Precarious Privilege: Exploring the Intersection of White Teacher Habitus and Social Justice in International Schools
This qualitative study explored the underresearched phenomenon of White teacher allyship within an emergent diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) movement in international schools. Gaining momentum in 2020 as a digital, postcolonial counterstory, the movement exposed structural inequities and racism across the international school ecosystem. Applying an antiracist reading of Bourdieu’s (1977) theory of practice, the study analyzes how White teachers (n = 8) from diverse international contexts understand, experience, and assess their participation in DEIJ activities. Thematic analysis of interview data corroborated the digital voices, explicitly identifying White supremacy as a key force shaping the field’s doxa. The study found that DEIJ discourse energized a reactive orthodoxy that obstructed DEIJ initiatives—introducing to the field a new antagonistic dialectic between reformers and guardians of the status quo. Experiences with hysteresis among participants suggests racial and gender privilege was rendered precarious at the level of the individual habitus. Novel contributions to the field include an expanded, critical deployment of Bourdieusian thinking tools, alongside the possible emergent constructs of DEIJ literacy capital and racial resilience capital as future research agendas. Acknowledging the researcher’s positionality and the study’s limitations (i.e., small homogenous sample, temporal lag), this research highlights how Whiteness obstructs both social justice and social justice research in the context of international schools. The study aims to inform equity initiatives in international schools by examining White allies’ experiences, bridging discourse between academics and activists, and recommending strategic investment in DEIJ literacy to deepen racial resilience and foster meaningful change.
International Schools; International School Teachers; Social Justice; Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice; Bourdieu; Habitus; Teacher Habitus, Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education, Curriculum and Social Inquiry, Educational Sociology, Inequality and Stratification, International and Comparative Education, Other Education, Other Teacher Education and Professional Development, Politics and Social Change, Race and Ethnicity, Secondary Education and Teaching, Social and Philosophical Foundations of Education, Social Justice, Theory, Knowledge and Science
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