the classroom" was held at REMESO, facilitated by Anaïs Duong-Pedica, PhD candidate at Åbo Akademi University in Finland, and Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, visiting professor at REMESO and professor at University Paris 8 Vincennes - Saint-Denis.
The event was well-attended by students at the MA programme Ethnic and Migration Studies as well as REMESO faculty and PhD and guests from other institutions.
During the workshop, Duong-Pedica shared her experiences from teaching a course titled ‘White Women & White Feminism’ in the Master's programme in Social Exclusion at Åbo Akademi University, and Guénif-Souilamas, her own encounters with and insights into blanchité/blanchitude, and other phenomena related to the most often unspoken, obscured hegemony of whiteness in the French (and broader Western) context, socio-politically and within academia. The event offered a well-needed space for participants to open up about their own experiences on the intersection of race, gender and whiteness, and for a discussion on how white fragility, white (dis)comfort and white mediocrity on racial awareness in the classroom and beyond function as obstacles to true intersectional, antiracist feminist solidarity.