Storying Shame: Humiliation in the Colonized Classroom

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explore the use of shame and humiliation in schools as technologies of colonial violence. In particular, I draw from critical race and anti-colonial scholarship to situate colonialism as both violent and ongoing. My interests are in tracing systemic racism in classrooms as it exists through acts of humiliation and shaming. In this process, I am interested in examining the physicality of humiliation and shame: the subtle, metaphoric, and emotional ways in which shame weaves into and through bodies. Utilizing personal narrative and collective storytelling as my methods of analysis, I argue in this thesis that contextualizing and historicizing humiliation within a collective gathering of shame stories has the potential to bring the operation and ongoing effects of colonialism into a collective consciousness, one that has the potential to highlight the ways humiliation is bound to bodies and the ways in which racialized bodies are organized and educated in social spaces.

In order to respect the multiple voices and experiences of this research project, I combined personal narrative and collective storytelling (Baskin, 2005; Mahoney, 2007) to explore the collective gathering of shame stories as an anti-racist practice. My focus is on expanding our understanding of student disengagement to account for the affective experiences of shaming. To do so, I draw on critical race theories that explore the corporeality of racism and the ways it operates through affective forms. My hope is that by focusing on the corporeal mechanisms at work in colonial technologies of shaming, this work will make meaningful contribution to anti-racist work on student disengagement and will support racialized students struggling with racism and oppression in classrooms across Canada.